Periodic brain stimulation, such as repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), can be used to engage cortical rhythms (Fröhlich, 2015). Such findings have raised the fascinating prospect of manipulating rhythmic brain activity in a controlled manner, thereby engaging neural circuits at a functional level to manipulate cognition and to treat disorders of the central nervous system (Cecere et al., 2015; Fröhlich, 2015; Romei et al., 2016; Ezzyat et al., 2017). Yet, the brain is not a passive receiver. Invasive and non-invasive brain stimulation differ in their effect on neuronal dynamics as a function of the state of the targeted network, a robust observation across a variety of stimulation modalities (Neuling et al., 2013; Ruhnau et al., 2016; Alagapan et al., 2016). Indeed, previous studies have reported the seemingly counterintuitive fact that the susceptibility of neural tissue to exogenous control (during stimulation for instance) is increased during task-engaged states (Neuling et al., 2013; Ruhnau et al., 2016; Alagapan et al., 2016). Task-engaged states are generally characterized by higher neuronal firing rates and by population responses that are predominantly asynchronous, and by a suppression of low-frequency electrical brain activity compared to what is seen in the rest condition (Churchland et al., 2010; Rosenbaum et al., 2017). By contrast, the rest state is characterized by strong endogenous oscillations, such as alpha oscillations (8 Hz–12 Hz), which reflect internally driven brain processes (Pfurtscheller et al., 1996; Klimesch, 2012). To compensate for these state-dependent differences in population activity, it has been suggested that stimulation parameters should be calibrated in a closed loop (Boyle and Frohlich, 2013; Lustenberger et al., 2016) in order for stimulation to be optimally effective. But the lack of understanding about the cause of these state-dependent changes and how they interfere with brain stimulation remains one of the main limitations for the development of new paradigms that are based on the selective control of brain rhythms.

We formulated the hypothesis that the dominance of asynchronous activity in the task state — in the form of irregular fluctuations in neural activity — may enhance the susceptibility of cortical neurons to periodic stimulation. Specifically, we asked whether stochastic resonance (SR) was involved. SR is a phenomenon by which the presence of uncorrelated random fluctuations, or so-called ‘noise’, amplifies the salience of a weak periodic signal driving a non-linear system (McDonnell and Abbott, 2009). In absence of noise, a subthreshold signal is too weak to generate an output that reflects the input. For intermediate levels of noise, however, the superposition of the signal and the random fluctuations results in super-threshold — and thus detectable — dynamics. Further increase in noise typically causes the saliency of the signal to decrease. Such a link between SR and state-dependent effects of brain stimulation have been reported experimentally across various modalities (Schwarzkopf et al., 2011; Silvanto and Cattaneo, 2017), in which irregular waveforms have further been shown to improve the effect of rhythmic stimuli (Wuehr et al., 2017). However, it remains unclear how the task-related decrease in alpha oscillations is involved in enhancing the susceptibility of cortical neurons to entrainment by exogenous electric fields.

Computational approaches and modeling are poised to answer many of these fundamental questions, but have received little attention, especially with respect to the clinical applications of brain stimulation. By identifying the network mechanisms involved, modeling can be used to catalyze the development of more efficient stimulation protocols and customized clinical interventions. Using simulations, we have previously used a cortical network model to better understand how periodic stimulation interacts with resting-state alpha (8 Hz–12 Hz) activity, and found that multiple mechanisms where involved (Herrmann et al., 2016). Echoing the theory of non-linear oscillators in physics, stimulations with increasing amplitudes and/or frequencies were found to shape networks responses through different mechanisms: resonance, in which intrinsic oscillations are enhanced by stimuli with frequencies close to the network natural frequency; and entrainment, where the systems’ dynamics become phase locked to the stimulation and thus adopt the same frequency. Entrainment occurs only for specific sets of stimulation amplitudes and frequencies (regions in stimulation parameters space called Arnold tongues). But what happens in the presence of state-induced changes in baseline activity?

To address these questions and to provide predictions about optimal entrainment conditions, we harnessed computational and mathematical techniques to analyze state-dependent effects on a network model of the thalamo-cortical system in the presence of periodic stimulation. We found that increased thalamic drive suppressed endogenous oscillations throughout the thalamo-cortical loop, leading to an asynchronous state characterized by intense spiking activity that was weakly synchronized. We defined regimes of low (with respect to high) thalamic drive and resting (with respect to task-engaged) brain state to represent two externally imposed experimental conditions. In presence of periodic stimulation, the transition from the rest to the task-engaged state was accompanied by an increased susceptibility to entrainment, as demonstrated by amplified power at stimulation frequency and phase alignment between cortical responses and stimulation. Specifically, we found that the oscillatory response of the system switched from alpha oscillations to stimulus-induced activity as thalamic drive was increased, i.e. during a transition from the resting state to the task state. Taken together, these results show that the thalamo-cortical loop implements a gain control mechanism that regulates the robustness of alpha oscillatory activity and, by doing so, modulates cortical susceptibility to rhythmic entrainment by stimulation.

To understand how the effect of periodic stimulation depends on brain state (Alagapan et al., 2016), we examined the hypothesis that cortical susceptibility to entrainment is controlled by sub-cortical (i.e. thalamic) populations that are reciprocally connected with the cortical networks targeted by stimulation. Given the important role of the thalamus in controlling cortical state (Poulet et al., 2012) and resting-state alpha activity (Hughes et al., 2004; Hughes and Crunelli, 2005; Lorincz et al., 2009), we investigated how increased thalamic inputs regulated cortical excitability and the power of endogenous alpha oscillations. By brain state, we here refer to the state of the thalamo-cortical network, which is determined by the afferent sensory drive to thalamus in the model and parallels two different experimental conditions (i.e. rest and task-engaged). We developed a model of the thalamo-cortical network composed of cortical, thalamic relay and reticular populations that exhibit synchronous activity within the alpha band (see Materials and methods). In this model, cortical populations of excitatory and inhibitory cells share both feedforward and feedback connections with the thalamus. Sensory inputs (e.g. visual) are sent through the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) to cortical areas for further processing (Poulet et al., 2012), impacting the pattern of activity of cortical neurons. The model structure is illustrated in Figure 1, along with the steady-state responses generated by the different groups of neurons present.

Figure 1

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To quantify the impact of thalamic drive on cortical activity and alpha oscillations — first without stimulation — we calculated both cortical and sub-cortical firing rates, and the power of endogenous oscillations as the input to the thalamus was increased (Figure 2). We did this to define quantitatively different brain states, i.e. resting state vs task-engaged state. For low input to the thalamus, all populations across the network were maintained in a highly synchronous state, where recurrent interactions generate strong firing-rate oscillations with an envelope of about 8 Hz. As can be seen in Figure 1B, the activity of the different populations is synchronized, and the phase difference is due to the presence of propagation delays from the thalamus to and back from the cortex.

Figure 2

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Increases in thalamic inputs have a destabilizing effect on endogenous oscillations. While increasing thalamic drive also increased firing rates throughout the system, a gradual suppression of synchronous alpha activity could also be observed: the power of endogenous alpha oscillations decreased substantially. This increased thalamic drive also changed the spiking patterns of cortical neurons: spiking activity became irregular and asynchronous, in line with studies showing a transition towards decorrelated cortical dynamics at task-onset (Pfurtscheller et al., 1996; Poulet et al., 2012; Churchland et al., 2010). This negative correlation between alpha power and spike rate is further in line with other experimental findings (Haegens et al., 2011; van Kerkoerle et al., 2014). Taken together, these results demonstrate that changes in thalamic state are sufficient to destabilize alpha oscillations throughout the thalamo-cortical loop, as well as to shape spike correlations. We thus defined rest and task states as limit cases of low (i.e. rest) and high (i.e. task-engaged) thalamic drive, respectively (see Materials and methods), as indicated in Figure 2C. We note that aside from the thalamic input, the network parameters were kept constant. Such a smooth and gradual destabilization of alpha oscillations is suggestive of a noise-induced supercritical Hopf bifurcation (See Materials and methods). According to this well-known mechanism (Horsthemke and Lefever, 1982), noise acts as a gain control parameter by which non-linear oscillations sustained by delayed and recurrent inhibition (as in our model) can be altered and/or suppressed by a change in noise variance (Lefebvre et al., 2015; Hutt et al., 2016). In the process, noise also linearizes the dynamics by smoothing the non-linear response function of threshold systems (Gammaitoni, 1995; McDonnell and Abbott, 2009; Lefebvre et al., 2015). In the context of our model, rest and task-engaged states would then correspond to opposite points above and below the transition point, respectively, where the ‘noise’ is here mediated by increasingly irregular input from thalamus to cortex.

Having defined rest and task-engaged states in our network model and having characterized the influence of thalamic activity on alpha oscillations, we next asked how state-dependent changes in resting state oscillations (the destabilization of alpha oscillations) were impacted by cortical periodic stimulation. To disambiguate the contribution of resonance (the amplification of endogenous oscillations) and entrainment (the phase locking to an externally applied frequency) and to test network responses, we first considered a cortical stimulation with moderate amplitude and frequency of 11 Hz (${\omega }_{stim}$), which does not share any low order harmonic relationship with the endogenous frequency (i.e. ${\omega }_o=$8 Hz). This was done to align our simulation to a previous experimental setting (Alagapan et al., 2016), in order to determine whether we could reproduce the previously observed state-dependent effects. Then, we investigated how spiking activity and cortical oscillations properties changed as thalamic drive was gradually increased in the presence of periodic stimulation (Figure 3). We first computed the correlations in the spiking response amongst excitatory cells in the cortical network, either with 11 Hz stimulation or with no stimulation (sham), see Figure 3A. Without stimulation, thalamic drive suppresses correlated spiking and synchronous activity decreases. By contrast, when stimulation is applied in regimes of weak thalamic drive, correlations are lower than in the sham condition, indicating that stimulation itself interferes with endogenous activity. By increasing thalamic drive, spike-rate correlations gradually increase, indicating that cells are becoming entrained by the stimulation. Taken together, these observations elucidate a gradual transition from recurrent to externally driven dynamics as thalamic input is increased. To explore this further, we plotted, in Figure 3B, the peak power found both at alpha frequency (8 Hz) and at stimulation frequency (here 11 Hz). The power at stimulation frequency did indeed increase during the transition from the rest to the task state and that a shift in oscillatory regime can be observed. Indeed, one can clearly observe a jump in the dominant frequency from 8 Hz (endogenous alpha frequency) to 11 Hz (stimulation frequency) as resting state alpha oscillations are gradually suppressed.

Figure 3

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We hypothesized that this enhanced spectral power at the stimulation frequency might occur through SR. SR has been implicated in the enhancement of sub-threshold signals in which random fluctuations — of either external or internal origin — act like a pedestal increasing the sensitivity of stimulated neurons to a given set of low-intensity inputs (Miniussi et al., 2013). Initially formulated in bistable systems with an implicit time-scale (a ‘resonance’), SR is also present in systems with threshold nonlinearities, which we note are present in our model.

To verify whether SR was indeed involved —and to disambiguate the contribution of SR and dithering (McDonnell and Abbott, 2009) — we chose a weak amplitude stimulation and computed the mutual information between stimulation signal and firing-rate response at the stimulation frequency across successive and independent trials, while noise variance was gradually increased across all populations in the network. As shown in Figure 3D, the mutual information was found to be optimized at an intermediate value, indicating that SR — in its most strict definition (McDonnell and Abbott, 2009) — was indeed involved. In contrast to SR, dithering — a similar phenomenon by which the saliency of weak signals is improved by noise — would cause the mutual information to increase monotonically, that is, it would not exhibit a peak at some intermediate value of noise. To confirm the presence of entrainment (to the stimulation and not to another internal oscillation), we performed a phase analysis comparing the phase of the cortical firing rates with the phase of the stimulation across independent trials. The results are shown in Figure 3E and F. There, one can see that weak phase alignment was found in the rest state (Figure 3E), whereas clear phase locking can be seen in the task state (Figure 3F). Our simulations show that cortical spiking responses are phase locked to the stimulation waveform only for intermediate values of thalamic drive. Below this drive, endogenous network activity suppresses cortical entrainment, and beyond this value, irregular noisy fluctuations originating from the thalamic population decreases the saliency of the temporal structure of the stimulation waveform. Taken together, the results above indicate that state-dependent inputs simultaneously amplify stimulation-induced activity while suppressing endogenous rhythmic activity through SR, enabling the stimulation to entrain cortical neurons.

Figure 4 summarizes these findings in the rest and task-engaged states. In the rest state (Figure 4A), the dynamics of the cortical neurons were predominantly governed by internal, recurrent fluctuations. When stimulation is applied in this state (Figure 4B), ongoing alpha oscillations are slightly perturbed but no cortical entrainment occurs. Stimulation has a minimal impact on the activity of cortical neurons: the phasic alternation of network-wide coincident firing and inhibitory recovery greatly reduces susceptibility to entrainment. This absence of phase locking of neuronal activity to the stimulation signal can be most clearly seen from the firing activity of cortical excitatory and inhibitory neurons. The firing activity of these cells occurs by successive bursts at 8 Hz, with little effect from stimulation-induced membrane fluctuations, which remain sub-threshold. The poor susceptibility is also apparent from the relatively small contribution of stimulation power to the overall spectral density distribution of the simulated cortical EEG (Figure 3C). These indicate that the rest state is characterized by highly stable attractor dynamics. By contrast, robust entrainment was observed in the task-engaged state (Figure 4C), as seen from a dominant spectral peak located precisely at the stimulation frequency (Figure 3C). Despite the fact that stimulation amplitude and frequency remained the same, cortical neurons were here fully entrained by the 11 Hz stimulation. The irregular activity that characterizes the task state was here replaced by stimulus-induced fluctuations while neural firing was tightly phased locked to the stimulus dynamics. Spectral power at the stimulation frequency is significantly amplified when compared to that in the rest state, whereas negligible power can be found at the endogenous alpha frequency. This forms yet another indication that the resting state attractor has been destabilized under the action of thalamic drive and the resulting increase in neural noise (Lefebvre et al., 2015; Hutt et al., 2016), also in line with requirements of SR (McDonnell and Abbott, 2009).

Figure 4

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But how does this state-dependent susceptibility depend on stimulation parameters? To answer this question, we first fixed stimulation amplitude and varied its frequency between 0 and 50 Hz, while computing the power spectral density in each case (Figure 5). A peak at the stimulation frequency can be seen along the diagonal, but the rest state power spectral density is characterized by a dominant horizontal peak at 8 Hz. According to this analysis, the spectral contribution of stimulation is negligible unless the stimulation frequency is close to the endogenous frequency and/or its harmonics (horizontal lines in Figure 5A), as expected via resonance (Ali et al., 2013; Herrmann et al., 2016). In the task-engaged state, the opposite occurs: reduced power at the endogenous frequency promotes entrainment, and stimulation power increases significantly across the range of stimulation frequency considered.

Figure 5

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As a next step, we computed the power-spectral density of the simulated EEG activity of cortical excitatory and inhibitory cells, and systematically measured the peak frequency and power for all combinations of stimulation frequency and amplitudes within a given range. We then identified regions for which the dominant (i.e. peak) frequency was defined either by endogenous oscillations or by the stimulation — thus identifying regimes of entrainment. In Figure 6A, one can see the peak frequency of the simulated cortical EEG activity in the rest state. For most combinations of stimulation amplitudes and frequencies, the peak frequency remains stable and equal to the endogenous alpha frequency (i.e. 8 Hz). However, for higher amplitudes and for stimulation frequencies near 8 Hz, cortical neurons were gradually entrained by the stimulation (1:1 entrainment). A narrow triangular entrainment region (the so-called Arnold tongue, delimited by white dashed lines) (Glass and Belair, 1980; Hunter and Milton, 2003) emerges and gets larger as stimulation amplitude increases. Note that the asymmetrical shape of the Arnold tongue is here due to a stimulation-induced shift of the endogenous frequency (Hutt et al., 2016). The equivalent calculations were made in Figure 6B but for the task-engaged state. Multiple differences compared to the rest state can be observed. The Arnold tongue spans a much larger portion of the stimulus-parameter space, indicating robust entrainment for much weaker stimulation amplitudes. In Figure 6C and D, the power at peak response frequency is plotted. The power found at the endogenous frequency in the rest state outside the Arnold tongue (here also delimited by a white dashed line) is high, and is gradually suppressed as stimulation parameters are changed towards the entrainment region. There, peak power, associated with the stimulation frequency is much smaller (Figure 6C). Under the action of thalamic input in the task state, endogenous alpha oscillations are suppressed compared to those in the rest state, leading to weak power outside the Arnold tongue (Figure 6D). In contrast to the rest state, stimulation at the endogenous frequency enhances the peak power. In sum, the effect of stimulation on peak power when the frequency is close to the resonant frequency (vertical black dashed lines in Figure 6C and D) also depends on the state, that is, the thalamic drive.

Figure 6

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What mechanism is responsible for this state-dependence? Mathematical insights can play a key role here in helping us to understand how periodic stimulation interacts with intrinsic limit cycles (i.e. alpha oscillations) and how changes in stability can promote entrainment. In Alagapan et al., 2016), the authors modelled state-dependent entrainment using a population-scale network of cortical neurons interacting through both local and feedback projections in the presence of robust resting state oscillations. To learn more about the mechanism involved, we considered a simplified neural oscillator with delayed feedback (Lefebvre and Hutt, 2013; Lefebvre et al., 2015; Hutt et al., 2016) as a simplified model for the thalamo-cortical network. Networks of neurons that are exposed to delayed feedback and recurrent inhibition commonly display rhythmic activity whose features are tightly linked to input statistics (Dhamala et al. 2001; Doiron et al., 2003; Lefebvre and Hutt, 2013). To better understand the mechanism underlying the state-dependent changes in the amplitude of resting state oscillations, we investigated the dynamics of this simplified oscillator (see Materials and methods) in the presence of periodic forcing (i.e. stimulation) and various levels of noise. In can be shown that as input noise increases during the task state, limit cycle solutions are destabilized through a supercritical Hopf bifurcation. Analyzing the response of this simplified model both above and below the bifurcation threshold, that is, in the vicinity of the point where self-sustained (i.e. intrinsic) oscillations become unstable, we found that limit cycle solutions of this system are entrained by periodic forcing, although their amplitudes are highly sensitive to noise intensity. To see this, we computed resonance curves (Figure 7B) for this oscillator and compared the results for both high and low values of input noise variance. This simple qualitative analysis shows that the linearization induced by noise decreases the amplitude of the resonant solutions and increases the amplitude of all other forcing frequencies by transitioning through a critical state. Spectral clustering, in which the power and/or amplitude of forced solutions are concentrated near the intrinsic resonance, is a state of weak susceptibility to entrainment. The consequences of input-induced linearization in the simple conceptual model above are two-fold: (1) it causes a suppression of resonant oscillations, and (2) it augments the amplitude of non-resonant solutions. This was found to be in agreement with the state-dependency observed in our full spiking model as depicted in Figure 7C.

Figure 7

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Alpha activity has been implicated in a wide variety of physiological and cognitive functions (Başar and Basar, 2012; Mierau et al., 2017). Numerous recent studies have demonstrated that periodically modulated electric fields can interfere with alpha oscillations to trigger a measurable effect on stimulus perception (Chanes et al., 2013; Cecere et al., 2015) and task performance by entraining these rhythms (Henry et al., 2014; Samaha and Postle, 2015). However, the efficacy of these approaches has been shown to depend heavily on brain states and to fluctuate according to internally governed dynamics (Zaehle et al., 2010; Miniussi et al., 2013; Ruhnau et al., 2016; Alagapan et al., 2016).

To better understand this phenomenon and to elucidate previous experimental findings (Alagapan et al., 2016), we here combined computational and mathematical approaches and analyzed a computational model of the thalamo-cortical system exhibiting resting state alpha oscillations. The dynamics of our network model were analyzed in two conditions: the rest state, which we have defined as a regime of weak afferent input to the thalamus, and the task-engaged state, where thalamic drive is high to reflect experimentally imposed conditions. We found that a destabilization of alpha oscillations occurred during the transition between rest and task-engaged states, in which both cortical and sub-cortical spiking patterns switched from correlated and synchronous to irregular and asynchronous. Then, applying periodic stimulation to cortical neurons, we found that the susceptibility of the system to external perturbations was strongly controlled by the presence (or absence) of an oscillatory attractor (i.e. the alpha oscillation) and as such depended heavily on state. By comparing the stimulation waveform with the cortical firing-rate responses for weak stimulation amplitudes, we found that SR was involved in improving cortical susceptibility to entrainment. While in the rest state, applied stimulation had a weak impact on the activity of cortical neurons whose dynamics remained locked to internal recurrent oscillations. Arnold tongues (i.e. regions in the stimulation parameter space where network activity is phase locked to the stimulation) were found to be very narrow. By contrast, in the task-engaged state, excitatory and inhibitory cortical neurons were freed from the intrinsic attractor and found to be more susceptible to entrainment, as shown by significantly larger Arnold tongues. Using a simplified neural oscillator model, our mathematical analysis revealed that thalamic input to the cortex, playing a similar role as noise, could control the stability of intrinsic oscillations by provoking a bifurcation, and by doing so, could amplify the response to non-resonant stimuli. Aside from the state-dependent input and/or noise, only stimulation parameters, such as amplitude and frequency, were changed in our study. Taken together, our results show that internal control over attractor states shapes the susceptibility of cortical populations to stimulation and entrainment. Our modelling results further suggest that the thalamo-cortical system behaves like a non-linear oscillator whose susceptibility to periodic forcing is gated by noise through SR and a passage through a bifurcation.

SR is widely appreciated as a mechanism that regulates cortical excitability (Miniussi et al., 2013) and has measurable effects on cognitive performance and perception (van der Groen and Wenderoth, 2016). Our computational results demonstrate the important role of SR, and thus of asynchronous and irregular neural dynamics, in regulating the responses of cortical neurons to stimulation. Using a simplified neural oscillator model, we have shown that noise — playing the role of uncorrelated inputs from the thalamus — can suppress oscillation through a Hopf bifurcation. Practically speaking, this is accomplished by a noise-induced linearization of the response function of the system, a generic effect observed in systems with threshold non-linearities (see McDonnell and Abbott, 2009) and references therein), which can further be shown to impact the frequency and amplitude of oscillatory solutions in non-linear systems (Lefebvre et al., 2015; Hutt et al., 2016). Such linearization also plays a fundamental role in dithering, a mechanism by which noise is added to a signal, prior to its digitalization, to increase its integrity (McDonnell and Abbott, 2009). Formulated in the context of neural systems, irregular and/or uncorrelated fluctuations can thus be used to increase the saliency or fidelity of neural responses. Interestingly, this ‘correlation-induced blockade’ has been previously discussed with respect to alpha oscillations (Klimesch et al., 2007), where large-scale synchrony has been hypothesized to implement a functional inhibition gate through which increased synchronized fluctuations shut down the mutual coding capacity of neural networks (Zohary et al., 1994; Greenberg et al., 2008). In this perspective, we hypothesize that alpha oscillations — as well as other intrinsic attractors — block perturbations of neural activity, triggered either by endogenous (e.g. inter-area signaling) or exogenous (e.g. stimulation) manipulations. Future work will show whether endogenous correlated neural activity, which goes beyond the purely rhythmic activity observed here, could also play a role in regulating susceptibility to entrainment, and more generally in control.

We here note that, in line with previous theoretical (Hutt et al., 2016) and experimental (Mierau et al., 2017) findings, the peak alpha frequency was found to change as a function of thalamic drive between 8 and 8.5 Hz. This can be seen for instance in Figure 3C (top), Figure 5A,B and Figure 6A,B, where the peak frequency is slightly higher in the task-engaged state than in the rest state. This is because inputs from the thalamus to the cortex, whose variance changes as a function of thalamic drive, correspond to a stream of irregular fluctuations (i.e. Poisson noise) that are known to alter the oscillatory properties of non-linear networks (Lefebvre et al., 2015). As here these fluctuations possess stationary statistics (i.e. mean and variance that did not fluctuate in time), no temporal variability was observed in the peak frequency of endogenous oscillations. As such, this non-linear phenomenon, which is well understood mathematically, does not impact our conclusions.

Our results are conceptually connected to experimental findings in studies of tACS. In the task-engaged state, successful entrainment was reflected in a shift of the oscillation frequency to the stimulation frequency. This agrees with the findings of multiple studies of tACS that point towards a successful shift in the alpha peak frequency to the stimulation frequency during stimulation (e.g. Helfrich et al., 2014). Several studies using tACS (see Thut et al., 2017 and references therein) and a recent study (Minami and Amano, 2017) that uses amplitude-modulated tACS (AM-tACS) have employed some type of visual task, ranging from a simple vigilance task to prevent participants from falling asleep all the way to sophisticated visual psychophysics paradigms.

As for any modeling work, a key aspect to discuss is the level of abstraction. The electrical field applied by tACS is the strongest in the cortex due to its closest proximity to the stimulation electrodes. However, any modulation of cortical network dynamics by stimulation must, almost by definition, also alter activity in the regions interconnected with the targeted cortical circuits, including the thalamus. However, dissecting the effects of stimulation on an interconnected network remains a challenge because of the feedback nature of the network dynamics. Here, we have chosen to study a reduced, relatively abstract model of the thalamo-cortical system. By contrast, in a recent study in which we focused on the cellular and synaptic biophysics and their role in shaping the response to stimulation, we examined the response to stimulation of thalamus in isolation (Li et al., 2017). Qualitatively, the findings from the two studies agree as the detailed thalamic model suggested that faster oscillations, typically associated with the task-engaged state, are more responsive to stimulation than the task-negative alpha oscillations.

Our results further raise interesting questions regarding sensory entrainment paradigms (Keitel et al., 2017). In the presence of periodic sensory stimulation, or sensory inputs possessing a rhythmic structure, thalamic drive would also possess a rhythmic structure. It would prove interesting to see how these fluctuations in thalamo-cortical inputs would interact with endogenous oscillations, and whether brain state fluctuations could gate their propagation towards cortical networks. Given the central role of thalamus in sensory gating (e.g. Sherman, 2007; Poulet et al., 2012), sensory rhythmic inputs that reach the thalamus first may have a different effect on thalamo-cortical oscillations than does cortical stimulation. Yet another fundamental difference is the magnitude of the input. Sensory input to the thalamus (e.g., retinal input to the LGN) is strong enough to cause spiking in the thalamus, which is time-locked to the temporal structure of the visual input (Hirsch et al., 2015). Thus such input is super-threshold in comparison to the subthreshold stimulation examined here.

In summary, our results demonstrate that target engagement by stimulation is state-dependent. The fact that the presence of a pronounced endogenous oscillation limits the impact of stimulation in terms of entrainment points towards important questions for the use of such stimulation paradigms in research, and ultimately in the clinic. First, the overall state of the network needs to be measured and documented in studies that investigate brain stimulation for the modulation of brain rhythms. Second, it remains mostly unclear how adjusting the frequency of the alpha oscillation affects cognition and behavior (Romei et al., 2016; Mierau et al., 2017). Yet, a reduced alpha peak frequency is a hallmark of a range of neurological and psychiatric illnesses (e.g. Rossini et al., 2007) and probably an overall marker of brain health (Klimesch, 1999, 2012). In such work, our findings suggest that states of low alpha power represent the ideal state for the application of stimulation, and that modulation of brain oscillations is best achieved in states of low endogenous alpha rhythmic activity. This finding may be important for the next generation of brain stimulation paradigms developed using rational design.

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Author details

1. Jérémie Lefebvre

   Krembil Research Institute, Toronto, Canada

   Contribution

   Conceptualization, Resources, Data curation, Software, Formal analysis, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Validation, Investigation, Visualization, Methodology, Writing—original draft, Project administration, Writing—review and editing

   For correspondence

   jeremie.lefebvre@uhnresearch.ca

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

   "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-0369-4565

2. Axel Hutt

   FE12 - Data Assimilation, Deutscher Wetterdienst, Offenbach am Main, Germany

   Contribution

   Conceptualization, Resources, Data curation, Software, Formal analysis, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Validation, Investigation, Visualization, Methodology, Writing—original draft, Project administration, Writing—review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

   "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-0041-7431

3. Flavio Frohlich

   Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, United States

   Contribution

   Conceptualization, Resources, Supervision, Writing—original draft, Project administration, Writing—review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

   "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-3724-5621

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