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arXiv · 0807.2893

Neuronal Shot Noise and Brownian $1/f^2$ Behavior in the Local Field Potential

J. N. Milstein·F. Mormann·I. Fried·C. Koch
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Abstract

We demonstrate that human electrophysiological recordings of the local field potential (LFP) from intracranial electrodes, acquired from a variety of cerebral regions, show a ubiquitous $1/f^2$ scaling within the power spectrum. We develop a quantitative model that treats the generation of these fields in an analogous way to that of electronic shot noise, and use this model to specifically address the cause of this $1/f^2$ Brownian noise. The model gives way to two analytically tractable solutions, both displaying Brownian noise: 1) uncorrelated cells that display sharp initial activity, whose extracellular fields slowly decay and 2) rapidly firing, temporally correlated cells that generate UP-DOWN states.

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J. N. Milstein, F. Mormann, I. Fried, C. Koch. 2008-07-18. Neuronal Shot Noise and Brownian $1/f^2$ Behavior in the Local Field Potential. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0004338

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