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A gold standard in neuroscience is to record  extracellularly the activity of single 

neurons with thin electrodes implanted  in the brain . Extracellular recordings pick up the spikes of  neurons nearby the electrode tip and the job of the experimenter is to 

determine which spike corresponds to which neuron. This identification is done based on the shape of the spikes, given that, in principle, each neuron fires spikes of a particular 

shape, depending on the morphology of its dendritic tree and the distance and orientation relative to the recording site, among other factors. Spike sorting is the grouping of the detected spikes into clusters based on the similarity of their shapes. The resulting clusters 

of spikes correspond to the activity of different putative neurons..