Partial injury to the corticospinal tract (CST) causes sprouting of intact axons at their targets, and this sprouting correlates with functional improvement. Electrical stimulation of motor cortex augments sprouting of intact CST axons and promotes functional recovery when applied soon after injury. We hypothesized that electrical stimulation of motor cortex in the intact hemisphere after chron...

OBJECTIVE To assess cortical excitability changes in patients with chronic neuropathic pain at baseline and after repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) of the motor cortex. METHODS In 22 patients with unilateral hand pain of various neurologic origins and 22 age-matched healthy controls, we studied the following parameters of cortical excitability: motor threshold at rest, motor...

The purpose of this review is to investigate how transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can modulate implicit motor sequence learning and consolidation. So far, most of the studies have focused on the modulating effect of tDCS for explicit motor learning. Here, we focus explicitly on implicit motor sequence learning and consolidation in order to improve our understanding about the poten...

We modulated neural excitability in the human motor cortex to investigate behavioral effects for both hands. In a previous study, we showed that decreasing excitability in the dominant motor cortex led to a decline in performance for the contralateral hand and an improvement for the ipsilateral hand; increasing excitability produced the opposite effects. Research suggests that the ipsilateral e...

.................................................................................................................... xiii Chapter 1 – Introduction .............................................................................................. 1 Chapter 2 – Motor control in the rat vibrissa system .................................................. 5 2.1 The motor plant for whisking .................

The agranular cortex is an important landmark-anatomically, as the architectural flag of mammalian motor cortex, and historically, as a spur to the development of theories of localization of function. But why, exactly, do agranularity and motor function go together? To address this question, it should be noted that not only does motor cortex lack granular layer four, it also has a relatively th...

A traditional view of the motor cortex in the primate brain is that it contains a map of the body arranged across the cortical surface. This traditional topographic scheme, however, does not capture the actual pattern of overlaps, fractures, re-representations, and multiple areas separated by fuzzy borders. Here, we suggest that the organization of the motor cortex, premotor cortex, supplementa...

Field potential recordings from motor cortex show oscillations in the beta-band (approximately 20 Hz), which are coherent with similar oscillations in the activity of contralateral contracting muscles. Recent findings have revised concepts of how this activity might be generated in the cortex, suggesting it could achieve useful computation. Other evidence shows that these oscillations engage no...

BACKGROUND There is evidence that interventions aiming at modulation of the motor cortex activity lead to pain reduction. In order to understand further the role of the motor cortex on pain modulation, we aimed to compare the behavioral (pressure pain threshold) and neurophysiological effects (transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) induced cortical excitability) across three different motor ta...