Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is an important technique in modern cognitive neuropsychology that is used to investigate the perceptual and behavioral effects of temporary interference of neural processing. Studies have shown that when a subject’s visual cortex is disrupted by TMS, the subject views colorless flashes of light, or phosphenes. When a subjects’ vision was subjected to the constant stimulus of a single color, neural adaptations occurred that made the subjects used to the color. Once this adaptation had occurred, TMS was used to disrupt the subjects’ visual cortex again, and the flashes of light viewed by the subject were the same color as the constant stimulus before the disruption.
Read more about this topic: Neural Adaptation
Famous quotes containing the words magnetic and/or stimulation:
“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)