FAQ

What is TMS?

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) is by now a well-established tool for inducing transient changes in brain activity non-invasively in conscious human volunteers. An increasing amount of studies have used the behavior-modulating capacity of TMS to reveal causal brain-behavior relationships, investigating an ever increasing range of different behavioral, cognitive, and affective functions. Recently, TMS has also been applied as a therapeutic tool for treating a variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders including, e.g., depression, neglect, stroke, or schizophrenia. All these studies clearly demonstrate the potential of TMS to serve as a unique research tool for the investigation of a broad variety of issues in cognitive neuroscience. Different experimental TMS protocols can be designed to address questions concerning the location, timing, lateralization, functional relevance or plasticity of the neuronal correlates of information processing. The hypotheses underlying these different experimental TMS protocols can be based on respective results of functional imaging studies, neuropsychology, or animal models, investigating the same paradigms and neuronal pathways from methodologically different perspectives. The increasing use of TMS in Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychiatry requires a precise positioning of the TMS coil above a specific anatomically or functionally defined brain region, individually for every participant or patient. Only such an individual imaging-guided Neuronavigation of the TMS coil is capable of achieving the precision in positioning the TMS coil, necessary for successful and reliable TMS experiments and clinical treatments.

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