What areas of the brain can be measured using EEG? What functions are appropriate and not appropriate to study with this method? Can the EEG record accurately activity in deeper brain structures and cortical areas along the midline (MPFC, Precuneus, ACC, subcortical structures)? What are the main advantages and disadvantages of this method?
What we know by now, it is only appropriate to use EEG for cortex in connection to, not for deeper structures. But there are some newer methods of use of EEG which can give you some answers or at least an idea about the connectivity, functional and other questions, like source reconstruction from EEG (like sLORETA, for example), the graph theory applications, and also Transfer entropy analysis, Granger causality etc. For those analyses you also need to use high-density EEG, meaning more than 64 electrode positions, the more the better.
EEG is a summation of the electrical activity of CORTICAL neurons. EEG activity varies considerably depending on the square of the electrode's distance to the source, there is an inverse relationship between them. You can record this activity by placing appropriate electrodes on the scalp. It has a high resolution of time (in the scale of ms), but poor in spatial resolution. Apart from this, you can indirectly obtain some information about electrical activities from the subcortical regions by using specific analysis methods such as LORETA. In this situation, to increase the precision, you have to use several electrodes placed in several brain regions. Besides, you can also record evoked potentials or event-related potentials to obtain information sensory networks and cognitive functions.
Thank you guys! I am just starting to learn about neuroscience and the specifics of the experimental techniques used. Thank you for this information, I will research it and study the methods you pointed out. I was just a bit lost as to what exactly to search for, especially now that other experimental techniques are being widely applied. But there are advantages to EEG recordings, as Enis pointed out, and it is a challenging area of research. Thank you all :)
Electroencephalography (EEG) is a technique that reflects the electric activity of cortical neurons. Information related to motor movement can be detected in motor cortex region of the brain. Also various changes in prefrontal cortex can also be detected using EEG (as in cases of autism spectrum disorder or ASD).
One of the most important advantage of using EEG is that it provides high precision time measurements that enables us to see brain activity at the level of milliseconds. It has excellent temporal resolution, low cost, no real safety restrictions (as it is a noninvasive approach), lightweight, and portable but poor spatial resolution and high noise (because the signals have to pass from different layers of tissues and skull).
It is widely used to diagnose various brain conditions like seizures, epilepsy, head injuries, dizziness, headaches, and sleeping problems. It can be used as a cheap substitute for CT scanning in detecting brain tumor.
Hi Alexandra,
I hope my answer helps.
EEG is a tool that measures the electrical activity of the brain. So it tells you if you have neural activation in the brain and whether neurons are firing more as a result of a presented stimulus during the experiment.
Areas studied: Usually, more superficial parts of the brain, including the cortex is measured. However, some stronger EEG tools are able to measure deeper parts of the brain. For specifics, I recommend researching the specific EEF machine that you might want to use.
Functions studied: As in terms of Function, tools in neuroscience generally are not function specific. Meaning, that you can discover any function correlated with the area of the brain you are researching. With EEG, the same is true. A wide variety of functions can trigger neural activities in the brain (specifically cortical regions) which can be shown on an EEG.
Advantages/Disadvantages: EEG has a high temporal resolution. Meaning, that it shows you in very small amount of time the activation of the neurons. So if you are conducting a time-sensitive experiment, EEG is a great tool. However, it has very low spatial resolution, meaning that it cannot gives you the exact region in which the signal is coming from. There are some mathematical functions that can be used to narrow down the region. You can use FMRI to accompany your EEG to see where the signal/activation is coming from.
I hope the answer helped.
Keep studying Neuroscience, it is the best
Alexandra Popova
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