Chest wall muscle recruitment varies as a function of the breathing task performed. However, the cortical control of the chest wall muscles during different breathing tasks is not known. We studied chest wall intermuscular coherence during various task-related lung volume excursions in 10 healthy adults (34 ± 15 yr; 2 men, 8 women) and determined if transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS...

Balance of cortical excitation and inhibition (EI) is thought to be disrupted in several neuropsychiatric conditions, yet it is not clear how it is maintained in the healthy human brain. When EI balance is disturbed during learning and memory in animal models, it can be restabilized via formation of inhibitory replicas of newly formed excitatory connections. Here we assess evidence for such sel...

A new study using transcranial direct current stimulation shows that modulating parietal cortex activity during the learning of abstract numerical material can enhance numerical competency for up to six months.

One hypothesis concerning the neural underpinnings of auditory streaming states that frequency tuning of tonotopically organized neurons in primary auditory fields in combination with physiological forward suppression is necessary for the separation of representations of high-frequency A and low-frequency B tones. The extent of spatial overlap between the tonotopic activations of A and B tones ...

introduction: working memory plays a critical role in cognitive processes which are central to our daily life. neuroimaging studies have shown that one of the most important areas corresponding to the working memory is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlfpc). this study was aimed to assess whether bilateral modulation of the dlpfc using a noninvasive brain stimulation, namely transcranial di...

The epidemics of obesity and diabetes most apparent in recent years had their origins with Thomas Edison's development of distributed electricity in New York City in 1882. His original direct current (DC) generators suffered serious commutator brush arcing which is a major source of high-frequency voltage transients (dirty electricity). From the onset of the electrical grid, electrified populat...

The effects of transcranial direct current stimulation on global/local attentional switching and feature processing were assessed. Direct current stimulation was applied to the left posterior parietal cortex in 14 healthy participants. A compound letter task was used to probe the feature processing and the switching of attention between global and local features. Results indicate that cathodal ...

BACKGROUND Previous research on hemispatial neglect has provided evidence for dissociable mechanisms for egocentric and allocentric processing. Although a few studies have examined whether tDCS to posterior parietal cortex can be beneficial for attentional processing in neurologically intact individuals, none have examined the potential effect of tDCS on allocentric and/or egocentric processing...

Insulator-based dielectrophoresis (iDEP) was utilized to separate and concentrate selectively mixtures of two species of live bacteria simultaneously. Four species of bacteria were studied: the Gram-negative Escherichia coli and the Gram-positive Bacillus subtilis, B. cereus, and B. megaterium. Under an applied direct current (DC) electric field all the bacterial species exhibited negative diel...