ABSTRACT
You are at the reception of your favorite conference. It is a big occasion, you enjoy a glass of wine and the scientists you respect the most are right there, discussing very interesting things. You end up talking with one of your favorite scientists and he is sharing lots of valuable information with you. His comments are really insightful and they give you lot of ideas of things you should be doing next. You take it easy with the wine and try to remember as much as possible from this conversation, but your memory is collapsing and you would rather take notes. This would look a bit odd, though, and furthermore, you do not want to leave your glass of wine. Suddenly you remember you have your Olympus digital recorder with you (who knows why), and a bit embarrassed you ask your interlocutor if he would mind if you record the conversation. He looks at rst surprised, but it’s ok, he does not mind. Much relieved-and without caring how weird you may look in front of your other peersyou take your Olympus and point the mic at him. That’s great, you think, as you will later have all the time in the world to go over this conversation again. But then you hear a familiar voice at your right, of another respected colleague who seems to be also making very interesting comments, and, perhaps unintentionally at rst, you start moving the mic more and more toward your right. So, trying not to be impolite with your rst interlocutor, you slowly shift the mic away from him toward the second person, at an optimal distance that will later allow you to follow what both of them said. But gosh, on your back somebody else is saying very interesting things as well. So now you would like to record the three conversations, holding the microphone in between the three speakers. Actually, it crosses your mind that in principle you could hang the mic on the roof and record all conversations. Well, you dismiss the idea because you know it would not be a fair thing to do, but even if it would, you realize that the recording would be a mess and it would not be possible to distinguish all the different voices and conversations. So, it is better to focus on a few voices that you could deal
4.1 At Your Favorite Party! ........................................................................................................... 61 4.2 The Neurons’ Party ................................................................................................................. 62 4.3 Spike Sorting .......................................................................................................................... 62 4.4 Why Should We Care about Spike Sorting at All? .................................................................64 4.5 Tetrodes and Stereotrodes.......................................................................................................64 4.6 Basic Spike Sorters .................................................................................................................64 4.7 Advanced Spike-Sorting Algorithms .....................................................................................65
