Does your doctor even know if these connector hubs were damaged in your stroke? What is the stroke protocol to recover from such damage? Recover not compensate. Does your doctor know ANYTHING AT ALL? Will your doctor be talking to these researchers to see what knowledge can be gained for stroke rehab? Or will your doctor DO NOTHING like usual? I know our stroke associations will do nothing with this, so we are once again screwed like we always are. So much that can be done if only there was a working brain somewhere in stroke leadership.
http://neurosciencenews.com/neural-network-connector-hubs-3159/
Swinging a bat at a 90-mph fastball requires keen visual,
cognitive and motor skills. But how do diverse brain networks coordinate
well enough to hit the ball?
A new UC Berkeley study suggests the human brain’s aptitude and
versatility can be credited in large part to “connector hubs,” which
filter and route information. They coordinate and integrate the flow of
data so that brain networks dedicated to specific roles, such as vision
and movement, can focus on their jobs.
“Our findings show that connector hubs allow for distinct networks to
each do their own thing, yet still interact with each other
effectively,“ said study lead author Maxwell Bertolero, a Ph.D. student
in neuroscience at UC Berkeley.
Moreover, the brain’s two dozen or so connector hubs play a key role
in complex cognitive tasks, and are vulnerable to brain damage and
dysfunction. Thus, the findings could “help neuroscientists shed more
light on the neural bases of disorders such as schizophrenia and
Alzheimer’s, ” which are marked by malfunctions in the brain’s wiring,
Bertolero said.
The findings are the result of a meta-analysis conducted in January
by Bertolero and fellow researchers at UC Berkeley and the National
University of Singapore of more than 9,000 brain imaging studies in the
BrainMap database that cover more than 75 cognitive tasks.
The study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
found heightened neural activity in the brain’s connector hubs during
complex tasks, such as puzzles and video games, while networks dedicated
to specific functions did not need to put in extra work.
The more complex the task, in that more networks are required for the
job, the greater the activity in the connector hubs, keeping the burden
off individual networks, the study found.
Like an airline hub, the brain’s main connector hubs link to multiple
brain networks like transfer stations. These hubs have been found in
the brains of many mammals, including mice and macaque monkeys.
Previous studies have linked connector hubs to the coordination and
integration of information between multiple brain networks, but this
latest study measured exactly how much of the work was being done by the
hubs vis–à–vis networks dedicated to specific tasks.
The experiments used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure
increased blood flow throughout the brain, a marker of increased neural
activity, during a wide range of activities, including finger-tapping,
whistling, chewing, drawing, writing, reading, watching a movie and
playing video games and memory games.
Researchers mapped the brain’s connections as one would analyze a
large-scale network such as the U.S electrical grid, global flight
patterns or Linkedin professional connections, creating a model of the
brain’s “connectome.“
Using “graph theory,” which is used in many scientific fields to
study networks, they identified 14 distinct networks of tightly
interconnected regions and roughly 25 connector hubs.
They then compared neural activity in the connector hubs to activity
in each of the brain’s dedicated networks during all the tasks recorded
in the BrainMap database.They found that activity increased only at
connector hubs as more networks were required for a task, indicating
that connector hubs, but not individual networks, must process more
information during these more complex tasks.
Next, Bertolero said, he and his co-authors plan to look into why
evolution built a brain with distinct networks and connector hubs,
precisely how connector hubs integrate and coordinate, and what happens
when they are damaged by a stroke, for example.
Cool picture at link.
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