Multimodal acoustic-electric trigeminal nerve stimulation modulates conscious perception

Multimodal stimulation has the potential to reverse pathological neural activity and alleviate symptoms in neuropsychiatric diseases. However, the reliability of this approach and the mechanisms through which it improves consciousness remain largely unknown. We investigated the effects of multimodal stimulation combining music stimulation with electrical trigeminal nerve stimulation in healthy human participants. We assessed conscious perception before and after acoustic-electric stimulation and investigated the mechanisms underlying the putative stimulation effects. Our results show that (1) acoustic-electric stimulation improves conscious tactile perception in healthy human participants without a concomitant change in auditory perception, (2) this improvement is caused by the interplay of the acoustic and electric stimulation rather than any of the unimodal stimulation alone, and (3) the effect of acoustic-electric stimulation on conscious perception correlates with inter-regional connection changes in a recurrent neural processing model. These findings provide evidence that multimodal acoustic-electric stimulation can promote conscious perception and offer insights into its underlying mechanisms.