Episode 5: Neural Oscillations

For our 5th episode, we get into braaaiiiiinnnwaaaaaavessss. By which we mean neural oscillations. By which we really mean a lot of different things it turns out. For this, we bring in special guest Nancy Padilla, who actually puts electrodes into animals to study these things. We define the vocabulary of the field and then Nancy tells us how she uses these measurements for her own work. Then with the help of this paper, we get into what we think can reasonably be concluded from extracellular-oscillation style studies, and the seemingly seductive nature of oscillations to explain everything. All throughout you're gonna hear a lot about LFPs (local field potentials), including Conor's lament about their undefinable nature. And Josh is going to demand that Nancy explain how oscillations could be of use to us computational types. Finally we wrap up with a bit of redemption and common ground, surrounding this paper on "ephaptic coupling".

To listen or download, click here.

Though we didn't mention it, this paper could of interest to anyone who wants to follow up on the question of how neural oscillations and LFPs can be used in computational modeling:
Computing the Local Field Potential (LFP) from Integrate-and-Fire Network Models.

Our jazzy theme music "Quirky Dog" is courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) 

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0