TY - JOUR
T1 - Multimodal acoustic-electric trigeminal nerve stimulation modulates conscious perception
AU - Wu, Min
AU - Auksztulewicz, Ryszard
AU - Riecke, Lars
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank S. Kuang for the assistance in data collection. We thank Y.X. Feng for creating the head models in Fig. 1 . This work was supported by China Scholarship Council ( CSC 201906320078 to M.W.).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023
PY - 2024/1/1
Y1 - 2024/1/1
N2 - Multimodal stimulation can reverse pathological neural activity and improve symptoms in neuropsychiatric diseases. Recent research shows that multimodal acoustic-electric trigeminal-nerve stimulation (TNS) (i.e., musical stimulation synchronized to electrical stimulation of the trigeminal nerve) can improve consciousness in patients with disorders of consciousness. However, the reliability and mechanism of this novel approach remain largely unknown. We explored the effects of multimodal acoustic-electric TNS in healthy human participants by assessing conscious perception before and after stimulation using behavioral and neural measures in tactile and auditory target-detection tasks. To explore the mechanisms underlying the putative effects of acoustic-electric stimulation, we fitted a biologically plausible neural network model to the neural data using dynamic causal modeling. We observed that (1) acoustic-electric stimulation improves conscious tactile perception without a concomitant change in auditory perception, (2) this improvement is caused by the interplay of the acoustic and electric stimulation rather than any of the unimodal stimulation alone, and (3) the effect of acoustic-electric stimulation on conscious perception correlates with inter-regional connection changes in a recurrent neural processing model. These results provide evidence that acoustic-electric TNS can promote conscious perception. Alterations in inter-regional cortical connections might be the mechanism by which acoustic-electric TNS achieves its consciousness benefits.
AB - Multimodal stimulation can reverse pathological neural activity and improve symptoms in neuropsychiatric diseases. Recent research shows that multimodal acoustic-electric trigeminal-nerve stimulation (TNS) (i.e., musical stimulation synchronized to electrical stimulation of the trigeminal nerve) can improve consciousness in patients with disorders of consciousness. However, the reliability and mechanism of this novel approach remain largely unknown. We explored the effects of multimodal acoustic-electric TNS in healthy human participants by assessing conscious perception before and after stimulation using behavioral and neural measures in tactile and auditory target-detection tasks. To explore the mechanisms underlying the putative effects of acoustic-electric stimulation, we fitted a biologically plausible neural network model to the neural data using dynamic causal modeling. We observed that (1) acoustic-electric stimulation improves conscious tactile perception without a concomitant change in auditory perception, (2) this improvement is caused by the interplay of the acoustic and electric stimulation rather than any of the unimodal stimulation alone, and (3) the effect of acoustic-electric stimulation on conscious perception correlates with inter-regional connection changes in a recurrent neural processing model. These results provide evidence that acoustic-electric TNS can promote conscious perception. Alterations in inter-regional cortical connections might be the mechanism by which acoustic-electric TNS achieves its consciousness benefits.
KW - Conscious perception
KW - Dynamic-causal modeling
KW - Multimodal stimulation
KW - Trigeminal-nerve stimulation
U2 - 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.120476
DO - 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.120476
M3 - Article
SN - 1053-8119
VL - 285
JO - Neuroimage
JF - Neuroimage
M1 - 120476
ER -