Michael A Nitsche

Leibniz Research Center for Working Enviroment and Human Factors | IFADO · Psychology and Neurosciences

Stroke is a central nervous system disease that causes structural lesions and functional impairments of the brain, resulting in varying types, and degrees of dysfunction. The bimodal balance-recovery model (interhemispheric competition model and vicariation model) has been proposed as the mechanism of functional recovery after a stroke. We analyzed...

Intro. Aggressive behavior represents a significant public health issue, with relevant social, political, and security implications. Non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) techniques may modulate aggressive behavior through stimulation of the prefrontal cortex. Aims. Reviewing research on the effectiveness of NIBS to alter aggression, discussing ma...

Objectives: A relevance of fear and concerns about vaccine development and its side effects are suggested to explain COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. However, evidence supporting the phobic origin hypothesis of hesitancy for COVID-19 and other vaccinations remains indirect and elusive. Methods: We addressed this issue by investigating the existence of...

Keywords: Non-Invasive Bran Stimulation, Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and related syndromes.

One of the most visible effects of aging, even in healthy, normal aging, is a decline in motor performance. The range of strategies applicable to counteract this deterioration has increased. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a non-invasive brain stimulation technique that can promote neuroplasticity, has recently gained attention. How...

The present review considers all papers published on the topic up to the end of the year 2022. Transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) is a non-invasive neuromodulation technique introduced about 15 years ago whose use is becoming increasingly widespread in neuroscience. It consists of the application over the scalp of a weak, white noise-like...

Background Evidence indicates beneficial effects of aerobic exercise on motor learning performance, which might be caused by the impact of aerobic exercise on cortical excitability. It is thus suggested that physiological effects of aerobic exercise on cortical excitability determine the effects of aerobic exercise on motor learning. Nevertheless,...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by reduced fast brain oscillations in the gamma band (γ, > 30 Hz). Several animal studies show that inducing gamma oscillations through (multi)sensory stimulation at 40 Hz has the potential to impact AD-related cognitive decline and neuropathological processes, including amyloid plaques deposition, neurofib...

A growing body of research suggests that changes in both structural and functional connectivity in the aging brain contribute to declines in cognitive functions such as response inhibition. In recent years, transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) has garnered substantial research interest as a potential tool for the modulation of functi...

Background Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has emerged as a non-invasive neuro-modulation technique. Most studies show that anodal tDCS increases cortical excitability, however, with variable outcomes. Previously, we have shown in computer simulations that our multi-channel tDCS (mc-tDCS) approach, the distributed constrained maximum...

Background Transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) is a promising method for modulating brain activity and excitability with variable results to date. To minimize E-field strength variability, we introduce the 2-sample prospective E-field dosing (2-SPED) approach, which uses E-field strengths induced by tES in a first population to individualize...

Attention bias is a tendency to preferably detect, orient and select emotionally valued stimuli, as compared to neutral stimuli, and plays a crucial role in the psychopathology of various psychiatric disorders. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been applied for the alteration of attention bias in health and disease with different p...

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the primary motor cortex (M1) is of increasing interest to improve motor performance in healthy adults and patients with respective deficits. This study aimed to examine whether tDCS over M1 can improve static and dynamic postural stability in young healthy adults. Seventeen healthy participants (...

Pareidolia refers to the perception of ambiguous sensory patterns as carrying a specific meaning. In its most common form, pareidolia involves human-like facial features, where random objects or patterns are illusionary recognized as faces. The current study investigated the neurophysiological correlates of face pareidolia via transcranial Alternat...

Objective Although relatively costly and non-scalable, non-invasive neuromodulation interventions are treatment alternatives for neuropsychiatric disorders. The recent developments of highly-deployable transcranial electric stimulation (tES) systems, combined with mobile-Health technologies, could be incorporated in digital trials to overcome metho...

Advances in our knowledge about the neuropsychological mechanisms underlying core deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have produced several novel treatment modalities. One of these approaches is modulation of activity of the brain regions involved in ASD symptoms. This study examined the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tD...

In paragraph 3.5 of their article, the authors provide some information about the nonmotor properties of tongue motor cortex. As a complement to the interesting work of Bono et al. (2022), in this commentary we focus on this aspect by addressing the link of the tongue motor cortex to the reward system, and its relevance for emotion processing, soci...

One of the most critical challenges in using non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) techniques for the treatment of psychiatric and neurologic disorders is inter- and intra-individual variability in response to NIBS. Response variations in previous findings suggest that the one-size-fits-all approach does not seem the most appropriate option for enh...

BACKGROUND As employees age, their physical and mental abilities decline and work ability (WA) decreases, enhancing the risk for long-term sick leave or even premature retirement. However, the relative impact of biological and environmental determinants on WA with increasing age is still poorly understood in their complexity. OBJECTIVE Previous re...

Knowledge about the relevance of the left inferior frontal gyrus (lIFG) and the left posterior superior temporal gyrus (lpSTG) in visual recognition of word categories is limited at present. tDCS is a non‐invasive brain stimulation method that alters cortical activity and excitability, and thus might be a useful tool for delineating the specific im...

Neurophysiological effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) have been extensively studied over the primary motor cortex (M1). Much less is however known about its effects over non-motor areas, such as the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is the neuronal foundation for many high-level cognitive functions and involved in neuropsychiatr...

Sleep strongly affects synaptic strength, making it critical for cognition, especially learning and memory formation. Whether and how sleep deprivation modulates human brain physiology and cognition is not well understood. Here we examined how overnight sleep deprivation vs overnight sufficient sleep affects (a) cortical excitability, measured by t...

Earlier research suggested that after 210 practice trials, the supplementary motor area (SMA) is involved in executing all responses of familiar 6-key sequences in a discrete sequence production (DSP) task (Verwey, Lammens, and van Honk, 2002). This was indicated by slowing of each response 20 and 25 min after the SMA had been stimulated for 20 min...

The perspective-taking in social cognition is an ability that makes third-person judgments about the intentions, beliefs and thoughts of others. We aimed to investigate gender differences in the neural structure differences in (non) emotional perspective-taking ability.Thirty healthy adults (15 females and 15 males) received anodal and sham transcr...

The purpose of this single subject study was to investigate whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) applied to both hemispheres combined with speech therapy can improve language learning in a pair of 5-year-old twins with corpus callosum dysgenesis (CCD). The treatment protocol included anodal tDCS with simultaneous speech therapy in...

Circadian rhythms have received increasing attention within the context of mental disorders. Evening chronotype has been associated with enhanced risk to develop anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The classical fear conditioning paradigm is a powerful tool to reveal key mechanisms of anxiety and PTSD. We used this paradigm to study...

Attempts to enhance human memory and learning ability have a long tradition in science. This topic has recently gained substantial attention because of the increasing percentage of older individuals worldwide and the predicted rise of age-associated cognitive decline in brain functions. Transcranial brain stimulation methods, such as transcranial m...

Background With increasing obese populations worldwide, developing interventions to modulate food-related brain processes and functions is particularly important. Evidence suggests that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) may modulate the reward–control balance towards facilitation of cogni...

Implicit motor learning and memory involve complex cortical and subcortical networks. The induction of plasticity in these network components via non-invasive brain stimulation, including transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), has shown to improve motor learning. However, studies showing these effects are mostly restricted to stimulation o...

Background Stuttering is a disorder that begins in childhood and can persist into adulthood. In the present study, it was hypothesized that the combined intervention of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF) would cause greater improvement in speech fluency in comparison to the intervention with DAF alone...

Phonological awareness (PA) training is a core intervention in dyslexia. Recently, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been probed as a complementary intervention for increasing reading ability in dyslexia, but not for enhancing the efficacy of PA. The aim of the current study was thus to examine whether tDCS combined with a PA inter...

Introduction: Over the last century, a variety of theories have been proposed to explain the etiology of stuttering, but the exact cause and neurological origin of it are still uncertain. The aim of the present study is to investigate the correlation between stuttering severity and ERP measures. Methods: 36 adults were recruited in this study. Thi...

Dopamine is a key neuromodulator of neuroplasticity and an important neuronal substrate of learning, and memory formation, which critically involves glutamatergic N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors. Dopamine modulates NMDA receptor activity via dopamine D1 and D2 receptor subtypes. It is hypothesized that dopamine focuses on long-term potentiati...

Low-intensity transcranial electrical stimulation (tES), including alternating or direct current stimulation, applies weak electrical stimulation to modulate the activity of brain circuits. Integration of tES with concurrent functional MRI (fMRI) allows for the mapping of neural activity during neuromodulation, supporting causal studies of both bra...

Background Neuromodulatory effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in older humans have shown heterogeneous results, possibly due to sub-optimal stimulation protocols associated with limited knowledge about optimized stimulation parameters in this age group. We systematically explored the association between the stimulation dosage...

Background Individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) have deficits in emotion regulation, which plays a putative role in psychopathology. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) are assumed to be involved in respective processes. In the present study, we aimed to explore the effect of stimulation...

Stimulation of the vagus nerve, a parasympathetic nerve that controls the neuro-digestive, vascular, and immune systems, induces pain relief, particularly in clinical conditions such as headache and rheumatoid arthritis. Transmission through vagal afferents towards the nucleus of the solitary tract (NST), the central relay nucleus of the vagus nerv...

Non-invasive direct current stimulation (DCS) of the human brain induces neuronal plasticity and alters plasticity-related cognition and behavior. Numerous basic animal research studies focusing on molecular and cellular targets of DCS have been published. In vivo, ex vivo, and in vitro models enhanced knowledge about mechanistic foundations of DCS...

Objective Performance accuracy and reaction time in cognitive tasks are routinely used to evaluate the efficacy of tDCS to affect cognitive task performance. tDCS alters the excitability of targeted brain areas and thereby alters performance of cognitive tasks. The drift diffusion model (DDM) provides some additional measures to explore information...

Noninvasive brain stimulation techniques (NiBS) have gathered substantial interest in the study of dementia, considered their possible role in help defining diagnostic biomarkers of altered neural activity for early disease detection and monitoring of its pathophysiological course, as well as for their therapeutic potential of boosting residual cog...

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation procedure to modulate cortical excitability and related brain functions. tDCS can effectively alter multiple brain functions in healthy humans and is suggested as a therapeutic tool in several neurological and psychiatric diseases. However, variability of results is...

The original version of chapter 15, page 283, and chapter 35, page 667, had wrongly attributed author affiliation to "University of Sao Paulo, Institute of Psychiatry, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Department of Psychiatry University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, Department of...

Network-level synchronization of theta oscillations in the cerebral cortex is linked to many vital cognitive functions across daily life, such as executive functions or regulation of arousal and consciousness. However, while neuroimaging has uncovered the ubiquitous functional relevance of theta rhythms in cognition, there remains a limited set of...

Combining non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) with resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is a promising approach to characterize and potentially optimize the brain networks subtending cognition that changes as a function of age. However, whether multifocal NIBS approaches are able to modulate rs-fMRI brain dynamics in aged...

BACKGROUND Previous research revealed a number of biological and environmental factors modulating cognitive functioning over a human’s lifespan. However, the relationships and interactions between biological factors, such as genetic polymorphisms, immunological parameters, metabolic products or infectious diseases, and environmental factors, like l...

Background: Previous research revealed several biological and environmental factors modulating cognitive functioning over a human's lifespan. However, the relationships and interactions between biological factors (eg, genetic polymorphisms, immunological parameters, metabolic products, or infectious diseases) and environmental factors (eg, lifesty...

Over the last decades, interest in transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) has grown, as it might allow for causal investigations of the associations between cortical activity and cognition as well as to directly influence cognitive performance. The main objectives of the present work were to assess whether tES can enhance the acquisition and app...

Background and purpose of the study: Individuals with general anxiety disorder (GAD) have deficits in emotional and cognitive processing, including cognitive bias, which plays a causal role in anxiety. Hyperactivity of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is assumed to be involved in cognitive bias....

The accurate recognition of others’ facial expressions is a core skill for social interactions. The left Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (L-DLPFC) represents a key node in the network for facial emotion recognition. However, its specific role is still under debate. As such, the aim of the current neuromodulation study was to assess the causal role o...

The present study aimed to investigate the effect of transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) on the primary motor cortex (M1) during action observation, and subsequent action execution, on motor cortex excitability. The participants received tACS at 10 Hz or 20 Hz, or a sham stimulation over the left M1 for 10 min while they observed a...

Mouse models of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) are required to define therapeutic targets, but detailed time-resolved studies to establish a sequence of events are lacking. Here, we fed male C57Bl/6N mice a Western or standard diet over 48 weeks. Multiscale time-resolved characterization was performed using RNA-seq, histopathology, immun...

Non-invasive brain stimulation with weak electrical currents (transcranial electrical stimulation, tES), including direct (transcranial direct current stimulation, tDCS) or alternating current stimulation (transcranial alternating current stimulation, tACS), has been developed in neuroscience research in the last decades and since then has become a...

TDCS is a promising method for altering cortical excitability with clinical implications. It has been increasingly used in children and adolescents especially in recent years. Yet, its potential target populations, developmental aspects, and efficacy parameters still require further investigation. In this chapter, we discuss the physiological mecha...

The most common adverse effects of tDCS are erythema (skin redness), burning, tingling, itching, headache, and discomfort on the site of stimulation. These side effects occur in up to one-third of patients and are generally mild, short lived, and well tolerated. Skin burning is an uncommon side effect that is often associated with repeated tDCS ses...

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) noninvasively induces cortical excitability alterations via application of continuous, weak direct current through the scalp and has been adopted in clinical settings, particularly in psychiatry, as adjunctive treatment option. This chapter discusses the interaction between tDCS and application of phar...

Targeted memory reactivation (TMR) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can enhance memory consolidation. It is currently unknown whether TMR reinforced by simultaneous tDCS has superior efficacy. In this study, we investigated the complementary effect of TMR and bilateral tDCS on the consolidation of emotionally neutral and negative...

Circadian rhythms have natural relative variations among humans known as chronotype. Chronotype or being a morning or evening person, has a specific physiological, behavioural, and also genetic manifestation. Whether and how chronotype modulates human brain physiology and cognition is, however, not well understood. Here we examine how cortical exci...

The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed extraordinary and unpredictable changes on our lifestyle for an unknown duration. Consequently, core aspects of wellbeing including behavior, emotion, cognition, and social interactions are negatively affected. Sleep and circadian rhythms, with an extensive impact on physiology, behavior, emotion, and cognition are...

Introduction: 1) During tES, increasing intracellular Ca2+ levels beyond those needed for inducing LTP may collapse aftereffects. 2) State-dependent plastic aftereffects are reduced when applied during muscle activation as compared to rest. 3) Cortical surround inhibition by antagonistic muscle activation inhibits the center-innervated agonist. O...

Background Gait problems are an important symptom in Parkinson’s disease (PD), a progressive neurodegenerative disease. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a neuromodulatory intervention that can modulate cortical excitability of the gait-related regions. Despite an increasing number of gait-related tDCS studies in PD, the efficacy of...

Introduction: The persistence of post-detoxification problems in drug addiction is one of the disadvantages of the ultra-rapid opioid detoxification (UROD) method. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been introduced in experimental addiction treatment for some years. Results of pilot studies suggest that it might be a promising meth...

Background Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is the most common anxiety disorder while remains largely untreated. Disturbed amygdala-frontal network functions are central to the pathophysiology of SAD, marked by hypoactivity of the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), and hypersensitivity of the medial PFC and the amygdala. The objective of this study was...