Neural Circuit Dynamics

September 18-25, 2027

Director: György Buzsáki

Neuroscience Institute, New York University, School of Medicine, New York, USA

Co-Director: Michael Häusser

University College London, UK & University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Faculty:

Massimo Scanziani, University of California, San Francisco, USA

Maiken Nedergaard, University of Rochester, USA & University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Itzhak Fried, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Hannah Monyer, Heidelberg University Hospital, Heidelberg, Germany

Nadine Gogolla, Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Munich, Germany

György Buzsáki, Neuroscience Institute, New York University, School of Medicine, New York, USA

Michael Häusser University College London, UK & University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

The Decade of the Brain, and later the BRAIN Initiative, transformed neuroscience by equipping the field with unprecedented tools and revealing brain function and disease with extraordinary clarity. These efforts sparked remarkable progress across neurotechnology and drew together a new generation of scientists from diverse disciplines, from chemistry and physics to mathematics, engineering, and AI.

Yet as neuroscience advances, it is becoming increasingly clear that progress depends on more than ever more powerful methods. Science is not only the art of measuring the world; it is also the art of making sense of it. Techniques can reveal new phenomena, but understanding requires ideas—conceptual frameworks that bring observations into focus, connect seemingly disparate findings, and inspire new questions. To move the field forward, neuroscience needs spaces where bold thinking is encouraged, overarching views are debated, and new theoretical directions can emerge.

This Advanced Course is designed to be such a space. It will explore new frontiers in systems neuroscience, not simply by presenting the latest results, but by asking what they mean and where they point next. The course will emphasize big questions, unifying hypotheses, and the dynamic interplay between experiment and theory. It will also examine how advances in basic neuroscience can illuminate the path toward new approaches to brain disorders and their treatment.

Bringing together an exceptional faculty from across systems neuroscience, the course will span action and perception, development and adult plasticity, innate and experience-dependent circuit dynamics, experimental design and mathematical theory, as well as animal models and clinical investigation. By crossing levels of analysis and bridging disciplines, it aims to foster a richer and more integrated vision of the brain.

Ultimately, the Advanced Course will offer students and scholars an opportunity not only to learn about emerging directions in neuroscience, but also to help shape them. Its goal is to cultivate the ideas, perspectives, and intellectual courage needed to guide future experiments, deepen interpretation, and open new avenues for discovery.

Massimo Scanziani

REM sleep as a window into the brain’s generative model of action

Behaving animals live in a continuous feedback loop with the external world. Motor commands issued by the brain lead to actions, and those actions have sensory consequences that the brain uses to update its internal representation of the animal’s position and state within the environment. This feedback loop with the external world thus coordinates the activity of motor centers with that of sensory and cognitive areas in the brain.

Actions and their consequences, however, can also be simulated. As exemplified by an athlete who mentally rehearses a sequence of movements before a competition, we can imagine actions without contracting a muscle and represent their consequences in the absence of sensory feedback from the external world. These simulations reveal the brain’s implicit understanding of how the body interacts with the physical world. They provide a window into the brain’s “internal model” of the world.

Can we tap into the neuronal mechanisms underlying this generative activity and understand the nature of these internal models? I will present recordings from the brains of mice during REM sleep, a phase of sleep associated with vivid mental experiences commonly referred to as dreams. I will show that, during this phase of sleep, activity across multiple brain regions is coordinated in a manner reminiscent of that observed in awake, behaving animals engaged in a feedback loop with the external world.

These observations reveal the brain’s ability to simulate actions by issuing motor commands and generating representations of their consequences, even when those motor commands are not executed in the external world.

György Buzsáki

Emergence of cognition from action

Current neuroscience is largely driven by an empiricist philosophy that assumes the brain’s goal is to perceive, represent the world, and learn the truth. An inevitable consequence of this framework is the assumption of a decision-making homunculus wedged between perception and action.

In contrast, I argue that the brain’s fundamental function is to initiate actions and predict their consequences to support the survival and prosperity of the brain’s host. Only actions can provide a second opinion on the relevance of sensory inputs and provide meaning and interpretation for those inputs. In this “inside-out” framework, the brain comes with a preconfigured, self-organized dynamic that constrains how it acts and how it views the world.

In the brain’s non-egalitarian organisation, pre-existing nonsense brain patterns become meaningful through action-based experience. I will show recent experiments that support this framework and illustrate how seemingly disparate neural computations, such as metabolic homeostasis/allostasis and memory-guided behaviors, have co-evolved at every step within the same brain circuits.