Nick Holmes

And we find quite a few of these foot+hand responses in an ongoing study :-)1

Yes, they like it a lot :-) i have a few go-to demos that work in most people - today's foot example is a new one for the ⚡️🧠 toolbox!

Transcranial magnetic stimulation over supramarginal gyrus stimulates primary motor cortex directly and impairs manual dexterity: implications for TMS focality | Journal of Neurophysiology | American Physiological Society Based on human motor cortex, the effective spatial resolution of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is often described as 5–20 mm, because small changes in TMS coil position can have large effects on motor-evoked potentials (MEPs). MEPs are often studied at rest, with muscles relaxed. During muscle contraction and movement, corticospinal excitability is higher, thresholds for effective stimulation are lower, and MEPs can be evoked from larger regions of scalp, so the effective spatial resolution of TMS is larger. We found that TMS over the supramarginal gyrus (SMG) impaired manual dexterity in the grooved pegboard task. It also resulted in short-latency MEPs in hand muscles, despite the coil being 55 mm away from the motor cortex hand area (M1). MEPs might be evoked by either a specific corticospinal connection from SMG or a remote but direct electromagnetic stimulation of M1. To distinguish these alternatives, we mapped MEPs across the scalp during rest, isotonic contraction, and manual dexterity tasks and ran electric field simulations to model the expected M1 activation from 27 scalp locations and four coil orientations. We also systematically reviewed studies using TMS during movement. Across five experiments, TMS over SMG reliably evoked MEPs during hand movement. These MEPs were consistent with direct M1 stimulation and substantially decreased corticospinal thresholds during natural movement. Systematic review suggested that 54 published experiments may have suffered from similar motor activation confounds. Our results have implications for the assumed spatial resolution of TMS, and especially when TMS is presented within 55 mm of the motor cortex. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is often described as having an effective spatial resolution of ∼10 mm, because of the limited area of the scalp on which TMS produces motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) in resting muscles. We find that during natural hand movement TMS evokes MEPs from a much larger scalp area, in particular when stimulating over the supramarginal gyrus 55 mm away. Our results show that TMS can be effective at much larger distances than generally assumed.

This sort of thing is reliable enough for a teaching demonstration today; not a one-off! See:

doi.org/10.1152/jn.0...

(Lol 👇 that's not our study in the image!)

The HandLab announces an Exclusive New Episode (#2) of

#TMSIsNotFocal

Foot *and* hand responses from 2cm behind the vertex (~7cm away from hand area)

Blue: thumb muscle
Green: big toe muscle

TMS: Magstim 200^2, 10cm outer diameter figure 8 coil, 2cm behind vertex, 65% MSO

#BrainStim #Methods

Needless to say, both 1) deadline and 4) reviews are in the middle of the busiest teaching terms.

But judging by Michael's wikipedia page, he was not a great father 🤷‍♂️

Quick google says thankfully no, father = Matthew.

Yes. I just took it out for first time this year - will seek lamination!!!

Very apt. Especially as Monopoly was based on a gsme designed as a parody of capitalism. I can't help feeling that the most successful labs will win the grants...

A university education "The characteristic gift of the university is the gift of an interval. Here is an opportunity for you to put aside the hot allegiances of youth without the necessity of at once acquiring new loyalties to take their place. Here is a break in the tyrannical course of irreperable events; a period in which to look around upon the world and upon oneself without the sense of an enemy at one's back or the insistent pressure to make up one's mind; a moment in which to taste the mystery without the necessity of seeking a solution. And all this, not in an intellectual vacuum, but surrounded by all the inherited learnings and literature and experience of our civilisation." Michael Oakeshott, quoted in The Observer

💯. I've carried this scrap of paper in my wallet for more than five years; occasionally i read out bits in tutorials:

Astonishingly honest.

Paper and pencil exams and in-person vivas are coming back, folks!

Grant applications 101:

1. Call announced, 2 month deadline. Go!
2. Spend 40 full days developing a 15k word application
3. Wait 3 months
4. Reviews arrive: "It's OK, but we have many, many questions"
5. Spend 7 full days writing 1.5k words of terse replies
6. Wait 3 months
7. ...

#NeuroSkyence 🧪

YouTube video by Jonathan Pie A Royal Reckoning

Reading between the lines of this news report, it's not a good week for the UK Royal Family

youtu.be/yiOvAgw4hwE?...

📣 PsychoPy Studio is out now!!

✨ Which also means swish new branding on psychopy.org ✨

We really hope that this improves user experience in general.

Please download and try it. Let us know how you get on via the forum discourse.psychopy.org/t/introducin...

Hannah and Zack having a selfie

Final weekend. One last push.

This is about whether you want local plumber Hannah Spencer or the extreme Reform candidate.

It's hope vs hate.

It's Greens vs Reform.

Hope can win.

I've used Chris Dancer's kit a lot. He provides some very nice solenoid and piezo components, and can build piezo and other stimulator control if you need it (and have money)

dancerdesign.co.uk

hth

My last preprint on tDCS:
Neither conventional nor HD tDCS boost motor sequence learning in healthy older individuals:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Sorry, error in skeet #2: Chipchase et al. (2012) has not been used *by* 681 studies, but *to assess* 681 studies 🙏

Many thanks to all the authors and 33 other contributors over the past year 🙏 #BrainStim

@solyas.bsky.social @valedichiaro.bsky.social @cassandralowe.bsky.social @pchs0114.bsky.social @phivph.com @fribreuer.bsky.social @neuro-engineer.bsky.social @maggieszymanska.bsky.social @luigitame.bsky.social

The initial development work was pre-registered:
osf.io/tywn8?view_o...

All code, materials & data are freely available:
osf.io/fpu3k/

Our website allows you to explore the tools, & will host interactive data visualisation, uploads & downloads as the project develops.

Questions..? 🙏

tms-rat.org

We present 2 versions of TMS-RAT:

Version 1.0 provides *recommendations* for TMS reporting. There are 80 items (72 fully tested), but some did not reach high inter-rater reliability. v1.0 is for further development.

Version 1.1 is fully-tested & all 50 items have high inter-rater reliability ⚡🐀.

Development of the TMS-RAT went through 4 iterations; each Version (v0.1, v0.2, v0.3, v1.0) was modified based on inter-rater reliability, usability & free-text feedback from raters & 12 international TMS experts.

This development has - & I can't stress this enough - a LOT of work over 18 months.

From 32 systematic reviews rating a total of 681 original research articles, the proportions of Items reported (according to the Chipchase et al. 2012 checklist) ranges from very low (~0.11%) to very high (0.92). This graph shows all 30 Checklist items, with the proportion reported (red) and controlled (blue) with bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals for each item. Reporting levels are - on average - pretty low (~50% of items). While this has increased over time, publication of the previous checklist did not appear to make much impact (graphs and stats in the preprint).

We started with the foundational paper in this field: Chipchase et al. 2012

Their 30-item checklist has been used by at least 681 studies (graph 👇)

We took all those items, combined them with ~50 others, then tested how 17 independent raters used them on 333 #TMS papers 📝

doi.org/10.1016/j.cl...

⚡ #TMS #Preprint ⚡🐀 🧪 🧠 🧵

Brain stimulation methods are complex; reproducibility depends on knowing what was done.

@solyas.bsky.social's paper reports work with myself & 15 other @tmsmultilab.bsky.social members to develop a modular, flexible reporting tool: the TMS-RAT

doi.org/10.64898/202...

haha, you beat me to it :-) just about to write it...

I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point.

I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion

People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it

EPS 80th Anniversary Symposium – Call for Proposals To mark the 80th anniversary of the Experimental Psychology Society, we invite proposals for a special anniversary symposium that reflects on the current state of experimental psychology and its fu…

To mark the 80th anniversary of the Experimental Psychology Society, we invite proposals for a special anniversary symposium reflecting on the current state of experimental psychology and its future trajectory.

Please see below for information on how to submit a proposal!

eps.ac.uk/eps-80th-ann...

"We are seeing readily available data assets, such as... the UK Biobank, NHANES, and many other databases, being weaponized to generate manuscripts with minimal scholarly value and utility"

I'm sure they'll love that.

posting unrelated story here👇
www.newsweek.com/college-ai-s...

I was genuinely shocked, and never felt so old: I have done <5 #LLM queries ever, whereas all 9/12 students present used #LLM all the time, every day, for everything.

When I suggested that LLM results may not be 100% reliable, there was quite a silence in the room...

😱