SFN is overwhelming, and this year is no different. There was a monstrous crowd at the poster session, so I didn’t get much out of it (the hangover didn’t help either). Chris Koch had not one but two posters on the origins of the local field potential (LFP). My guess is he will have that nut cracked in a couple of years.

Basically, they used simulations of large scale networks and put virtual electrodes in the extracellular medium to measure the various sources of the LFP. This seems to me like the right way of going about things. One conclusion that stands out is that the LFP integrates over a larger spatial range at lower temporal frequencies. Remember that this theory was thought to be disproved when the Logothetis lab did resistance measurements. The other is that, unsurprisingly, the LFP at high frequencies picks up (background) spike signals as opposed to dendritic activity.

I was made aware of a valient effort from the Fujii lab to open up physiology data. They have a dataset of simultaneous EEG/ECoG recordings (basically EEG both inside and outside the head) available for download (among others) from Neurotycho.org. There’s a lot of fun stuff you can do with such a dataset.

That’s it for the day, hopefully tomorrow will be a little more eventful.