Anesthetics are often used to characterize the activity of single neurons in vivo for their advantages such as reduction of noise level and convenience in noxious stimulations. Urethane has been a widely used anesthetic in thalamic studies under the assumption that sensory signals are still relayed to the thalamus under urethane anesthesia and that thalamic response would therefore reflect the ...

Desirable objectives for laboratory-based science courses include fostering skills in problem solving and reasoning, enhancing data fluency, and encouraging consideration of science as an integrative enterprise. An effective means of reaching these objectives is to structure learning experiences around interesting problems in our own research. In this article, we explore the idea of using extra...

The spatial and temporal summation of all the single muscle fibers’ electrical activity corresponding to that AHC depolarization is referred to as a motor unit action potential (MUAP/MUP; Fig. 2). In other words, the MUAP is essentially the electrical correlate to the anatomic motor unit. The above noted MUAP’s respective “spatial” and “temporal” qualifiers are related to the fact that: 1) all ...

In the study of population coding in neurobiological systems, tracking unit identity may be critical to assess possible changes in the coding properties of neuronal constituents over prolonged periods of time. Ensuring unit stability is even more critical for reliable neural decoding of motor variables in intra-cortically controlled brain-machine interfaces (BMIs). Variability in intrinsic spik...

Single fibre EMG recording from extensor digitorum communis muscle is described in patients with psychotic illness. The fibre density, or average number of single muscle fibre action potentials belonging to the same motor unit within the uptake area of the electrode, was higher in the patient group than in normal controls. Increased jitter was occasionally seen. Motor and sensory nerve conducti...

Du J, Riedel-Kruse IH, Nawroth JC, Roukes ML, Laurent G, Masmanidis SC. High-resolution three-dimensional extracellular recording of neuronal activity with microfabricated electrode arrays. J Neurophysiol 101: 1671–1678, 2009. First published December 17, 2008; doi:10.1152/jn.90992.2008. Microelectrode array recordings of neuronal activity present significant opportunities for studying the brai...

Single-unit recording has revealed both hand and eye movement-related activity in the parietal cortex of the macaque monkey. These experiments, as well as neuropsychological studies, are unravelling the complex nature of how the eye and the hand work together in the control of visually guided movements.

The presence of a columnar or clustered organization for some property often denotes that this property is important to the local information processing in a cortical area. To determine whether self-motion is systematically organized in the ventral intraparietal area (VIP), we made long electrode penetrations, recording both multi-unit and single-unit tuning for horizontally varying heading sti...

Recent single-unit recording studies have clarified how multiple parameters of movement are signaled by individual cortical and cerebellar neurons, and also that multiple coordinate frames are utilized. Cognitive processes also modulate the firing of these neurons. The various signals and coordinate systems vary in time and evolve throughout a behavioral sequence, consistent with the demands of...