Diaschisis: past, present, future

After a century of false hopes, recent studies have placed the concept of diaschisis at the centre of the understanding of brain function. Originally, the term 'diaschisis' was coined by von Monakow in 1914 to describe the neurophysiological changes that occur distant to a focal brain lesion. In the following decades, this concept triggered widespread clinical interest in an attempt to describe symptoms and signs that the lesion could not fully explain. However, the first imaging studies, in the late 1970s, only partially confirmed the clinical significance of diaschisis. Focal cortical areas of diaschisis (i.e. focal diaschisis) contributed to the clinical deficits after subcortical but only rarely after…