Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is one of the most promising new technologies in psychiatry. Essentially, it allows us to reach inside the brain, stimulate it, and alter the brain circuits that go awry in disorders like depression.

As the late Nolan Williams once explained, we've known for a long time that mental health disorders are caused by changes in electrical circuits in our brains, until TMS came along, we didn't had a good way of nudging those circuits back toward healthier function.

But for all its promise, there is still much we don't understand about what exactly TMS is doing. We know it sends electromagnetic waves into the brain and changes the flow of electricity within. What we don't know is how it changes brain circuits and networks or why that helps treat depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or any of the other conditions where it's being used.

Today's guest, Corey Keller, is dedicated to addressing that gap. He's been developing methods for recording inside the brain to help us understand how treatments like TMS change our brain circuits and address psychiatric disease.

Learn more

Stanford Precision Neurotherapeutics Lab
Koret Human Neurosciences Community Lab
Closed-loop Optimized rTMS for Depression (Stanford Medicine Clinical Trials)
Probing the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex and Central Executive Network for Improving Neuromodulation in Depression (Stanford Medicine Clinical Trials)
Non-invasive brain stimulation opens new ways to study and treat the brain (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2025)
Music supercharges brain stimulation (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2025)
How brain imaging is transforming mental health (From Our Neurons to Yours 2025)
Psychiatry 3.0 (From Our Neurons to Yours, 2023)
Stanford Psychiatry’s Corey Keller Awarded Grant to Research Biomarkers to Improve Efficacy of rTMS for Treatment-Resistant Depression (Stanford Medicine Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, 2026)
Personalizing Brain Stimulation for Psychiatric Disorders: From Circuits to Closed-Loop Control (American Journal of Psychiatry, 2026)
Transcranial magnetic stimulation with intracranial recording in humans and primates: a review (Brain: A Journal of Neurology, 2025)
Neural effects of TMS trains on the human prefrontal cortex (Scientific Reports, 2023)

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation and the future of psychiatry | Corey Keller

From Our Neurons to Yours

Transcranial magnetic stimulation and the future of psychiatry | Corey Keller