Brief History and Development of Electrophysiological Recording Techniques in Neuroscience
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 au
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Brief History and Development of Electrophysiological Recording Techniques in Neuroscience Zhuo Huang
1.1 The Brief History of Bioelectrical Investigation The bioelectrical investigation began with Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta in the 1700s. In 1786, Luigi Galvani, an Italian professor of medicine, showed that the frog muscle could be made to twitch when the leg of a dead frog was cut by a metal knife. Galvani thought that the muscles of the frog must contain electricity. However, Alessandro Volta repeated Galvani’s experiments and believed that the electricity was generated by the metal cable which Galvani used to connect nerves and muscles in his experiments. Volta was right. To prove his idea, Volta invented the voltaic pile, which was the first electrical battery that could continuously provide an electrical current to a circuit. He demonstrated that the animal electricity did not come from the muscle in its pelvis but was a physical phenomenon caused by rubbing frog skin (Bresadola 1998). In the following decades, scientists began to ask how the sensory information is transmitted by electrical signals. The first attempt to answer this question was the theory of “law of specific nerve energies” which was proposed by Johannes Peter Müller in 1835. In this doctrine, Müller thought that the nature of a sensory stimulus is defined by the pathway over which the sensory information is carried and neurons which do not localized to this pathway are not responsible for this information processing (Norrsell et al. 1999). In support of this view, Hermann von Helmholtz provided evidence that cells at different locations along the cochlear spiral are sensitive to different frequencies of sound (Helmholtz 1885). These findings from the late nineteenth century form our current understanding about the nervous system. Nowadays when we are trying to figure out how information is processed in the cortex, where an array of neurons decodes
Z. Huang () State Key Laboratory of Natural and Biomimetic Drugs, Department of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Peking University Health Science Center, Beijing 100191, China e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 X. Li (ed.), Signal Processing in Neuroscience, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-1822-0_1
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incoming stimuli according to the values of different component features, we are reminded of Helmholtz’ work, who found that the array of auditory nerve fibers would decompose sound into its component frequencies. To examine the idea of Helmholtz and Müller about neuronal coding of sensory information, it is required that direct recording of electrical activity from a single neuron, not just additive effect of bundle of nerve fibers. However, in those years, the electrical signals from a single neuron were too small to record. To pick up these small signals, in 1917 Lucas at Cambridge University using vacuum tube built an instrument which allowed the recoding of microvolt electrical signals in bandwidths
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