Typical Experiments
A typical experiment in sensory neuroscience involves the presentation of a series of relevant stimuli to an experimental subject while the subject's brain is being monitored. This monitoring can be accomplished by noninvasive means such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or electroencephalography (EEG), or by more invasive means such as electrophysiology, the use of electrodes to record the electrical activity of single neurons or groups of neurons. fMRI measures changes in blood flow which related to the level of neural activity and provides low spatial and temporal resolution, but does provide data from the whole brain. In contrast, Electrophysiology provides very high temporal resolution (the shapes of single spikes can be resolved) and data can be obtained from single cells. This is important since computations are performed within the dendrites of individual neurons.
Read more about this topic: Sensory Neuroscience
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