Voltage distributions in extracellular brain recordings

Abstract

We show that the voltage distributions in brain recordings, including high-pass extracellular recordings, the LFP, and human EEG, are accurately described by a Gaussian within ±1.5 standard deviations from zero, with heavy, exponential tails outside these limits. This offers a principled way of setting event detection thresholds in high-pass recordings. It also offers a means for identifying event-like, transient signals in LFP and EEG recordings which may correlate with other neural phenomena.