Spontaneous and dopamine-driven brain activity

Last weekend I started working on a video aimed at giving viewers a feel for the beauty and complexity of the network activity we record in the lab (see this entry for details). The trigger for this was meeting a friend who was able to create for me the Java code necessary to run the spike rate data through JFugue. My own attempts at this had not been completely successful. Simultaneously, Björn Brembs started posting a series of excellent and quite closely related videos over on his YouTube channel, which kept me motivated (also, being able to point to videos from Bill Kristan's lab certainly helped convince my supervisors of the wisdom of the idea).

There will be more of these, at least I intend for there to be, because it was a lot of fun to make and there are a range of variations and improvements on the audiovisual presentation to explore, as well as a whole bunch of specific topics I'd like to address. But for now, this is it.