Entrainment of brain oscillations by transcranial alternating current stimulation

Novel methods for neuronal entrainment [1-4] provide the unique opportunity to modulate perceptually relevant brain oscillations [5, 6] in a frequency-specific manner and to study their functional impact on distinct cognitive functions. Recently, evidence has emerged that tACS (transcranial alternat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Current biology Vol. 24; no. 3; p. 333
Main Authors: Helfrich, Randolph F, Schneider, Till R, Rach, Stefan, Trautmann-Lengsfeld, Sina A, Engel, Andreas K, Herrmann, Christoph S
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: England 03.02.2014
Subjects:
Brain - physiology
Electric Stimulation
Electroencephalography
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Humans
Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
Visual Perception - physiology
ISSN:1879-0445, 1879-0445
Online Access:Get more information
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Summary:Novel methods for neuronal entrainment [1-4] provide the unique opportunity to modulate perceptually relevant brain oscillations [5, 6] in a frequency-specific manner and to study their functional impact on distinct cognitive functions. Recently, evidence has emerged that tACS (transcranial alternating current stimulation) can modulate cortical oscillations [7-9]. However, the study of electrophysiological effects has been hampered so far by the absence of concurrent electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings. Here, we applied 10 Hz tACS to the parieto-occipital cortex and utilized simultaneous EEG recordings to study neuronal entrainment during stimulation. We pioneer a novel approach for simultaneous tACS-EEG recordings and successfully separate stimulation artifacts from ongoing and event-related cortical activity. Our results reveal that 10 Hz tACS increases parieto-occipital alpha activity and synchronizes cortical oscillators with similar intrinsic frequencies to the entrainment frequency. Additionally, we demonstrate that tACS modulates target detection performance in a phase-dependent fashion highlighting the causal role of alpha oscillations for visual perception.
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ISSN:1879-0445
1879-0445
DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2013.12.041