Deans' stroke musings: This is your brain on Scrabble: Neural correlates of visual word recognition in competitive Scrabble players as measured during task and resting-state

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.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

This is your brain on Scrabble: Neural correlates of visual word recognition in competitive Scrabble players as measured during task and resting-state

How do you relate this to stroke recovery?

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945215001069

Andrea B. Protzner ^a^,^b^,^c^,^,,
Ian S. Hargreaves ^a^,^b^,,
James A. Campbell ^a^,,
Kaia Myers-Stewart ^a^,,
Sophia van Hees ^a^,^b,
Bradley G. Goodyear ^b^,^c^,^d^,^e^,^f^,,
Peter Sargious ^g^,^h^,,
Penny M. Pexman ^a^,^b^,^c^,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2015.03.015

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Abstract

Competitive Scrabble players devote considerable time to studying words and practicing Scrabble-related skills (e.g., anagramming). This training is associated with extraordinary performance in lexical decision, the standard visual word recognition task (Hargreaves, Pexman, Zdrazilova & Sargious, 2012). In the present study we investigated the neural consequences of this lexical expertise. Using both event-related and resting-state fMRI, we compared brain activity and connectivity in 12 competitive Scrabble experts with 12 matched non-expert controls. Results showed that when engaged in the lexical decision task (LDT), Scrabble experts made use of brain regions not generally associated with meaning retrieval in visual word recognition, but rather those associated with working memory and visual perception. The analysis of resting-state data also showed group differences, such that a different network of brain regions was associated with higher levels of Scrabble-related skill in experts than in controls.