How does a Neuropixels probe tell which neuron fired? · Grey Matter

Inside the tissue, a recording site a few tens of micrometres from a neuron picks up that neuron's action potential directly, as a sharp dip of a fraction of a millisecond.

How does a Neuropixels probe tell which neuron fired?

Inside the tissue, a recording site a few tens of micrometres from a neuron picks up that neuron's action potential directly, as a sharp dip of a fraction of a millisecond. The probe's 960 sites are packed so closely along its shank that each spike appears on several neighbouring sites with a characteristic pattern of sizes and shapes. Spike-sorting software groups spikes by that footprint, and each group is taken to be one neuron, which turns 384 channels of voltage into the firing times of hundreds of individual cells.