Right Frequency, Right Place: Boosting Motor Learning Without Surgery
We have talked before about putting electrodes on the outside of the head to treat motor disorders. The idea is appealing, no surgery, cheap, and easy to repeat. The problem is that results tend to be modest and highly variable. Some people respond, many do not. A recent study in Science Advances suggests that part of the problem may be that we have been stimulating the brain without paying attention to its natural rhythm. The cerebellum has its own preferred rhythm. Neurons in the cerebellar microcircuit tend to oscillate in the theta range (roughly 4 to 8 Hz). These theta oscillations are thought to organize how information flows through the circuit, and to set up the right timing for synaptic plasticity, the strengthening and weakening of connections that underlies motor learning. So what did they do? The researchers combined two kinds of non-invasive stimulation over the cerebellum. The first was intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS), a form of magnetic stimulation alre...
