Direct effects of transcranial electric stimulation on brain circuits in rats and humans

By M. Vöröslakos, Yuichi Takeuchi, Kitti Brinyiczki, T. Zombori, A. Oliva, Antonio Fernández-Ruiz, Gábor Kozák, Zsigmond Tamás Kincses, B. Iványi, György Buzsáki and 1 more. Nature Communications, 2018

657 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Transcranial electric stimulation is a non-invasive tool that can influence brain activity; however, the parameters necessary to affect local circuits in vivo remain to be explored. Here, we report that in rodents and human cadaver brains, ~75% of scalp-applied currents are attenuated by soft tissue and skull. Using intracellular and extracellular recordings in rats, we find that at least 1 mV/mm voltage gradient is necessary to affect neuronal spiking and subthreshold currents. We designed an ‘intersectional short pulse’ stimulation method to inject sufficiently high current intensities into the brain, while keeping the charge density and sensation on the scalp surface relatively low. We verify the regional specificity of this novel method in rodents; in humans, we demonstrate how it affects the amplitude of simultaneously recorded EEG alpha waves. Our combined results establish that neuronal circuits are instantaneously affected by intensity currents that are higher than those used in conventional protocols. Though transcranial electric stimulation has been used to influence brain activity, it is debated whether neuronal spiking activity is directly affected by commonly-used protocols. Here, the authors quantify the voltage gradients necessary to instantaneously affect neuronal spiking and show that they are higher than commonly-used protocols.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Neurology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5dca432734db0f6fa25638bd43a5515a7a866342

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

1. Til Ole Bergmann
2. Mengsen Zhang
3. Gesa Hartwigsen
4. F. Frohlich
5. J. Duprez
6. J. Modolo

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Mengsen Zhang
2. Til Ole Bergmann
3. Gesa Hartwigsen
4. F. Frohlich
5. J. Duprez
6. J. Modolo
7. Justin Riddle

In Neurology

1. Til Ole Bergmann
2. Gesa Hartwigsen
3. F. Frohlich

Citations in the corpus

• Questions and controversies in the study of time-varying functional connectivity in resting fMRI (2020, neutral): “While some controversy remains as to the efficacy and reliability of these methods (Lafon et al., 2017; Voroslakos et al., 2018), they potentially provide an exciting opportunity for researchers interested in TVFC.”
• Mechanisms and Controversies of tACS (Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation) (2024, background): “Let us mention that recent studies have suggested solutions able to increase the in situ electric field magnitude (e.g. using the approach of (Voroslakos et al., 2018)), which should increase further tACS results reproducibility, as also supported by (Zanto et al., 2021).”
• After-effects of parieto-occipital gamma transcranial alternating current stimulation on behavioral performance and neural activity in visuo-spatial attention task (2026, unknown): “These attentional 36 modes can be assessed with variants of the Posner cueing task (Posner et al. (1980)), in which reaction 37 times (RTs) to a visual target differ depending on whether the preceding cue validly or invalidly predicts 38 target location.”
• Inferring Causality from Noninvasive Brain Stimulation in Cognitive Neuroscience (2020, background): “…Shirinpour, & Opitz, 2019), and the effectiveness of TCS in humans is thus highly debated (Filmer, Mattingley, & Dux, 2020; Liu et al., 2018; Vöröslakos et al., 2018), although TCS-induced E-fields as small as 0.2–1 V/m have already proven effective in causing tiny shifts in spontaneous…”