NIH R01 · 2025
Spinal Cord Associative Plasticity
SUMMARY Experience leads to behavioral change through associative activity of neural circuits. Using this principle, paired stimulation has been used to selectively strengthen circuits. We propose to target the spinal cord for associative plasticity, exploiting strong interaction of descending motor connections and large diameter afferents, which mediate the senses of joint position and muscle tension. In rats and humans, sub-threshold cervical stimulation, which activates afferents, strongly augments motor cortex evoked muscle responses when timed to converge in the spinal cord. When pairing is performed repeatedly in rats, spinal cord associative plasticity (SCAP) is induced with a large…
From the public funding record at NIH RePORTER. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.