Sorting action potentials one hundred channels at a time

For over half a century neuroscientists have sorted action potentials according to their shape, limited more by the technology available than by the inherent difficulty of the problem. Now the tools exist for real-time execution of a number of excellent sorting algorithms, including commercial offerings permitting large numbers of channels to be monitored in real-time. Shortly, the instrumentation questions will tum to the storage of data and the creation of visualization tools for investigating the correlative information which will be available. The scientific question is whether this information is useful for understanding the brain.