Neuroscience Diaries

We know that the human brain is very complex and can be defined in terms of many perspectives. We can define it as a following way;

The living organism composed of numerous subcomponents that is capable of generating electrical activity.

That sounds good !!!

Let’s break down this knowledge into basic questions;

Why brain does generate electricty and why is it important to its functionality ?

Do you feel that we are on the way of getting mysteries related to our brains ? You must feel !

The fundamental component of neural electricity is action potential, representing all or none feature. Suppose the neuron is excited enough to generate an action potential. In that case, the ionic flow through the cell membrane of neurons leads to temporary voltage fluctuation in the same amount every time. The firing rate of a single neuron cell provides information about the decoding strategy of this cell related to a specific stimulus or event.

The electricty for encoding or decoding information to interact with world.

The rate at which an individual neuron generates action potential is referred to as rate coding, while the synchronized firing of multiple neurons is known as temporal coding.

We considered action potential related to electrical activity so far. However, the flow of information between cells is provided with post-synaptic potentials. Specifically, these potentials create dipole-like structures on the cortical pyramidal neural cells.

Action potentials and post-synaptic potentials are two main electrial source within the brain.

The post-synaptic potentials can be measured at the cortical surface if there are sufficiently aligned dipoles to produce a strong electric field. This allows to EEG electrodes to collect electrophysilogical cortical activity from the human scalp.