blufuz

If you want to target alpha oscillations, fNIRS is not sufficient, it measures oxygenation changes in the blood, which is a delayed metabolic response to brain activity, changing on the scale of seconds. EEG oscillations instead reflect real-time neuronal electrical activity, changing on the scale of tens of milliseconds. On the plus side, you can also sew EEG into headbands, there are a lot of wearable devices under development.

Your experiment in macaques is a really important test for such a new method, but do you think that the difference in stimulation protocol could be meaningful? In their paper they used a theta burst stimulation protocol (3 100 hz pulses 200ms apart) which has been very effective with TMS and has been shown to affect neuronal plasticity. Maybe 10 hz tACS-like stimulation is more about spike timing than plasticity?

Original paper: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/articlepdf/...

I work in the lab of the author of this study. I can tell you that this was also a concern of the high school students; they were given a questionnaire about when THEY would like to start school, and they only wanted to shift start times by about half an hour for this very reason, and were concerned about when to compensate for the time, preferring shorter breaks than ending later. Fortunately for them, Swiss high school schedules are crazy with lots of big gaps, so improvements can be made to start times before sacrificing end times.