Lamm and his group recently sought the answer to answer this question by combining
measures of electrical activity in the brain (via electroencephalogram) with functional magnetic resonance imaging to show blood flow patterns in 25 participants getting rounds of shocks on their hands.
For example,
records of electrical activity in the brain showed that, on average, they experienced deep, non-rapid eye movement sleep for 30 per cent less time compared with participants who slept during a new moon.
New research published in PLOS Computational Biology is seeking a way to refine this process by looking at
networks of electrical activity in the brain just prior to the onset of a seizure by studying the recordings of 88 seizures from 22 patients.
As you can probably imagine, these millions of neurons sending signals all at once produces an enormous
amount of electrical activity in your brain, and this can actually be detected using medical equipment like an electroencephalography (EEG), which measuring electricity levels over areas of your scalp (4).
Seizures are symptoms of a brain problem in a dog or cat, and occur when there is an abnormal burst
of electrical activity in the brain.