Neuronal Shot Noise and Brownian 1/f2 Behavior in the Local Field Potential

Abstract

We demonstrate that human electrophysiological recordings of the local field potential (LFP) from intracranial electrodes, acquired from a variety of cerebral regions, show a ubiquitous 1/f2 scaling within the power spectrum. We develop a quantitative model that treats the generation of these fields in an analogous way to that of electronic shot noise, and use this model to specifically address the cause of this 1/f2 Brownian noise. The model gives way to two analytically tractable solutions, both displaying Brownian noise: 1) uncorrelated cells that display sharp initial activity, whose extracellular fields slowly decay in time and 2) rapidly firing, temporally correlated cells that generate UP-DOWN states.