Although brain development has been actively investigated in animals, maturation of the cerebral cortex in human newborns is still poorly understood. This study aimed at characterizing the cortical areas participating in tactile processing in human neonates. Somatosensory-evoked magnetic fields were recorded from 21 healthy full-term newborns during natural sleep. Altogether, four cortical area...

BACKGROUND As magnetoencephalography (MEG) is of increasing utility in the assessment of deficits and development delays in brain disorders in pediatrics, it becomes imperative to fully understand the functional development of the brain in children. METHODOLOGY The present study was designed to characterize the developmental patterns of auditory evoked magnetic responses with respect to age a...

BACKGROUND Insulin is an anorexigenic hormone that contributes to the termination of food intake in the postprandial state. An alteration in insulin action in the brain, named "cerebral insulin resistance", is responsible for overeating and the development of obesity. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS To analyze the direct effect of insulin on food-related neuronal activity we tested 10 lean and...

In our daily life, we are successively exposed to frequency-modulated (FM) sounds that play an important role in speech and species-specific communication. Previous studies demonstrated that repetitive exposure to identical pure tones resulted in decreased neural activity. However, the effects of repetitively presented FM sounds on neural activity in the human auditory cortex remain unclear. In...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) provides a non-invasive means of investigating brain function. Whereas TMS of the human frontal eye fields (FEFs) does not induce saccades, electrical stimulation of the monkey FEF evokes eye-head gaze shifts, with neck muscle responses evoked at stimulation levels insufficient to evoke a saccade. These animal results motivated us to examine whether TMS o...

The M100 wave representing a robust component of cortical Auditory Evoked Magnetic Fields (AEFs) is used to localize neuronal activation in the primary auditory cortex for a long time in neurophysiological research and with increasing importance also in clinical research [1-4]. Changes of location, orientation and strenght of equivalent current dipoles (ECD) are considered being correlated to c...

The topography of somatosensory evoked magnetic fields (SEFs) following stimulation of the upper and lower lips was investigated in 6 normal subjects. When the lateral side of the upper lip was stimulated, P20m and its counterpart, N20m, were identified in the hemisphere contralateral to the stimulated side. The equivalent current dipoles (ECDs) of N20m-P20m were considered to be located in lip...

Although oral sensory feedback is essential for mastication, whether the cortical activity elicited by oral stimulation is associated with the preferred chewing side (PCS) is unclear. Somatosensory evoked fields were measured in 12 healthy volunteers (6 with the right side as the PCS and 6 with the left side as the PCS) following tongue and hard palate stimulation. Three components were identif...

Auditory evoked magnetic fields were recorded from 15 patients with acute cerebral infarction and 11 healthy volunteers using magnetoencephalography. The auditory stimuli of 2 kHz pure tone were binaurally presented with an interstimulus interval of 1 second. The intensity of stimuli was 90 dB and the stimulus duration was 8 ms. The results showed that the M100 was the prominent response, peaki...