Eavesdropping on the brain with 10,000 electrodes

Our brain is a complex tangle of 86 billion neurons wired through trillions of connections. These neurons interact in networks through small pulses of electricity to give rise to movement, behavior, thought and emotion. Understanding how our brain cells enable this complex behavior is still the Holy Grail in neuroscience. Over the past decades, neuroscientists have intercepted the communication between neurons to get a clue about brain mechanisms but also about brain disorders.

For this, they used small needle-shaped brain implants called neuroprobes that record brain activity as small voltage fluctuations (“spikes”). Starting out from a wire with one recording site or electrode, the big push came to the field of neuroscience with the introduction of micro- and nanofabrication techniques that yielded silicon devices (neuroprobes) with several tens of recording sites.

In this article in IEEE Spectrum, Barundeb Dutta, chief scientist at imec, talks about Neuropixels, a new generation of neuroprobes with more than 5,000 recording electrodes that enable neuroscientists to stably register the activity of thousands of neurons from different brain areas over long time periods, while barely causing damage to brain tissue.