Contextualization
Understanding the complexity of the human brain in order to expand the knowledge of human cognition and the development of technologies capable of improve health and physical capabilities of the human being, present themselves as fields where electronics has great importance.
The acquisition and the processing signals of the human body in order to create systems that react to these signals is a study that falls within the biomedical applications. Throughout this report, neuronal mapping techniques will be approached important for the study of brain's sensory and motor tasks. In order to contextualize a brief explanation of it is made and a brief description of the human brain and the main signs that this can acquire and study.
Existing neuroimaging methods, the one that appears as being the most used in health is encephalography (EEG), which is why at the end of this report is a comparison of this with the methods that we have been approached in more detail.
The electroencephalography is presented as the study of graphic record of the electrical currents developed in brain, conducted through electrodes applied on the scalp, in the brain surface or even in the encephalic substance. The procedure was first described by German physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond. This found that the spread of nerve stimulation resulted in the emergence of an electric current. However, the psychiatrist Hans Berger got the first graphic image of the electric currents of the brain through the intact skin of the head of a man, a method developed in his research on psychophysics and psychophysiology of psychic states.The basic principle for obtaining EEG graphs is the amplification of the electrical signals obtained from the scalp by means of powerful amplifier circuits called differential amplifiers. These circuits are capable of amplifying potential differences between two points of the scalp.
[From: http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/neurons_intro/synapses_2.0.swf]