What is the real shape of extracellular spikes?

We show that the standard filters used for on-line spike detection in most hardware acquisition systems introduce distortions in the recorded spike shapes. This is because on-line spike detection is done after band pass filtering the data with causal filters. As illustrated with three clusters of spike shapes from a real single cell recording in a human subject, causal filtering can create a spurious negative rebound and a smooth looking appearance of the spikes. We also show that these filtering distortions can make artifacts look similar to real spikes.