Neurostimulation and Therapeutic Advance: Iterative or Principled?

Although electrical stimulation has been used intermittently for centuries to treat neural dysfunction, recent decades have seen a renaissance, with therapeutic applications ranging from motor disorders like dystonia and Parkinson’s to urological dysfunction and even psychiatric diseases. Fueling growth is an improved capacity for targeted spatial and temporal intervention over that of pharmacological methods. On the other hand, despite an improving understanding of its mechanisms of action, the complexity of higher order neural mechanisms and conceptual conflicts over the structuring of global brain activity continue to overshadow development, making advances on the basis of principle the exception rather than the norm.

Keywords: Neurostimulation; Electrotherapy; Radical predictive processing; Brain oscillations; Global brain states; Epilepsy; Neural dysfunction; Parkinson’s disease