Functional relevance of cross-modal plasticity in blind humans

Functional imaging studies of people who were blind from an early age have revealed that their primary visual cortex can be activated by Braille reading and other tactile discrimination tasks1. Other studies have also shown that visual cortical areas can be activated by somatosensory input in blind subjects but not those with sight2,3,4,5,6,7. The significance of this cross-modal plasticity is unclear, however, as it is not known whether the visual cortex can process somatosensory information in a functionally relevant way. To address this issue, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the function of different cortical areas in people who were blind from an early age as they i…

Induction of a recall deficit by rapid-rate transcranial magnetic stimulation

We used rapid-rate, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) for the noninvasive study of verbal recall. Five right-handed normal subjects were studied. Recall followed immediately after presentation of a 12-word list. Focal rTMS was applied with a figure eight coil in trains of 500 ms duration to F7, F8, T5, T6, P3, P4, or O1, O2 at latencies of 0, 250, 500, or 1000 ms during word list presentation. Recall was consistently significantly diminished only after left mid-temporal and bilateral dorsofrontal rTMS at both 0 and 250 ms latencies. We conclude that rTMS may be useful as a non-invasive tool for the study of verbal memory processes.

Evaluation of movement and brain activity

Clinical neurophysiology studies can contribute important information about the physiology of human movement and the pathophysiology and diagnosis of different movement disorders. Some techniques can be accomplished in a routine clinical neurophysiology laboratory and others require some special equipment. This review, initiating a series of articles on this topic, focuses on the methods and techniques. The methods reviewed include EMG, EEG, MEG, evoked potentials, coherence, accelerometry, coherence, posturography (balance), gait, and sleep studies. Functional MRI (fMRI) is also reviewed as a physiological method that can be used independently or together with other methods. A few applicat…

The role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in implicit procedural learning.

We studied the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in procedural learning. Normal subjects completed several blocks of a serial reaction time task using only one hand without or with concurrent non-invasive repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation. To disrupt their function transiently, stimulation was applied at low intensity over the supplementary motor area or over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex contralateral or ipsilateral to the hand used for the test. Stimulation to the contralateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex markedly impaired procedural implicit learning, as documented by the lack of significant change in response times during the task. Stimulation over the other …

Procedural learning and prefrontal cortex.