Transcranial magnetic stimulation: from neurophysiology to pharmacology, molecular biology and genomics

Noninvasive plasticity paradigms, both physiologically induced and artificially induced, have come into their own in the study of the effects of genetic variation on human cortical plasticity. These techniques have the singular advantage that they enable one to study the effects of genetic variation in its natural and most relevant context, that of the awake intact human cortex, in both health and disease. This review aims to introduce the currently available artificially induced plasticity paradigms, their putative mechanisms-both in the traditional language of the systems neurophysiologist and in the evolving (and perhaps more relevant for the purposes of stimulation genomics) reinterpretation in terms of molecular neurochemistry, and highlights recent studies employing these techniques by way of examples of applications.