Cellular Electrophysiology

Abstract

The coordinated activity of neurons organized into networks is believed to act as the major computational units in the brain. In order to understand how the spatio-temporal organization of activity in networks of neurons transform information it is necessary to use high resolution monitoring techniques. Extracellular electrophysiology is currently the best tool for performing high-resolution recording from neural tissue in an awake animal. It offers information about the spiking (output) and synaptic activity (input) of neurons in the recorded area. The interpretation of the data that is gathered using extracellular recording must be patiently interpreted, however, as there can be ambiguities. As more research is carried out it will be possible to better interpret extracellular recording data in terms of neural network activity and to begin to unfold the way that network activities work in concert to transform information.