Patterned Brain Stimulation, What a Framework with Rhythmic and Noisy Components Might Tell Us about Recovery Maximization

Sein Schmidt, Michael Scholz, Klaus Obermayer, Stephan A. Brandt

Brain stimulation is having remarkable impact on clinical neurology. Brain stimulation can modulate neuronal activity in functionally segregated circumscribed regions of the human brain. Polarity, frequency, and noise specific stimulation can induce specific manipulations on neural activity. In contrast to neocortical stimulation, deep-brain stimulation has become a tool that can dramatically improve the impact clinicians can possibly have on movement disorders. In contrast, neocortical brain stimulation is proving to be remarkably susceptible to intrinsic brain-states. Although evidence is accumulating that brain stimulation can facilitate recovery processes in patients with cerebral stroke, the high variability of results impedes successful clinical implementation. Interestingly, recent data in healthy subjects suggests that brain-state dependent patterned stimulation might help resolve some of the intrinsic variability found in previous studies. In parallel, other studies suggest that noisy "stochastic resonance" (SR)-like processes are a non-negligible component in non-invasive brain stimulation studies. The hypothesis developed in this manuscript is that stimulation patterning with noisy and oscillatory components will help patients recover from stroke related deficits more reliably. To address this hypothesis we focus on two factors common to both neural computation (intrinsic variables) as well as brain stimulation (extrinsic variables): noise and oscillation. We review diverse theoretical and experimental evidence that demonstrates that subject-function specific brain-states are associated with specific oscillatory activity patterns. These states are transient and can be maintained by noisy processes. The resulting control procedures can resemble homeostatic or SR processes. In this context we try to extend awareness for inter-individual differences and the use of individualized stimulation in the recovery maximization of stroke patients.