Occipital Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Has an Activity-Dependent Suppressive Effect

The effects of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) vary depending on the brain state at the stimulation moment. Four mechanisms have been proposed to underlie these effects: (1) virtual lesion-TMS suppresses neural signals; (2) preferential activation of less active neurons-TMS drives up activity in the stimulated area, but active neurons are saturating; (3) noise generation-TMS adds random neuronal activity, and its effect interacts with stimulus intensity; and (4) noise generation-TMS adds random neuronal activity, and its effect depends on TMS intensity. Here we explore these hypotheses by investigating the effects of TMS on early visual cortex by assessing the contrast response function while varying the adaptation state of the observers. We tested human participants in an orientation discrimination task, in which performance is contingent upon contrast sensitivity. Before each trial, neuronal activation of visual cortex was altered through contrast adaptation to two flickering gratings. In a factorial design, with or without adaptation, a single TMS pulse was delivered simultaneously with targets of varying contrast. Adaptation decreased contrast sensitivity. The effect of TMS on performance was state dependent: TMS decreased contrast sensitivity in the absence of adaptation but increased it after adaptation. None of the proposed mechanisms can account for the results in their entirety, in particular, for the facilitatory effect at intermediate to high contrasts after adaptation. We propose an alternative hypothesis: TMS effects are activity dependent, so that TMS suppresses the most active neurons and thereby changes the balance between excitation and inhibition.