Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Single neuron power

I had a link to this on BBC but it disappeared and I can't find it in Nature but here is the brief synopsis.

There could be enough computing ability in just one brain cell to allow humans and animals to feel, a study suggests.
The brain has 100 billion neurons but scientists had thought they needed to join forces in larger networks to produce thoughts and sensations.
The Dutch and German study, published in Nature, found that stimulating just one rat neuron could deliver the sensation of touch.
One UK expert said this was the first time this had been measured in mammals.
  These studies drive down the level at which relevant computation is happening in the brain
Dr Douglas Armstrong
Edinburgh Centre for Bioinformatics
The complexity of the human brain and how it stores countless thoughts, sensations and memories are still not fully understood.
Researchers believe connections between individual neurons, forming networks of at least a thousand, are the key to some of its processing power.
However, in some creatures with simpler nervous systems, such as flies, a single neuron can play a more significant role. The latest research suggests this may also be true in "higher" animals.
The team, from the Humboldt University in Germany and the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, stimulated single neurons in rats and found this was enough to trigger a behavioural response when their whiskers were touched.
A second research project from the US suggests the computational ability of the brain cell could be even more complex, with different synapses - the many junctions between neurons and other nerve cells - able to act independently from those found elsewhere on the same cell.
This could mean that, within a single neuron, different synapses could be storing or processing completely different bits of information.
Computing power
Dr Douglas Armstrong, the deputy director of the Edinburgh Centre for Bioinformatics, said the research did not mean all neurons had an individual role to play but that, in some instances, they might be capable of working alone with measurable results.
He said: "The generally accepted model was that networks or arrays make decisions and that the influence of a single neuron is smaller - but this work and other recent studies support a more important role for the individual neuron.
"These studies drive down the level at which relevant computation is happening in the brain."

This one truly gives me hope that my speculation on Insanity and neuroplasticity  is wrong.

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