Introduction

Electrophysiology has the problem of the Beginners Curse. There is a pretty steep learning curve for both being able to do experiments and analyze experiments. The steeper the learning curve the worse your outcomes at the beginning (thus the curse). To help people get over that hill faster I thought I would write a modern, electrophysiology handbook. In my personal journey I spent a lot of time finding resource and wasted a lot of time on bad resources or pulling snippets from different sources. Along the way of learning how to process and analyze electrophysiology data I also learned a lot about why you would want to do certain experiments. I thought why not combine electrophysiology analysis with the reasons why we do certain experiments. Lastly, to push the envelope of your experimental design I believe that you must embrace custom analysis. Your experiments are only as good as your analysis. With the NIH looking to push computational modeling it is even more important to really understand the data you collect.

This book covers several topics. The first parts covers essential slice electrophyiosology topics like solutions and equipment. The last part of the book covers some statistical and signal processing topics that I feel really need more attention by both neuroscientists and electrophysiologists that include distributions, curves, variance, etc.

Throughout the book you may notice that some plots are interactive and others are not. Many of the non-interactive plots are there to reduce the size of the HTML pages which unfortunately leads to inconsistent formating. Interactive plots contain data that you should interact with.

Lastly, I have found there are a lot of unfounded opinions in electrophysiology and lots of protocols where people do not understand why they are doing what they do. For example I had a manuscript under review where the reviewer stated that you must use series resistance compensation for current recordings (not true) and another stated the mEPSCs essentially mean nothing (also not true). There are actually two main ways to control for series resistance and the are caveats to interpreting mEPSCs but, they are very useful for examining the amount of exicitory synaptic input. With this book I tried to put forth accepted ways to run, analyze and interpret data. Some of this book is intended to provide you with the analytic skills to make decisions yourself because at the end of the day you can interpret your data however you want, it is just a matter of convincing reviewers that your interpretation is correct.