Impaired motor and sensory function is common in the upper limb in humans after cerebrovascular stroke and it often remains as a permanent disability. Functional electrical stimulation therapy is known to enhance the motor function of the paretic hand; however, the mechanism of this enhancement is not known. We studied whether neural plasticity has a role in this therapy-induced enhancement of ...

Specific physical or mental practice may induce short- and long-term neuroplastic changes in the motor system and cause tools to become part of one's own body representation. Athletes who use tools as part of their practice may be an excellent model for assessing the neural correlates of possible bodily representation changes that are specific to extensive practice. We used single-pulse transcr...

A relation between corticospinal excitability and background voluntary muscular activity was investigated at low and high transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) intensities while grasping a stationary object with different widths (2 and 8 cm) using a precision grip. The muscle activity was recorded from the ®rst dorsal interosseous muscle. Regression analysis revealed that there was a linear r...

We used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to clarify how non-verbal emotionally-characterized sounds modulate the excitability of the corticospinal motor tract (CST). While subjects were listening to sounds (monaurally and binaurally), single TMS pulses were delivered to either left or right primary motor cortex (M1), and electromyographic activities were recorded from the contralateral a...

Transection of the rubrospinal tract in rats, performed before lesion of the red nucleus, resulted in the facilitated recovery of motor activity and operantly conditioned reflexes. Such facilitation was absent when the red nucleus is lesioned alone. This phenomenon is explained by the switching of descending influences on the corticospinal tract through the participation of the following system...

In the human upper limb a proportion of the descending corticospinal command may be relayed through cervical propriospinal premotoneurons. This may serve to co-ordinate movements involving multiple joints of the arm, such as reaching. The present study was conducted to determine if a shoulder stabilising muscle, infraspinatus (INF), is functionally integrated into the putative cervical proprios...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies have shown that the observation of an action causes subliminal activation within the motor system. However, the issue of whether such an effect is modulated by the match between the observed action and that the observer would have exhibited if acting under similar circumstances remains unclear. We address this issue by recording motor potentials e...

The aim of this study was to identify a neurophysiological marker of upper motoneuron involvement in patients with sporadic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). For this purpose we evaluated the after-effects of transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) on excitability of the motor cortex of eight ALS patients and eight healthy controls. Healthy controls showed a transient polarity-specifi...

19 Unloading of the baroreceptors due to orthostatic stress increases corticospinal excitability. The 20 purpose of this study was to examine the effects of baroreceptor unloading due to orthostatic 21 stress on intracortical excitatory and inhibitory pathways in the motor cortex. Using transcranial 22 magnetic stimulation, measures of intracortical excitability for a hand muscle were tested on...