The potential utility of evoked potentials in the treatment of mental illnesses

Abstract

The "Decade of the Br ain"r eferr ed to the 1990s, as the emer-gence of various brain imaging techniques allo w ed the analysis of both normal and pathological behaviors with specific patterns of distributed neural activity (Insel and Quirion, 2005 ). Among these tec hniques, electr oencephalogr a phy (EEG) indexed sponta-neous brain electrical activity, and included e v ent-r elated poten-tials (ERPs), referring to epochs of EEG activity that are time-locked to the processing of stimuli (Rugg and Coles, 1995 ). Once mental diseases were also envisaged as resulting from brain alterations (Price et al., 2000 ), a neur ocognitiv e a ppr oac h emer ged, pr omoting that: (i) significant cognitive disturbances are observed in psychi-atric diseases (Green, 2006 ); (ii) these cognitive disturbances, in-dexed by dysfunctional neural networks , ma y trigger/subtend the onset and/or maintenance of clinical symptoms, thereby defining v alid ther a peutic tar gets (Ver dejo-Gar cia et al., 2023 ); and (iii) re-habilitating these cognitive functions (through neuropsycholog-ical training programs and/or neuromodulation tools) disclosed encour a ging r esults by pr omoting r eduction of clinical symptoms as well as enhancement of patients quality of life (Lesniak et al., 2014 ). In this view, ERPs, considered a useful tool to probe the in-formation pr ocessing str eam in the br ain, can help pinpoint the specific neur ocognitiv e functions that should be tar geted in eac h patient through specific and indi vidualized cogniti v e r emediation pr ocedur es (Campanella, 2016 ). Ob viousl y, e v en if we choose to focus this perspective paper on cognitive ERPs, several other elec-trophysiological tools (such as transcranial magnetic stimulation or neural oscillations) have proved to be useful for studying neuro-physiological biomarkers of psychiatric disorders (Cao et al., 2021 ; Ferr ar elli and Phillips, 2021 ).