James Brissenden: perturbing the human cerebellum скачать в хорошем качестве

James Brissenden: perturbing the human cerebellum

The cerebellum is increasingly recognized as a major node in large-scale brain networks that extend well beyond motor control, with functional connectivity and task-based mapping revealing cerebellar territories aligned with association networks across cortex. Yet much of what we know about cerebello-cortical organization in humans, across both cognitive and motor domains, is based largely on correlational inference, leaving open a central question: how does cerebellar activity causally influence cortical physiology and behavior? In this talk, I will present two studies in different behavioral domains that use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to perturb the cerebellum and quantify downstream consequences in the cerebral cortex. In the first, transiently altering cerebellar state with intermittent theta-burst stimulation reduced plasticity in a parietal–motor pathway, as measured by changes in motor-evoked potentials following paired associative stimulation, consistent with cerebellar modulation of cortical plasticity via heterosynaptic metaplasticity. In the second, continuous theta-burst stimulation to the cerebellum disrupted spatial working-memory representations during fMRI, producing distributed reductions in the precision of cortical encoding across visual and frontoparietal regions. Together, these findings show that cerebellar perturbation can directly shape cortical plasticity and cognitive representations, linking cerebellar network organization to causal mechanisms. James Brissenden is a Research Scientist in the Cognition, Control, and Action Lab (Department of Psychology) and the Brain and Behavior Lab (School of Kinesiology) at the University of Michigan. He received his PhD in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Boston University under the supervision of David Somers. His research integrates functional MRI, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and computational modeling to understand the neural mechanisms of visual cognition, with a particular focus on cerebellar contributions to attention and working memory. His work uses causal perturbation approaches to test how cerebellar activity shapes cortical physiology, neural representations, and behavior.