A powerful approach to investigate the relationships between brain activity, cognition, and behavior is to temporarily influence brain activity and to measure the impact on cognition and behavior. It is possible to achieve this in humans noninvasively (without neurosurgery) using noninvasive brain stimulation. Our laboratory uses Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), which primarily affects activity of small, targeted areas of the superficial parts of the brain. We utilize TMS within a brain-network framework, meaning that we investigate how TMS affects activity throughout the network of areas that are connected to the stimulated location. We focus on the indirect effects of TMS on the hippocampus, a key area for learning and memory. Our TMS experiments test how the hippocampus contributes to memory and support our overarching goal of developing noninvasive stimulation methods to treat individuals with memory impairments.

Read about our various findings on the Publications page or check out this representative study:

Targeted enhancement of cortical-hippocampal brain networks and associative memory

Above: Our TMS Robot delivering stimulation to four targets.