Every day, I get questions about the TMS project I've gotten involved in at Harvard's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. TMS stands for Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. What's that? It's the use of high power magnetic fields to induce tiny electrical currents in the brain that can change the way we think.

TMS has been in the news recently because it just got FDA approval as a drug alternative for depression. Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, the director of the TMS lab in Boston, was one of the pioneers in the research that led to that approval, fifteen years ago.

Today, Alvaro remains on the cutting edge of neuroscience research with his work in autism. His scientists are using TMS on different areas of the brain to unravel some of the secrets of autism and how we think. It's a remarkable journey.

I am often asked if I the stories I've written about TMS are in one place somewhere. Well, as of today, they are. Here you go:

This is my first blog post on TMS, from March of this year:
http://jerobison.blogspot.com/2008/04/standing-on-brink.html

Here's the story of my first actual TMS experience:
http://jerobison.blogspot.com/2008/04/visit-to-beth-israel-deaconess-medical.html

Here's the second:
http://jerobison.blogspot.com/2008/05/visit-to-tms-lab-and-some-questions.html

And the third:
http://jerobison.blogspot.com/2008/05/brain-plasticity-in-action.html

Here you can see some changes in me:
http://jerobison.blogspot.com/2008/06/challenge-and-opportunity-of-autism.html

And finally, here's a sort of summary of where we are this October:
http://jerobison.blogspot.com/2008/10/appearance-next-week-and-latest-from.html

There is a story, "seeing with a different eye," that one of the program participants wrote and allowed me to post.
http://jerobison.blogspot.com/2008/05/another-participants-view-of-tms.html

Here are two more stories from the blog of Michael Wilcox, one of the other participants in the study.

http://www.mfw.us/rTMS-experience

http://www.mfw.us/a-second-tms-experiment

The official site of the TMS lab is www.tmslab.org

For more of John's insights check out his blog Look Me in The Eye