2 - Charges, Currents, Fields, and Potentials in the Brain

Summary

Readers who do not have strong schooling in physics can consult this book chapter for an introduction to key concepts such as ion fluxes, electric fields, electric potentials, and electric currents as well as for definitions of the ohmic, electrodiffusive, and capacitive currents that govern the electrodynamics of brain tissue. Building on the biophysical principles and approximations introduced here, we explain how the electric potential surrounding neurons can be computed based on the principles of current conservation and electroneutrality, and wegive a brief overview of modeling schemes designed to perform such computations on computers. Towards the end of the chapter, we show how the standard theory for computing extracellular potentials relates to Maxwell’s equations and list the approximations that we typically make when we apply these equations in a complex medium like brain tissue.