Electrical brain stimulation may enhance sounds temporally coherent with entrained oscillations

Evidence

Considering that clicks were presented at the tACS frequency and their detectability was found to depend on tACS phase, a possible interpretation is that tACS essentially enhanced the loudness of those click trains that were temporally coherent (rather than anti-coherent) with tACS-entrained oscillations. Such an ‘envelope enhancement’ would have interesting implications for auditory scene analysis problems that benefit from tracking the envelope of the target sound. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4768

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing whether phase-locked enhancement reflects genuine cortical gain or an artifact of attention/arousal entrainment.
• DEFINE: Introduces the concept of ‘envelope enhancement’ as a mechanistic interpretation tying tACS to auditory scene analysis.