The main objective of this paper is to make the auto regressive (AR) power spectrum estimation method accessible to electrophysiologists and present some typical applications. The AR method is explained, choices of various parameters are explored and examples from the analysis of rat hippocampal EEG are given. We also provide the pseudocode for the computation of the AR coefficients and the AR spectrum. We compare the results from the AR method to the FFT-based power spectrum method and demonstrate the superiority of the AR method. We also show the differences in the spectra of the EEG of alcohol-preferring (P) and non-preferring (NP) rats in the baseline condition when no alcohol is infused. We found a statistically significant difference in peak theta frequency which was at 6.96 Hz for the P rats and at 7.74 Hz for the NP rats. There were also other observable differences in the shape of the spectra of the EEG of the P and NP rats.