Deans' stroke musings: Effects of bilateral and unilateral mental practice on actual motor performance and event-related desynchronization

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, June 4, 2026

Effects of bilateral and unilateral mental practice on actual motor performance and event-related desynchronization

You can be assured that your doctor will NOT create any recovery protocols from this!

Do you prefer your doctor, hospital and board of director's incompetence NOT KNOWING? OR NOT DOING? Your choice; let them be incompetent or demand action!

Effects of bilateral and unilateral mental practice on actual motor performance and event-related desynchronization

Kazuya Umeno ,
Yoshihiro Itaguchi

Abstract

Bilateral hand movement has been reported to enhance actual motor performance and increase motor cortex activation more than unilateral hand movement. This study investigated the interaction effects of bilateral and unilateral mental practice on event-related desynchronization (ERD) amplitude and unilateral motor performance, to explore better clinical rehabilitation for stroke patients with hemiparesis. The task was a ball rotation, where participants circulated two balls on their palm by using their fingers. Seventy-six healthy young adults were randomly assigned to one of three mental practice groups or a control group without mental practice. In the mental practice groups, three subgroups of participants engaged in ball-rotation motor imagery for two blocks in different orders: bilateral hand imagery followed by left hand imagery (BL group), left hand imagery followed by bilateral hand imagery (LB group), and consecutive left hand imagery (LL group). The results showed greater improvement in actual motor performance in the BL group than in the control group, while the performance of the LB and LL groups did not significantly differ from that of the control group. Greater ERD was observed in the BL group than in the LL group in the early sets of the first block. However, ERD amplitude decreased with continued mental practice, and significant correlations between ERD and motor performance were limited. These results suggest that engaging in bilateral mental practice before unilateral mental practice is beneficial in improving unilateral motor performance. Bilateral mental practice following unilateral mental practice may provide neither notable improvements nor detrimental effects on unilateral motor action. Our findings also reveal a mismatch between ERD and motor performance, implying that these two measures are not straightforwardly linked.