I bet your doctor won't use this to update your stroke protocols. You'll have to figure this out on your own.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-09-neural-mechanisms-skill.html
Most people can swing a hammer, but most
people cannot swing said hammer with the fluid speed and precision of a
master carpenter. The difference is thousands of hours of practice and
the systematic organization of hundreds of thousands of the brain's
neurons.
"Practice makes
perfect, in a pretty literal sense. When we improve at a skill over
time, it is presumably driven by coordinated changes in our brain's
neural representation of how that movement should be completed,"
explains Steven Chase, assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering and
the Center for Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University.
"Yet, the link between how our brain reorganizes its neurons and how we learn a new skill is still largely unknown."
Chase was recently awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award
to discover the link between the neural reorganization and skill
learning. With the award, one of the NSF's most prestigious awards in
support of junior faculty, he will also research the behavioral factors
that drive skill learning. Chase has been awarded an $800,000 five-year
grant for his research.
An improved understanding of the science behind skill learning will
have long-term impact on the clinical understanding of the progression
of various motor control disorders, such as Parkinson's disease and
stroke. His research may inform the design of targeted rehabilitation
paradigms for those patient groups.
"You can imagine stroke as a sort of rewiring of the brain's system.
Because parts of the brain are now dead, there are neurons that
contribute completely differently to that circuit," explains Chase. "In
stroke rehabilitation, the brain must learn to use those neurons in an
appropriate way for this altered system. We want to understand how the
brain does this learning."
A major challenge in studying skill learning is that most movements
engage tens of thousands of neurons, and the link between any individual
neuron and movement is not known. To overcome this problem, Chase and
his lab will use a brain-computer interface,
a device that allows the brain to control a computer cursor using
thought alone, and observe how neurons change when mastering control of
the device. By using a brain-computer interface, Chase says the group
can interpret how changes in individual neurons combine to enable skill development.
"Sometimes our brain actually requires us to rebuild a neural circuit
in order to make what was previously impossible, possible," explains
Chase. "With this award, we will go deep into that process and answer
the question: 'how do you rebuild those neural circuits?'"
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