Thanks, Bill. Good luck. Keep us posted, although, somehow I believe that we’ll hear about it if you win approval for your experiment.

If you need a writer to cover it, I’m your man.

Richard Dooling

TMS won’t cut it – not because it is shallow, but because its spatial resolution is egregiously bad. At best one can restrict TMS effects to roughly a square cm of brain (as I understand it). The clusters of neurons that carry the discrete motion signals in MT are on the order of 100-200 microns. TMS would simply smear a signal across clusters encoding ALL directions of motion. What I want to know is what one “sees” when a single cluster, encoding a particular direction of motion, is electrically stimulated. This is the central goal – being able to correlate the activity of *physiologically* characterized microcircuits to perceptual experience. Just blasting the brain indiscriminately with large amount of current is of little scientific value to me….

Regards,
Bill Newsome
Stanford University

From what little I could gather from the article, however, it doesn’t sound like he’s planning to go very deep into cortex anyway, for fear of damage to vasculature. Then again, I could just be exaggering what’s between the lines.

It might depend what area he’s after. My neuroscience is rusty, but last time I checked TMS is pretty “shallow.”

I mean, how much is a single electrode or electrode array in IT likely to tell us about consciousness? It would be much more efficient to spend the time (and insurance money) on TMS.