A decades-old challenge in neuroscience has been solved by harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to identify the electrical signatures of different types of brain cells for the first time, as part of a study in mice led by researchers from UCL.
Brains are made up of many different types of neurons (nerve cells in the brain), each of which are thought to play different roles in processing information. Scientists have long been able to use electrodes to record the activity of neurons by detecting the electrical ‘spikes’ that they generate while performing brain functions.
Although recording spikes has proved invaluable for monitoring the activity of individual neurons deep in the brain, until now the method has been ‘blind’ to the type of neuron being recorded – making it impossible to identify how…