Clinical Neuroscience utilises the most current techniques in genetics, imaging and psychology to understand how brain disorders develop and how the physical properties of the brain affect us. Studies often concentrate on Neurodegenerative diseases such as Motor Neuron Disease (MND; Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, ALS), Parkinson’s disease and related disorders, epilepsy, peripheral nerve disorders, and increasingly on acute brain injury including stroke and traumatic brain injury.

A primary tool used in clinical neuroscience studdies is Electroencephalography (EEG), the measurement of electrical activity produced by the brain as recorded from electrodes placed on the scalp. In some cases, such as epileptic studies, deeper brain activity cannot be recorded accurately or not at all by scalp EEG. Clinicians then use an invasive form of EEG known as intracranial EEG (icEEG) where electrodes are placed directly inside the skull. In some cases, a grid of electrodes is laid on the external surface of the brain, on dura mater yielding epidural EEG but in other cases, brain activity is recorded using deeper electrodes known as subdural EEG (sdEEG) and electrocorticography (ECoG). Because of the filtering characteristics of the skull and scalp, icEEG activity has a much higher spatial resolution than surface EEG. The technique is sometimes also referred to as stereotactic EEG (stereo-EEG or sEEG) to emphasize that it records from precise 3D locations defined by stereotaxy. However, since icEEG uses macro-electrodes for recording it can not detect single-neuron activity as it is feasible with neural implants based on micro-electrodes.

A routine clinical EEG recording typically lasts 20-40 minutes. During this time, it is common to perform different "activation procedures" which may evoke different activity than is seen during the resting awake state. These activation procedures include sleep, intermittent photic stimulation with a strobe light, hyperventilation and eye closure. When a routine EEG is done in a patient with suspected or known epilepsy, often it is to look for interictal discharges (i.e., abnormal activity resulting from "brain irritability" that shows a possible predisposition to epileptic seizures).

There are a number of benefits to using EEG in neuroscience research. One is that EEG is non-invasive to the research subject. Furthermore, the need for the subject to hold still is perhaps less stringent than in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Another benefit is that many applications of EEG record spontaneous brain activity, and the subject does not need to be able to cooperate with the research (e.g., as is necessary in the behavioral testing of neuropsychology). Also, EEG has a high temporal resolution compared to techniques such as fMRI and is capable of detecting changes in electrical activity in the brain on a millisecond time scale. Much of the cognitive research conducted with EEG uses the event-related potential (ERP) technique. Most ERP paradigms involve a subject being provided a stimulus to react to either overtly or covertly. There are often at least two conditions that vary in some manner of interest to the researcher. As this stimulus-response is going on, an EEG is being recorded from the subject. The ERP is obtained by averaging the EEG signal from each of the trials within a certain condition; averages from one stimulus-response condition can then be compared with averages from the other stimulus-response condition(s).