History of Electrophysiological Recording for Functional Neurosurgery, Principles of Extracellular Single-Unit Recording

Microelectrode recording in movement disorder surgery. Zvi Israel, Michael Schulder, Mary M. Heinricher. p1-13 I don’t know if book chapters count for the journal blog, but I’m making a command decision that they do. This is because today I found a couple of chapters in a book about extracellular recording that were pretty great. The first chapter (Zvi Israel and Michael Schulder) was a brief review that covered the history of everything from EEG down to the first intra- and extracellular recording electrodes. The second chapter (Mary M. Heinricher) goes in to the theory of extracellular recordings and detection of field potentials before giving an introduction to the concept of waveform analysis and separation of units in a multi-unit recording by multi-dimensional spike sorting. It wraps up by discussing a few types of sampling biases and how to get around some. This chapter is very basic, but its strength is that it explains the concepts in an incredibly clear way that I’ve never seen in reviews/books before. I’d highly recommend reading at least the second chapter, and I’m hoping I can soon see what’s in later chapters too. -DH