Creativity has been conceptualized as involving two distinct components; divergent thinking, the search for multiple solutions to a single problem, and convergent thinking, the quest for a single solution either through an analytical process or the experience of insight. Studies have demonstrated that these abilities can be improved by cognitive stimulation, mood, and meditation. Here, we inves...

While both insight and divergent thinking tasks are used to study creativity, there are reasons to believe that the two may call upon very different mechanisms. To explore this hypothesis, we administered a verbal insight task (riddles) and a divergent thinking task (verbal fluency) to 16 native English speakers and 16 non-native English speakers after they underwent Transcranial Direct Current...

The existence of a network of brain regions which are activated when one undertakes a difficult visual search task is well established. Two primary nodes on this network are right posterior parietal cortex (rPPC) and right frontal eye fields. Both have been shown to be involved in the orientation of attention, but the contingency that the activity of one of these areas has on the other is less ...

Introduction: Anodal and cathodal transcranial direct current stimulations (tDCS) have been shown to have facilitatory and inhibitory effects, respectively, on the stimulated cortical networks. Given sufficient stimulation duration the effect of stimulation can outlast the duration of the stimulation for several hours [1]. Combining functional MRI (fMRI) with concurrent tDCS allows for a non-in...

In societies with left-to-right reading direction, left-side vs. right-side behavioral decisions are faster for relatively small vs. large number magnitudes, and vice versa, a phenomenon termed Spatial-Numerical Associations of Response Codes (SNARC) effect. But also for non-numerical sequential items, SNARC-like effects were observed, suggesting a common neurocognitive mechanism based on the o...

Objectives: Parkinson’s disease (PD) has been associated with impaired motor sequence learning (also known as procedural learning). In the current study, we determined the potential of anodal transcranial direct current stimulation delivered over the primary motor cortex to promote the acquisition of sequential movement in a large sample of patients with idiopathic PD and matched controls. Meth...

Working memory impairments in schizophrenia have been strongly associated with abnormalities in gamma oscillations within the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLFPC). We recently published the first ever study showing that anodal transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) to the left DLPFC was able to significantly improve working memory performance in schizophrenia. In the current paper we ...

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is an “old/new” noninvasive brain modulation technique that has gained increasing popularity and relevance in psychology and neuroscience. The contemporary tDCS procedure is effective and painless. It was shown to modulate motor performance and several sensory and cognitive functions. It can be used to study cortical organization and clarify brain-...

Multisensory interactions can produce analgesic effects. In particular, viewing one's own body reduces pain levels, perhaps because of changes in connectivity between visual areas specialized for body representation, and sensory areas underlying pain perception. We tested the causal role of the extrastriate visual cortex in triggering visually induced analgesia by modulating the excitability of...

Neuromodulation techniques such as tDCS have provided important insight into the neurophysiological mechanisms that mediate cognition. Albeit anodal tDCS (a-tDCS) often enhances cognitive skills, the role of cathodal tDCS (c-tDCS) in visual cognition is largely unexplored and inconclusive. Here, in a single-blind, sham-controlled study, we investigated the offline effects of 1.5 mA c-tDCS over ...