Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Facilitates Associative Learning and Alters Functional Connectivity in the Primate Brain
| Autor: | Praveen K. Pilly, Theodoros P. Zanos, Christopher C. Pack, Matthew R. Krause, Jaehoon Choe, Bennett A. Csorba, Abhishek Datta, Matthew E. Phillips |
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| Rok vydání: | 2017 |
| Předmět: |
Male
0301 basic medicine Brain activity and meditation medicine.medical_treatment Conditioning Classical Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Macaque General Biochemistry Genetics and Molecular Biology 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine biology.animal medicine Animals Primate Prefrontal cortex biology Transcranial direct-current stimulation Association Learning Brain Cognition Human brain Macaca mulatta Associative learning 030104 developmental biology medicine.anatomical_structure General Agricultural and Biological Sciences Neuroscience 030217 neurology & neurosurgery |
| Zdroj: | Current Biology. 27:3086-3096.e3 |
| ISSN: | 0960-9822 |
| Popis: | There has been growing interest in transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a non-invasive technique purported to modulate neural activity via weak, externally applied electric fields. Although some promising preliminary data have been reported for applications ranging from stroke rehabilitation to cognitive enhancement, little is known about how tDCS affects the human brain, and some studies have concluded that it may have no effect at all. Here, we describe a macaque model of tDCS that allows us to simultaneously examine the effects of tDCS on brain activity and behavior. We find that applying tDCS to right prefrontal cortex improves monkeys' performance on an associative learning task. While firing rates do not change within the targeted area, tDCS does induce large low-frequency oscillations in the underlying tissue. These oscillations alter functional connectivity, both locally and between distant brain areas, and these long-range changes correlate with tDCS's effects on behavior. Together, these results are consistent with the idea that tDCS leads to widespread changes in brain activity and suggest that it may be a valuable method for cheaply and non-invasively altering functional connectivity in humans. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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