These results indicate that the joint contribution of multimodal IPL and auditory cortex is causally relevant for sound knowledge retrieval: The functional relevance of left IPL depends on the integrity of the auditory cortex as single perturbation of either region did not disrupt performance.

The individual impairment of sound judgments was best explained by the electric field in the auditory cortex.

We found that combined stimulation of auditory cortex and multimodal IPL selectively impaired sound judgments, but not action judgments, on low sound–low action words. Unifocal TMS over auditory cortex or IPL alone did not disrupt behavior, suggesting adaptive compensatory plasticity.

For the first time in a TMS study on higher cognition, we optimized TMS targeting and dosing using a priori computational electric field simulations (see doi.org/10.1162/imag...).

To tackle this issue, we combined offline TMS over modality-specific cortex (somatomotor, auditory, or sham) with online TMS over multimodal cortex (IPL, or sham) while 24 participants performed action and sound knowledge tasks on written words.