Abstract
When we are sitting in a classroom and listening to an exciting lecture, our brains are not interpreting the patterns of amplitude and frequency of sound wave produced by the professor. Actually, our brains are interpreting the spikes from roughly 3000 auditory nerve fibers. When we are reading an interesting book and the characters and words in every page come to our brains, our brains are not interpreting the color or light intensity which falls into our retina. In fact, our brains are reading the pattern of neural spikes which are evoked by millions of excitatory drives from connected neurons within neural networks. This means the only information which our brain received from sensory organs is the sequences of spikes or spike trains. Therefore, understanding the exact relationship between neural spikes and sensory stimuli allows us to reveal how the neural activities represent the external world. However, the major challenge in cognitive and computational neuroscience has been to characterize the firing patterns of central neurons in response to sensory stimuli or to behavior of alert moving animals. The investigation of how this information is represented in the electrical activities of the neurons is mainly limited by our ability to record these activities from single neuron. The progress in electrophysiological recording techniques is intertwined with the history of experiments on the electrical activity of nerves. In this chapter, we will have a look at the history of bioelectrical investigation in cognitive neuroscience, and then we will discuss the commonly used electrophysiological recording techniques and their applications in neuroscience research.
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Huang, Z. (2016). Brief History and Development of Electrophysiological Recording Techniques in Neuroscience. In: Li, X. (eds) Signal Processing in Neuroscience. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1822-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1822-0_1
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