Neural activity related to volitional regulation of cortical excitability
- ETH, Zürich, Switzerland
- University of Tübingen, Germany
Abstract
To date there exists no reliable method to non-invasively upregulate or downregulate the state of the resting human motor system over a large dynamic range. Here we show that an operant conditioning paradigm which provides neurofeedback of the size of motor evoked potentials (MEPs) in response to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), enables participants to self-modulate their own brain state. Following training, participants were able to robustly increase (by 83.8%) and decrease (by 30.6%) their MEP amplitudes. This volitional up-versus downegulation of corticomotor excitability caused an increase of late-cortical disinhibition (LCD), a TMS derived read-out of presynaptic GABAB disinhibition, which was accompanied by an increase of gamma and a decrease of alpha oscillations in the trained hemisphere. This approach paves the way for future investigations into how altered brain state influences motor neurophysiology and recovery of function in a neurorehabilitation context.
Data availability
Data are openly available on the ETH Library Research Collection with the DOI: https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000300799.This contains processed EEG data for all subjects (Figure 5), EMG data and MEPs from the main experiment (Figure 2) and follow-up experiments (Figures 3 and 4).
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MEP neurofeedbackETH Library research collection, ethz-b-000300799.
Article and author information
Author details
Pegah Kassraian-Fard
Bankim Subhash Chander
Funding
Swiss National Science Foundation (320030_175616)
- Nicole Wenderoth
Irish Research Council (GOIPD/2017/798)
- Kathy Ruddy
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All participants gave written informed consent to procedures. The experiments were approved by the Kantonale Ethikkommission Zürich, and were conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (1964).
Copyright
© 2018, Ruddy et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Further reading
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