News
Brain-altering magnetic pulses could zap cocaine addiction
At first, researchers used TMS to study how the motor cortex controls muscles and later to examine how the visual cortex works in blind people. In the 1990s, researchers began to experiment with using repetitive TMS (rTMS), which delivers sustained, closely spaced pulses, to treat several diseases. They had learned that low-frequency stimulation, at one pulse per second (1 hertz), made neurons less excitable, whereas high-frequency pulses, at 5 to 20 hertz, made the cells more prone to fire. Depressed people, they found, responded to high-frequency rTMS, presumably because it boosted the activity of sluggish neurons. By contrast, low-frequency TMS seemed to tamp down the auditory hallucinations that can plague schizophrenics.
Source: AAAS