Transcranial magnetic stimulation, causal structure-function mapping and networks of functional relevance

Current Opinion in Neurobiology

Volumn 16, Issue 5, 2006, Pages 593-599

  Sack, Alexander T ^a  

^a MAASTRICHT UNIVERSITY   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

BEHAVIOR; BRAIN; BRAIN FUNCTION; COGNITION; HUMAN; PRIORITY JOURNAL; REVIEW; TRANSCRANIAL MAGNETIC STIMULATION;

BEHAVIOR; BRAIN; BRAIN MAPPING; COGNITION; HUMANS; NERVE NET; TRANSCRANIAL MAGNETIC STIMULATION;

EID: 33749165751     PISSN: 09594388     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.conb.2006.06.016     Document Type: Review

References (57)

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38. Boyer J.L., Harrison S., and Ro T. Unconscious processing of orientation and color without primary visual cortex. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 102 (2005) 16875-16879. In this interesting study, Boyer et al. used TMS to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying unconscious vision. Patients suffering from a lesion in primary visual cortex (V1) are blind for stimuli in the part of the visual field that corresponds to the lesion. However, despite this loss of conscious visual experience, these patients are often still capable of discriminating and localizing visual stimuli in the blind regions when forced to guess what they have seen. Boyer et al. tried to mimic this blindsight phenomenon in healthy volunteers using TMS. They revealed that a TMS-induced deactivation of V1 at around 100 ms after stimulus presentation produced a transient blindness for visual stimuli within the TMS-induced scotoma (see also [56,57]). Importantly, even when participants reported no conscious awareness of the presented stimuli, they nevertheless accurately guessed both the orientation and the color of these unseen stimuli, suggesting that an alternative visual pathway bypassing V1 is still unconsciously processing residual visual features. On the basis of their results, the authors speculate that these alternative pathways include direct subcortical projections from the thalamus to extrastriate visual areas, for example, those involved with color perception (see also Jolij and Lamme, 2005 [39] for TMS-induced blindsight of affective content).
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55. Bestmann S., Baudewig J., Siebner H.R., Rothwell J.C., and Frahm J. Functional MRI of the immediate impact of transcranial magnetic stimulation on cortical and subcortical motor circuits. Eur J Neurosci 19 (2004) 1950-1962. The authors simultaneously combined TMS and fMRI to assess directly the neural effects induced by TMS in human volunteers. They could demonstrate that focal TMS over the sensorimotor cortex activates a network of cortical and, importantly, subcortical motor regions, even at stimulation intensities below the motor threshold.
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