Human Cortical Electrogenesis: Stratigraphy and Spectral Analysis

The most important results concerning the mechanisms of cortical electrogenesis have been achieved with animals thanks to transcortical bipolar investigations (Bishop and Clare 1952, Calvet and Scherrer 1961 a, b, Calvet et al. 1964, Jami et al. 1965, Fourment et al. 1965). These researches revealed that only the technique of transcortical derivation could give an accurate account of cortical activity. This is in accordance with the histological radiate structure of the cortex. The best proof of this is the parallelism between the phenomena of EEG type that this technique records and the unitary activity of neuronal volume explored. Moreover stratigraphic explorations enable these phenomena to be linked with the existence of generators. Experiments on human beings have been made with simple transcortical derivation by Hirsch et al. (1961, 1965, 1966) in particular. To our knowledge there have not been stratigraphic experiments with humans.