ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the techniques by which such recordings can be performed to study single-neuron activity in awake humans for research purposes. It presents complex novel visual stimuli for a short period of time on the screen of a notebook computer situated at the patient’s bedside. The chapter explores a subpopulation of single neurons in the hippocampus and the amygdala that showed striking differences in their spiking response when comparing novel with familiar stimuli. It reviews studies on memory that have provided new mechanistic understanding of the physiology of memory. The ability to perform single-neuron recordings in awake human patients capable of performing cognitive tasks is a powerful research paradigm that has contributed valuable and otherwise unobtainable insights into many areas of neuroscience, including memory, learning, visual recognition, perception, motor control, decision-making, and emotions. Electrodes are implanted bilaterally at likely epileptogenic sites using a lateral approach.
