A Faraday cage is a container made of conducting material, such as wire mesh or metal plates, that shields what it encloses from external electric fields. In our experiments, a Faraday cage can be used to prevent external electromagnetic interference (EMI, or noise) from interfering with our neural recordings. As you know, the neural signals that we are recording are very small (on the order of micro-volts), and we use our Spikerboxes to amplify these small signals to a large enough amplitude that we can hear and record them. Depending on our environment, though, there can be electromagnetic, radio, microwave, or other types of invisible emissions that can travel through the air and interact with the metal needles and wire that we use as electrodes. The metal then propagates the noise signal like an antenna into our neural recordings, interfering with or even drowning out our recordings so that all we hear, in the worst cases, is a radio station! A Faraday cage then can be used to block many of these noise sources.