| Samenvatting: | As any schoolboy with a toolkit or a broken toy soon appreciates, to find out how a machine works you need to take it apart, and to put it back together again, you need to know how it works. The next lesson is that, no matter how hard you try, you always end up with a handful of leftover nuts and bolts. These remaining components can be informative: will your machine still work without them? The same logic applies to one approach to understanding human brain function: by investigating the effects of lesions in animals and accidental brain damage in humans we can ask which parts are necessary for specific functions. Over the past twenty years, it has become possible to interfere with human brain functions safely and reversibly, and to control when and where the interference is induced. The technique, known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), has become a mainstay of cognitive neuroscience.
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