Detection of bursts and pauses in spike trains

► This paper proposes a new method for analyzing spike trains that can detect bursts and pauses simultaneously. ► Bursts and pauses are detected independent of background firing rate. ► Normalized spike trains can be pooled within groups to obtain a central distribution even when there are only bursts and pauses. ► Simultaneous detection of bursts and pauses provides insight into the underlying mechanism driving bursts in dopaminergic neurons.