A perfusion-based event-related functional MRI method for the study of brain activation is presented. In this method, cerebral blood flow (CBF) was measured using a recently developed multislice arterial spin-labeling (ASL) perfusion imaging method with rapid spiral scanning. Temporal resolution of the perfusion measurement was substantially improved by employing intertrial subtraction and stim...

This report describes the brain responses to acupuncture in an upper limb amputee patient. A 62-year-old male had previously undergone a lower left arm amputation following an electrical accident. Using functional MRI, we investigated brain responses to acupuncture stimulation in the aforementioned amputee under three conditions: (a) intact hand, (b) prosthetic hand (used by the patient), and (...

Residual acoustic hearing can be preserved in the same ear following cochlear implantation with minimally traumatic surgical techniques and short-electrode arrays. The combined electric-acoustic stimulation significantly improves cochlear implant performance, particularly speech recognition in noise. The present study measures simultaneous masking by electric pulses on acoustic pure tones, or v...

Humans and animals are constantly exposed to a continuous stream of sensory information from different modalities. At the same time, they form more compressed representations like concepts or symbols. In species that use language, this process is further structured by this interaction, where a mapping between the sensorimotor concepts and linguistic elements needs to be established. There is ev...

Seeing or imagining others in pain may activate both the sensory and affective components of the neural network (pain matrix) that is activated during the personal experience of pain. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), proved adept at highlighting the sensorimotor side of empathy for pain in studies where mere observation of needles penetrating body parts of a human model brought about a ...

This study was designed to examine the effect of emotion on the nociceptive flexion reflex and pain ratings. To do so, 28 participants viewed pictures varying in emotional valence (unpleasant, neutral, pleasant) and electric stimulations were delivered during and in between pictures. Biceps femoris EMG resulting from the stimulations was used to quantify the nociceptive flexion reflex (spinal n...

Recent studies in humans and monkeys have reported that acoustic stimulation influences visual responses in the primary visual cortex (V1). Such influences can be generated in V1, either by direct auditory projections or by feedback projections from extrastriate cortices. To test these hypotheses, cortical activities were recorded using optical imaging at a high spatiotemporal resolution from m...