Neuromodulation for restoring and amplifying brain function.

Neuromodulation's compensatory amplification (CA) can enhance brain function by strengthening repurposed processes, with four key factors enabling its effectiveness.

• Why it matters: Understanding how to effectively use neuromodulation to support brain function is crucial for improving treatments in stroke, neurodegeneration, psychiatry, and aging, where traditional approaches focus on restoring normal dynamics.
• What they did: The authors formalized two strategies—restorative normalization (RN) and compensatory amplification (CA)—and evaluated four factors (multiple realizability, multiscale neuroplasticity, precision readiness, activity selectivity) that enable CA to be effective, analyzing their interplay across clinical goals.
• The result: Positioning CA alongside RN as a core principle can improve target selection, guide stratified treatments, and translate compensatory signatures into testable neuromodulation protocols, potentially delaying decline and increasing neural capacity.