The plate is a consumable dish that is designed to fit into this guy: Maestro Pro.

It’s kind of the iMac Pro of reading electrode signals from cells. It’s a high end piece of lab equipment, and popular for this kind of work. Which is great: it means that this work is more replicatable, as I’m sure lots of people are going to want to try variations on this. There’s a good chance my old boss is at least considering it right now.

Reward in this context means a nice, soothing syncronized electrical pulses. I’m curious whether more informed experts would validate that this constitutes a desirable effect, but that’s what they went with. The alternative was random noise.

For you, this would be like, bad: four seconds of audio static. Good: four seconds of metronome.