Growing Up in Science: Gyorgy Buzsaki

György Buzsáki

Dr. György Buzsáki Credit: Buzsáki lab

As far as I remember, there was only one rule. “Be home before it gets dark.” The definition of darkness was, of course, negotiable. I lived in complete freedom, growing up in the streets with other kids from the neighborhood. We made up rules, invented games and wandered around the reeds, losing ourselves only to find our way out, developing a sense of direction and self-reliance.

I grew up in a child’s paradise, even if those years were the worst times of the communist dictatorship in Hungary for my parents’ generation. My childhood included many animals: turtles, a family of hedgehogs, fish in a toilet tank, pigeons, and barn owls, in addition to our family’s cats and chickens. Our pig, Rüszü, and I were good friends. He was always eager to get out from his sty and follow me to our favorite destination, a small, shallow bay of Lake Balaton. The lake was the source of many happy moments of my early life. It provided everything I needed: swimming during the summer, skating in the winter, and fishing most of the year around.

Summers were special. My parents rented out our two bedrooms, bathroom, and kitchen to vacationers from Budapest, and we temporarily moved up to the attic. Once my father told me that one of the vacationers was a “scientist-philosopher” who knew everything. I wondered how it would be possible to know everything.

I became a scientist as a consequence of striving to understand the true meaning behind explanations.

I took every opportunity to follow him around to figure out whether I could discover something special about his head or eyes. But he appeared to be a regular guy with a good sense of humor. I asked him what Rüszü thought about me and why he could not talk to me. He gave me a long answer with many words that I did not understand, and, at the end, he victoriously announced, “Now you know.” Yet I did not, and I kept wondering whether my pig friend’s seemingly affectionate love was the same as my feelings for him.

Perhaps my scientist knew the answer, but I did not understand the words he used. Here began my problem with words used in scientific explanations. My early curiosity has never evaporated. I became a scientist as a consequence of striving to understand the true meaning behind explanations.

Too often, what my peers understood to be a logical and straightforward answer remained a mystery to me. I had difficulty comprehending gravity in high school. OK, it is an “action at a distance” or a force that attracts a body having mass toward another physical body. But are these statements not just another way of saying the same thing? My physics teacher’s answer about gravity reminded me the explanation of Rüszü’s abilities given by “my” scientist. My troubles with explanatory terms only deepened during my medical student and postdoctoral years and I realized that too often, when we do not understand something, we make up a word or two and pretend that those words solve the mystery.

As part of our mandatory paramilitary education, I chose a ham radio course. I was mesmerized by the sound of the Morse code sounds, especially when our instructor told us that somebody from New Zealand had responded to his call he sent out from our transmitter. The operator on the other side of the world informed us about the sunny weather there, the receiving conditions, the details of his rig, and the antenna type he used.

My surprise only increased when I figured out that our instructor did not speak either English or Maori, and presumably the operator in New Zealand did not understand Hungarian. Instead, I was informed, they “spoke” to each other with dots (short pulses) and dashes (long pulses), through a universal language in which all words consist of three letters, called Q-code.

To be part of such a conversation, all I had to do was to learn Morse code, memorize the Q language, learn a bit about electronics, pass exams, get a license, build a transmitter and receiver, and set up a wire antenna between the chimneys of our house and the neighbor’s. Then I could communicate with any ham radio around the globe.

That is exactly what I did, and the problem of coding has bugged me ever since. Falling in love with radio communication gave me a sense of direction. I had a dream. Be the first person to shoot a signal to the Moon and detect its bounced version. Unfortunately, my high-school plan to become an electrical engineer was vetoed by my parents, and I had to choose between Medical School and Law School options.

I applied to Medical School. While my friends were having fun at the School of Engineering in Budapest, learning exciting stories about radio transmission and electronic oscillators, I spent most of my time studying the unending details of bones and ligaments in the anatomy class. But one day in the physiology class, Professor Endre Grastyán talked about how the brain outputs, such as movement and cognition, control its inputs, rather than the other way around.

Even in the most complex animals, the goal of cognition is the guidance of action. Back then in the 1970s, when Pavlovian sensory-sensory association was the dominant ideology in the East and stimulus-decision-response paradigm dominated Western thinking (and has remained so to this day), Grastyán’s teachings were unusual, to say the least. From that lecture on, my life acquired new meaning. I applied to become his apprentice, got accepted and spent most of my student life in his laboratory.

It was here where I first learned about the hippocampal “theta” rhythm, the oscillation that has become my obsession ever since. My story, thus, is typical of most scientists: a career inspired by a charismatic individual. The most important thing in life is to find a goal. The second step is to figure out how to make a living to achieve that goal. But that is another story, which we will discuss in the seminar.