The effects of electrical microstimulation on cortical signal propagation
By Nikos K. Logothetis, Mark-Aurel Augath, Yusuke Murayama, Alexander Rauch, F. Sultan, J. Goense, A. Oeltermann, H. Merkle. 2010
352 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Electrical stimulation has been used in animals and humans to study potential causal links between neural activity and specific cognitive functions. Recently, it has found increasing use in electrotherapy and neural prostheses. However, the manner in which electrical stimulation–elicited signals propagate in brain tissues remains unclear. We used combined electrostimulation, neurophysiology, microinjection and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the cortical activity patterns elicited during stimulation of cortical afferents in monkeys. We found that stimulation of a site in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) increased the fMRI signal in the regions of primary visual cortex (V1) that received input from that site, but suppressed it in the retinotopically matched regions of extrastriate cortex. Consistent with previous observations, intracranial recordings indicated that a short excitatory response occurring immediately after a stimulation pulse was followed by a long-lasting inhibition. Following microinjections of GABA antagonists in V1, LGN stimulation induced positive fMRI signals in all of the cortical areas. Taken together, our findings suggest that electrical stimulation disrupts cortico-cortical signal propagation by silencing the output of any neocortical area whose afferents are electrically stimulated.
Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
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Citations in the corpus
- Telling cause from effect in deterministic linear dynamical systems (2015, background): “For example, it is very difficult to influence the activity of a specific brain region without influencing other properties of the neural system (Logothetis et al., 2010).”
- High-resolution electrophysiological mapping of effective connectivity of lateral prefrontal cortex (2025, unknown): “48 Other authors have explained the fast peak delay responses ( 50 ms) as a consequence of monosynaptic postsynaptic 49 connections 49-51 and slower peak delay responses (generally considered over 50 ms) to group mono-and polysynaptic connections through cortico-cortical and cortico-subcortical…”
- CARLA: Adjusted common average referencing for cortico-cortical evoked potential data (2023, background): “…peaks and troughs captured by the measurement electrodes, termed cortico-cortical evoked potentials (CCEPs), quantify synchronous signal propagation downstream from the stimulation site and are a macroscopic analog to local field potentials (Logothetis et al., 2010; Silverstein et al., 2020).”
- Why does invasive brain stimulation sometimes improve memory and sometimes impair it? (2024, unknown): “In addition, evidence from nonhuman primates suggests that specific patterns of stimulation can simultaneously induce both inhibitory and excitatory effects in different downstream regions [72].”