1,721,277 research outputs found
Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation: New Prospects in Cognitive Neurorehabilitation
No full textCognitive deficits are a common consequence of neurological disease, and there is evidence that specific cognitive training may be effective in rehabilitation. Behavioural dysfunction following neurological disease constitutes one of the major causes of disability worldwide, exerts a major impact on the daily life of affected individuals, and their families, also with a financial burden both for patients, and the society in general. Therefore, the adequate treatment of cognitive dysfunction is a much relevant issue, with social and economical implications, over and above the neuropsychological problem per se. Several investigations emphasise the fact that interacting with neural activity, by means of cortical stimulation, can affect cognitive performance. A number of studies have reported enhanced performance in specific cognitive tasks in patients with several types of neurological disease, after receiving Non Invasive Brain Stimulation (NIBS) to specific cortical areas, namely: Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, and transcranial Electrical Stimulation. In general, the evidence highlights the possibility of inducing changes in cortical excitability, which, in turn, may lead to a plastic reorganization of dysfunctional networks, responsible for the impaired cognitive functions. Despite these advances, a number of important questions remain open, regarding the use of stimulation techniques in cognitive rehabilitation. This special issue puts together international leading experts in the field, to review and discuss recent advances as to whether NIBS techniques alone, or combined with behavioural cognitive rehabilitation, can lead to performance enhancements, and why. The issue is timely and promises to have a huge impact across many domains of clinical and basic neuroscience
High frequency TMS induces changes in cortical excitability as revealed by EEG responses: a co-registration study
No full textLooking straight ahead while your brain goes sideways. Hemispheric asymmetry in the modulation of event-related potentials of foveal stimuli by selective spatial attention
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Parietal lobe contribution to mental rotation demonstrated with rTMS.
No full textA large number of imaging studies have identified a role
for the posterior parietal lobe, in particular Brodmann’s area
7 and the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), in mental rotation. Here
we investigated whether neural activity in the posterior
parietal lobe is essential for successful mental rotation
performance by observing the effects of interrupting this
activity during the execution of a mental rotation task.
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) was
applied to posterior parietal locations estimated to overlie
Brodmann’s area 7 in the right and the left hemisphere, or to
a posterior midline location (sham condition). In three
separate experiments, rTMS (four pulses, 20 Hz) was
delivered at these locations either 200–400, 400–600, or
600–800 msec after the onset of a mental rotation trial.
Disrupting neural activity in the right parietal lobe interfered
with task performance, but only when rTMS was delivered
400 to 600 msec after stimulus onset. Stimulation of the left
parietal lobe did not reliably affect mental rotation performance
at any of the time points investigated. The time-limited
effect of rTMS was replicated in a fourth experiment that
directly compared the effects of rTMS applied to the right
parietal lobe either 200–400 or 400–600 msec into the
mental rotation trial. The results indicate that the right
superior posterior parietal lobe plays an essential role in
mental rotation, consistent with its involvement in a variety of
visuospatial and visuomotor transformation
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