Influencing Human Behavior with Noninvasive Brain Stimulation: Direct Human Brain Manipulation Revisited

Abstract

The use of tools to perturb brain activity can generate important insights into brain physiology and offer valuable therapeutic approaches for brain disorders. Furthermore, the potential of such tools to enhance normal behavior has become increasingly recognized, and this has led to the development of various noninvasive technologies that provides a broader access to the human brain. While providing a brief survey of brain manipulation procedures used in the past decades, this review aims at stimulating an informed discussion on the use of these new technologies to investigate the human. It highlights the importance to revisit the past use of this unique armamentarium and proceed to a detailed analysis of its present state, especially in regard to human behavioral regulation.

Changes in resting-state functional MRI connectivity during and after transcranial direct current stimulation in healthy adults

“…However, one remaining pitfall in the field is to take for granted the premises that anodal and cathodal tDCS, respectively, facilitates and inhibits cortical excitability, which is mainly based on the direct current stimulation literature, and that such local effects are causally related to the observed behavioral effects. Such premises derived from direct current stimulation to postulate mechanisms of tDCS are oversimplified and have created misleading data interpretations in the field of tDCS in humans ( Jackson et al, 2016 ; Fecteau, 2022 ). Precise mechanisms of tDCS remain largely unknown ( Bestmann and Walsh, 2017 ).…”