Researchers find that targeting specific regions of the brain with ultrasound may increase a person’s mood.
A study recently published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience suggests that targeting a region of the prefrontal cortex with transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) — a new ultrasound technique — may temporarily elevate mood.
The findings could both open the door to further mood-enhancing techniques and support further research into consciousness.
tFUS is a developing technique that allows researchers to affect the pattern of a person’s brain waves. Influencing brain waves in this way can generate different cognitive effects.
Other techniques for changing brain waves include transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct current stimulation. tFUS has a number of advantages over these methods, primarily that it enables a researcher to access deeper parts of an individual’s brain with more precision.
As the authors of the present study report, past experiments in animals have shown that tFUS modulates neuronal activity; also, studies in humans have demonstrated that it temporarily alters activity in various parts of the brain.
A possible clinical application of tFUS is the treatment of psychiatric and neurological diseases.
As such, the authors of the present study wanted to see what effect tFUS would have on a part of the brain associated with mood and other affective responses — the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG).
To go about this, the researchers