Electrophysiological measures animal studies

Electrophysiology — Electrophysiology is the study of the electrochemical phenomena associated with biological cells and tissues in animals, plants, bacteria, and insects. It involves measurements of electrical -> potentials or - current on a wide variety of scales from single ion channel, to whole tissues like the heart, muscles, phloem,... 

The second section concentrates on study results and current knowledge, and attempts to summarize what we know as a result of research in relation to lead and intelligence, educational attainment, behaviour, and other psychometric measures. The contribution of animal studies, and studies with electrophysiological outcome measures, to current knowledge is assessed. The problems in interpreting the existing data are discussed in relation to some of the methodological issues described in the first section. 

The assumption that the effects on brain reward mechanisms in animals produced by acute administration of addictive drugs (the brain reward enhancement measured electrophysiologically and the DA enhancement measured neurochemically in Acb) has relevance to self-reported euphoria at the human level is supported by real-time, in-vivo, positron emission tomography studies of DA transporter occupancy in human brain loci following acute cocaine administration (Volkow et al. 

Larger animals, including rats, cats, and monkeys, are studied in a sleep laboratory. In these studies, electrophysiologic and electroencephalographic measurements are obtained and often are helpful in gaining information about the site of action of CNS depressants as well as about induced sleep patterns. Drug discrimination studies also have been useful in differentiating sites of action of CNS depressants. 

The International Association for the Study of Pain (lASP) has defined pain as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience that is evoked by actual or potential noxious (i.e. tissue-damaging) stimuli or by tissue injury. Normally, pain is the subjective result of nociception. Nociception is the encoding and processing of noxious stimuli in the nervous system. It can be objectively measured with various techniques, i.e. with electrophysiological recordings. By contrast, pain as a subjective experience can be verbally or visually described by humans, and it cannot be measured objectively However, animals (as well as humans) show reflex responses to acute noxious stimuh, which can be assessed for the relationship between nociception and pain. 

---