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Your Brain Is Electric
New technology could be a game-changer for neurological disorders
This is a modified excerpt from Inside Your Head 🧠, a weekly newsletter exploring why your brain makes you think, feel, and act the way you do, written by me, Elemental’s senior writer and a former brain scientist. Subscribe here so you won’t miss the next one.
Like nearly all complex machines, your brain runs on electricity. Every time a neuron fires in order to communicate with another neuron, a little burst of electricity courses through the cell to power the message. Scientists use these electric pulses to measure and track activity in the brain, and this research has contributed to a lot of what we know about what different brain regions do.
One way researchers measure electrical activity is a method known as EEG (electroencephalography), where a person wears a cap made of a web of electrodes that sits on top of their head. However, because the electrodes are reading neural activity through the scalp, EEG recordings aren’t very precise. It can tell you roughly when and what type of activity is happening but not where.
A more spatially accurate — but much more invasive — technique is to implant electrodes directly into a person’s brain. This type of research only happens on the rare occasions that someone is already…
