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by mattkrause
1120 days ago
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That study is misleading/wrong and has done a huge amount of damage to this field. What they actually showed is that 1) much of the current does not reach the brain, and 2) the current that does is not sufficient to directly “force” neurons to fire. However, that doesn’t mean the remaining current does nothing at all, as it could still modulate brain activity. Using direct recordings of individual neurons, I showed that various forms of tES shift spike timing. Simulation causes them to fire sooner or later than they otherwise would. This matters because information is carried in both by overall rate of spiking and the timing of those spikes. Moreover, it’s not just a placebo, because knocking out the sensations with topical anesthetic doesn’t block the neural effects, nor is recreating them sufficient to cause them. I just wrote a little think-piece about this for PLOS Biology that summarizes what we know—-and don’t—-about it https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou... |
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If one wants to change neural computation via a global oscillator, it would seem that a flashing light, auditory tone, or tactile vibration might be a more potent alternative. These stimuli indisputably drive substantial brain wide activity, including many action potentials. I suppose I’m reluctantly team Firing Rate when it comes to mammals—there’s beautiful work on spike ordering in cold blooded animals for example but I’m less aware of computational work where precise spike time matters and not the relative time ie hebbiwn plasticity.
I’m also somewhat influenced by my first hand difficulty when doing in vitro patch clamp to induce sub threshold voltage changes on a neuron with a second probe even just 100um away. Color me skeptical, in part as it’s really hard to do a double-blinded control and the effect sizes seem small.