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, September 18, 2014

Neural Basis of Confidence Uncovered in Mice

Do you still have this confidence  region in your brain post-stroke? If not, what the hell is your doctor doing to recover it?  You are going to need massive amounts of confidence that you will recover even though your doctor knows nothing about how to get you back to 100% recovery. I must still have it because even though 8 years later I still have quite a few deficits I know I will eventually recover. As compared to my doctor who told me nothing about my recovery prospects. He must have been confident that he was right. In my opinion he knew nothing and I'm confident in that opinion. I'm confident in my confidence, must be my arrogance showing. 

Neural Basis of Confidence Uncovered in Mice



Life is a series of decisions, ranging from the mundane to the monumental. And each decision is a gamble, carrying with it the chance to second-guess. Did I make the right turn at that light? Did I choose the right college? Was this the right job for me?

Our desire to persist along a chosen path is almost entirely determined by our confidence in the decision: when you are confident that your choice is correct, you are willing to stick it out for a lot longer. 
Confidence determines much of our path through life, but what is it? Most people would describe it as an emotion or a feeling. In contrast, scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have found that confidence is actually a measureable quantity, and not reserved just for humans. The team, led by CSHL Associate Professor Adam Kepecs, has identified a brain region in rats whose function is required for the animals to express confidence in their decisions. 
How do we know when a rat is exhibiting confidence? The researchers devised a method to study decision making in these animals. The rats were offered an odor that they were trained to associate with one of two doors. When they chose the correct door, they were rewarded. This part was easy for the animals: their selections were almost always correct.­­ Things got trickier when Kepecs and his team offered a mixture of the two scents, with one dominating over the other by only a very small percentage. The rats now needed to choose the door representing the dominant odor in order to get their reward– a choice that reflects their best guess.
In work published today in Neuron, the team describes how confidence can be measured simply by challenging a rat to wait for the reward to be revealed behind the door. The time they are willing wait serves as a measure of the confidence in their original decision. “We found that the rats are willing to ‘gamble’ with their time,” Kepecs explains, sometimes waiting as much as 15 seconds, which is an eternity for these animals. “This is something that we can measure and create mathematical models to explain,” said Kepecs. “The time rats are willing to wait predicts the likelihood of correct decisions and provides an objective measure to track the feeling of confidence.”
The researchers hypothesized that a distinct region of the brain might control confidence. Previous work has suggested that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a part of the brain involved in making predictions, might have a role in decision confidence. Kepecs and his team specifically shut off neurons in the OFC, inactivating it, and found that rats no longer exhibited appropriate levels of confidence in their decisions. 
“With an inactive OFC, the rats retained the ability to make decisions– their accuracy did not change,” said Kepecs. “And they spent the same amount of time waiting for a reward on average. The only difference is that animals’ willingness to wait for a reward was no longer guided by confidence. They would often wait a long time even when they were wrong.” 
The discovery offers a rare glimpse into the neuronal basis of a higher-level cognitive process, and is likely to have implications in human decision-making as well. As Kepecs describes, “we now know that the OFC is critical for making on-the-fly predictions in rats. The human OFC is just a more sophisticated version of the rodent counterpart.” The team is expanding their research to explore how the elusive feelings of confidence are based on objective predictions that influence human decisions as well. 
The study appeared online in Neuron.

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