Pathological changes in excitability of cortical tissue commonly underlie the initiation and spread of seizure activity in patients suffering from epilepsy. Accordingly, monitoring excitability and controlling its degree using antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) is of prime importance for clinical care and treatment. To date, adequate measures of excitability and action of AEDs have been difficult to id...

Learning is known to cause alterations in intrinsic cellular excitability but, to date, these changes have been seen only after multiple training trials. A powerful learning task that can be quickly acquired and extinguished with a single trial is fear conditioning. Rats were trained and extinguished on a hippocampus-dependent form of fear conditioning to determine whether learning-related chan...

Tyrosine kinases have recently been shown to modulate synaptic plasticity and ion channel function. We show here that tyrosine kinases can also modulate both the baseline excitability state of Aplysia tail sensory neurons (SNs) as well as the excitability induced by the neuromodulator serotonin (5HT). First, we examined the effects of increasing and decreasing tyrosine kinase activity in the SN...

Objective. High intensity interval treadmill training (HIITT) has been gaining popularity for gait rehabilitation after stroke. In this study, we examined the changes in excitability of the lower limb motor cortical representation (M1) in chronic stroke survivors following a single session of HIITT. We also determined whether exercise-induced changes in excitability could be modulated by transc...

Abstract Voluntary allocation of visual attention is controlled by top-down signals generated within the Frontal Eye Fields (FEFs) that can change excitability lower-level areas. However, mechanism through which this control achieved remains elusive. Here, we emulated generation an attentional signal using single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation to activate FEFs and tracked its consequen...

introduction: in the kindling-induced seizure model, low and repeated electrical or chemical stimulations, can elevate the neural network excitability and induce epileptiform seizures. opioid receptors are widely distributed in different areas of the brain. on the other hand, morphine has paradoxical effects and induces elevation or alleviation of the pain sensation and excitability, at differe...

This study investigated whether there are sex differences in the spinal excitability of the human mirror-neuron system. We measured the modulation of spinal excitability, elicited by Hoffmann reflex in the left plantar flexor muscle (soleus), when women and men participants observed videos of bipedal heel-stepping (plantar dorsiflexion), standing still, and bipedal toe-stepping (plantar flexion...

Cognitive functions, such as working memory, depend on neuronal excitability in a distributed network of cortical regions. It is not known, however, if interindividual differences in cortical excitability are related to differences in working memory performance. In the present transcranial magnetic stimulation study, which included 188 healthy young subjects, we show that participants with lowe...