A robust way to study neuronal avalanches, i.e. scale-invariant spatio-temporal activity bursts, indicative of critical state dynamics in cortex. Avalanches emerge spontaneously in developing superficial layers of cultured cortex which allows for long-term measurements of the activity with planar integrated multi-electrode arrays (MEA) under precisely controlled conditions.
Plenz, D., Stewart, C. V., Shew, W., Yang, H., Klaus, A., Bellay, T. Multi-electrode Array Recordings of Neuronal Avalanches in Organotypic Cultures. J. Vis. Exp. (54), e2949, doi:10.3791/2949 (2011).