It sounds perhaps bizarre and not very subtle, but it works. A strong magnetic field
can be focused through a stimulation coil that is placed on the outside of the skull,
inducing small electric currents inside of the brain that perturb and modulate brain
activity. This technique, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), has been available
to researchers for about 20 years. Over that period applications of the technique
and the number of TMS publications have increased exponentially, turning a niche area
of brain research into one that produced more than 1300 papers in 2007. Soon transcranial
stimulation may be as widespread as electroencephalography (EEG) or functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI), and the recently published Oxford Handbook of Transcranial
Stimulation could be the last attempt to unite all aspects of the approach into a
single volume.
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© 2008 Published by Elsevier Inc.
