The life project

This conference paper is available to download from the publisher’s website at the link below.The Life Project explores issues of psychological projection into technology by diving into the convoluted relationship between practical purpose and emotional attachment, through both the creative act of designing and making robot entities with artificial emotions, and the social act of engaging with them. This process explores the concept of body representation through a multiidentity in virtual and physical blended space. In a lesser sense, it also suggests a future world of collaboration between physical and virtual forms, enabled by new forms of representation in blended worlds

Preconditioning of low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation with transcranial direct current stimulation: evidence for homeostatic plasticity in the human motor cortex

Recent experimental work in animals has emphasized the importance of homeostatic plasticity as a means of stabilizing the properties of neuronal circuits. Here, we report a phenomenon that indicates a homeostatic pattern of cortical plasticity in healthy human subjects. The experiments combined two techniques that can produce long-term effects on the excitability of corticospinal output neurons: transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) of the left primary motor cortex. "Facilitatory preconditioning" with anodal TDCS caused a subsequent period of 1 Hz rTMS to reduce corticospinal excitability to below baseline levels for >20 min. Conversely, "inhibitory preconditioning" with cathodal TDCS resulted in 1 Hz rTMS increasing corticospinal excitability for at least 20 min. No changes in excitability occurred when 1 Hz rTMS was preceded by sham TDCS. Thus, changing the initial state of the motor cortex by a period of DC polarization reversed the conditioning effects of 1 Hz rTMS. These preconditioning effects of TDCS suggest the existence of a homeostatic mechanism in the human motor cortex that stabilizes corticospinal excitability within a physiologically useful range

Proprioception in motor learning: : lessons from a deafferented subject

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: N. Yousif, J. Cole, J. Rothwell, and J. Diedrichsen, ‘Proprioception in motor learning: lessons from a deafferented subject’, Experimental Brain Research, Vol. 233 (8): 2449-2459, August 2015. The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4315-8.Proprioceptive information arises from a variety of channels, including muscle, tendon, and skin afferents. It tells us where our static limbs are in space and how they are moving. It remains unclear however, how these proprioceptive modes contribute to motor learning. Here, we studied a subject (IW) who has lost large myelinated fibres below the neck and found that he was strongly impaired in sensing the static position of his upper limbs, when passively moved to an unseen location. When making reaching movements however, his ability to discriminate in which direction the trajectory had been diverted was unimpaired. This dissociation allowed us to test the involvement of static and dynamic proprioception in motor learning. We found that IW showed a preserved ability to adapt to force fields when visual feedback was present. He was even sensitive to the exact form of the force perturbation, responding appropriately to a velocity- or position-dependent force after a single perturbation. The ability to adapt to force fields was also preserved when visual feedback about the lateral perturbation of the hand was withdrawn. In this experiment, however, he did not exhibit a form of use-dependent learning, which was evident in the control participants as a drift of the intended direction of the reaching movement in the perturbed direction. This suggests that this form of learning may depend on static position sense at the end of the movement. Our results indicate that dynamic and static proprioception play dissociable roles in motor learning.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Proprioception in motor learning: : lessons from a deafferented subject

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: N. Yousif, J. Cole, J. Rothwell, and J. Diedrichsen, ‘Proprioception in motor learning: lessons from a deafferented subject’, Experimental Brain Research, Vol. 233 (8): 2449-2459, August 2015. The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4315-8.Proprioceptive information arises from a variety of channels, including muscle, tendon, and skin afferents. It tells us where our static limbs are in space and how they are moving. It remains unclear however, how these proprioceptive modes contribute to motor learning. Here, we studied a subject (IW) who has lost large myelinated fibres below the neck and found that he was strongly impaired in sensing the static position of his upper limbs, when passively moved to an unseen location. When making reaching movements however, his ability to discriminate in which direction the trajectory had been diverted was unimpaired. This dissociation allowed us to test the involvement of static and dynamic proprioception in motor learning. We found that IW showed a preserved ability to adapt to force fields when visual feedback was present. He was even sensitive to the exact form of the force perturbation, responding appropriately to a velocity- or position-dependent force after a single perturbation. The ability to adapt to force fields was also preserved when visual feedback about the lateral perturbation of the hand was withdrawn. In this experiment, however, he did not exhibit a form of use-dependent learning, which was evident in the control participants as a drift of the intended direction of the reaching movement in the perturbed direction. This suggests that this form of learning may depend on static position sense at the end of the movement. Our results indicate that dynamic and static proprioception play dissociable roles in motor learning.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Assessing TMS-induced D and I waves with spinal H-reflexes

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of motor cortex produces a series of descending volleys known as D (direct) and I (indirect) waves. In the present study, we questioned whether spinal H-reflexes can be used to dissect D waves and early and late I waves from TMS. We therefore probed H-reflex facilitation at arrival times of D and I waves at the spinal level and thereby changed TMS parameters that have previously been shown to have selective effects on evoked D and different I waves. We changed TMS intensity and current direction and applied a double-pulse paradigm known as short-interval intracortical inhibition (SICI). Experiments were conducted in flexor carpi radialis (FCR) in the arm and soleus (SOL) in the leg. There were two major findings: 1) in FCR, H-reflex facilitation showed characteristic modulations with altered TMS parameters that correspond to the changes of evoked D and I waves; and 2) H-reflexes in SOL did not, possibly because of increased interference from other spinal circuits. Therefore, the most significant outcome of this study is that in FCR, H-reflexes combined with TMS seem to be a useful technique to dissect TMS-induced D and I waves. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Questions that relate to corticospinal function in pathophysiology and movement control demand sophisticated techniques to provide information about corticospinal mechanisms. We introduce a noninvasive electrophysiological technique that may be useful in describing such mechanisms in more detail by dissecting D and I waves from transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Based on the combination of spinal H-reflexes and TMS in the flexor carpi radialis muscle, the technique was shown to measure selective effects on D and I waves from changing TMS parameters

On the Use of TMS to Investigate the Pathophysiology of Neurodegenerative Diseases

Neurodegenerative diseases are a collection of disorders that result in the progressive degeneration and death of neurons. They are clinically heterogenous and can present as deficits in movement, cognition, executive function, memory, visuospatial awareness and language. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation tool that allows for the assessment of cortical function in vivo. We review how TMS has been used for the investigation of three neurodegenerative diseases that differ in their neuroanatomical axes: (1) Motor cortex—corticospinal tract (motor neuron diseases), (2) Non-motor cortical areas (dementias), and (3) Subcortical structures (parkinsonisms). We also make four recommendations that we hope will benefit the use of TMS in neurodegenerative diseases. Firstly, TMS has traditionally been limited by the lack of an objective output and so has been confined to stimulation of the motor cortex; this limitation can be overcome by the use of concurrent neuroimaging methods such as EEG. Given that neurodegenerative diseases progress over time, TMS measures should aim to track longitudinal changes, especially when the aim of the study is to look at disease progression and symptomatology. The lack of gold-standard diagnostic confirmation undermines the validity of findings in clinical populations. Consequently, diagnostic certainty should be maximized through a variety of methods including multiple, independent clinical assessments, imaging and fluids biomarkers, and post-mortem pathological confirmation where possible. There is great interest in understanding the mechanisms by which symptoms arise in neurodegenerative disorders. However, TMS assessments in patients are usually carried out during resting conditions, when the brain network engaged during these symptoms is not expressed. Rather, a context-appropriate form of TMS would be more suitable in probing the physiology driving clinical symptoms. In all, we hope that the recommendations made here will help to further understand the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative diseases

Participatory Data Collection Technique for Capturing Beginning Farmer Program Outcomes

This article describes an innovative evaluation plan we employed to capture outcomes of a multiyear beginning farmer program and, specifically, highlights the facilitation technique we used to document short-term and intermediate goals of the program that matched U.S. Department of Agriculture grant requirements and Extension administration priorities. Developing a comprehensive, two-phase evaluation plan based on a well-conceived logic model was a key factor in the success of the New FARM program. Our midterm and end-of-program evaluations addressed often sought, but sometimes difficult to obtain, intermediate goals from the logic model and demonstrated program effectiveness to a variety of funders

Comparison between surface electrodes and ultrasound monitoring to measure TMS evoked muscle contraction

INTRODUCTION: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is widely employed to explore cortical physiology in health and disease. Surface electromyography (sEMG) is appropriate for superficial muscles, but cannot be applied easily to less accessible muscles. Muscle ultrasound (mUS) may provide an elegant solution to this problem, but fundamental questions remain. We explore the relationship between TMS evoked muscle potentials and TMS evoked muscle contractions measured with mUS. METHODS: In 10 participants we performed a TMS recruitment curve, simultaneously measuring motor evoked potentials (MEPs) and mUS in biceps (BI), first dorsal interosseous (FDI), tibialis anterior (TA) and the tongue (TO). RESULTS: Resting motor threshold (RMT) measurements and recruitment curves were found to be consistent across sEMG and mUS. DISCUSSION: This work supports the use of TMS-US to study less accessible muscles. The implications are broad but could include the study of a new range of muscles in disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis