Topic: transcranial magnetic stimulation

Lindsay N. Oberman reviews evidence for transcranial magnetic stimulation protocols in autism spectrum disorder. The seminar first explains how TMS works and how it can probe the brain mechanisms associated with autism. It then presents NIH research using repetitive TMS as an experimental therapeutic tool, examining its effects on both brain function and behaviour to guide the development of potential interventions. Online via Duke Zoom. Wednesday 7 October 2026, 16:00 EDT (America/New_York; UTC−4). Register through the event-specific Register Here link on the Duke Autism Seminar Series page

Corey Keller discusses how transcranial magnetic stimulation can probe and influence brain networks. He explains efforts to measure the brain's response to stimulation and to understand why treatment outcomes differ, outlining the opportunities and remaining uncertainties in developing more precise psychiatric interventions.

Advancements in cognitive neuroscience have provided profound insights into the workings of the human brain and the methods used offer opportunities to enhance performance, cognition, and mental health. Drawing upon interdisciplinary collaborations in the University of California San Diego, Human Performance Optimization Lab, this talk explores the application of cognitive neuroscience principles in three domains to improve human performance and alleviate mental health challenges. The first section will discuss studies addressing the role of vision and oculomotor function in athletic performan

Sleep strongly affects synaptic strength, making it critical for cognition, especially learning and memory formation. Whether and how sleep deprivation modulates human brain physiology and cognition is poorly understood. Here we examined how overnight sleep deprivation vs overnight sufficient sleep affects (a) cortical excitability, measured by transcranial magnetic stimulation, (b) inducibility of long-term potentiation (LTP)- and long-term depression (LTD)-like plasticity via transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), and (c) learning, memory, and attention. We found that sleep deprivat

When listening to music, humans readily perceive and move along with a periodic beat. Critically, perception of a periodic beat is commonly elicited by rhythmic stimuli with physical features arranged in a way that is not strictly periodic. Hence, beat perception must capitalize on mechanisms that transform stimulus features into a temporally recurrent format with emphasized beat periodicity. Here, I will present a line of work that aims to clarify the nature and neural basis of this transformation. In these studies, electrophysiological activity was recorded as participants listened to rhythm

Mobile organisms must be capable of deciding both where and when to move in order to keep up with a changing environment; therefore, a strong sense of time is necessary, otherwise, we would fail in many of our movement goals. Despite this intrinsic link between movement and timing, only recently has research begun to investigate the interaction. Two primary effects that have been observed include: movements biasing time estimates (i.e., affecting accuracy) as well as making time estimates more precise. The goal of this presentation is to review this literature, discuss a Bayesian cue combinati

Visual working memory (WM) is the cognitive function that temporarily keeps sensory information online. There is a debate on WM's limited ability: holding a fixed small amount of items or a limited resource allocated to all items stored. The current study tries to solve the debate by model comparison, involving the Mixture Model, Variable Precision Model, and All-guessing models. Furthermore, though multiple subregions of the human brain cortex coordinate to support the WM functions, their distinct contributions are under debate. By comparing WM performance with transcranial magnetic stimulati

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) offers a non-invasive clinical treatment for intractable neuropsychiatric disorders, including Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). Repetitive TMS (rTMS) involves administering a series of patterned magnetic pulses through the skull to modulate cortical brain activity and induce synaptic plasticity in aberrant neural circuitry. When successful, rTMS results in lasting therapeutic changes that may reflect an amelioration in cognitive symptoms. The salient parameters that comprise rTMS protocols, such as pulse frequency, amplitude, etc., interact to determine

It is widely known that motor learning leads to reorganization changes in the motor cortex. Recently, we have shown that using navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) allows us to reliably trace interactions among motor cortical representations (MCRs) of different upper limb muscles. Using this approach, we investigate changes in the MCRs after fine finger movement training. Our preliminary results demonstrated that areas of the APB and ADM and their overlaps tended to increase after finger independence training. Considering the behavioral data, hand dexterity increased for both hand

Working memory (WM) content is mostly stored in neurons preferring contralateral cues in bilateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) [2], but can travel between hemispheres [3]. This is thought to support full-field spatial WM continuity. Recently, temporal continuity in WM has been linked to activity-silent mechanisms in PFC supporting behavioral serial dependence (SD) between successive trials [1]. Moreover, SD increases when prefrontal activity-silent traces of previous memories are reactivated in the fixation period by either internal or external (e.g. transcranial magnetic stimulation, TMS) inputs

The study of mirror neurons (MN) has a long way since its discovery on monkeys and later on humans. However, in literature there are inconsistencies on the ways stimuli are presented and on the time of presentation. Which is the best way to present motor movement stimuli? Is it possible to estimate when the mirror neurons effect take place by using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation at specific time windows? In the current study we test different ways of stimuli presentation (photo and video of hand movements) and brain stimulation (e.g. TMS) delivered on the dominant primary motor cortex (M1)

Integrating information is particularly crucial when decisions contain complex information. In decision neuroscience, it has been widely studied how overall decision value is encoded in the brain, but how information is integrated prior to encoding overall value remains largely unclear. Recently, our neuroimaging study has shown that the lateral frontopolar cortex (FPl), a uniquely well-developed region in the human brain, engaged specifically in complex choice but not in simple choice (Law et al., 2023). Aided by an artificial neural network, we found that FPl involved a parallel processing t

Modeling non-invasive brain stimulation, particularly transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the primary motor cortex (M1), has been previously explored through simulation methods at different scales. However, the coupling of TMS induced electric fields to neural mass models is still largely unexplored, while previously approached as an arbitrary current pulse [1, 2]. Via multi-scale simulations at the subcellular and neural mass level we study the underlying mechanisms of electromagnetic activation of cortical tissue by TMS. Validation of the coupling model is aided by measurements like E