Use the labels in the right column to find what you want. Or you can go thru them one by one, there are only 33,991 posts. Searching is done in the search box in upper left corner. I blog on anything to do with stroke. DO NOT DO ANYTHING SUGGESTED HERE AS I AM NOT MEDICALLY TRAINED, YOUR DOCTOR IS, LISTEN TO THEM. BUT I BET THEY DON'T KNOW HOW TO GET YOU 100% RECOVERED. I DON'T EITHER BUT HAVE PLENTY OF QUESTIONS FOR YOUR DOCTOR TO ANSWER.
Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain!trillions and trillions of neuronsthatDIEeach day because there areNOeffective 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.
This useless crap is the best you can expect from the ASA. NO PROTOCOLS. Guide your journey, NOT Guide your recovery. A slight distinction but everything to a stroke survivor. Words like that mean the ASA knows nothing about stroke recovery.
Awards for stroke survivors should never need to occur. They shouldn't have to struggle and be brave in the face of impossible odds of getting fully recovered. This need for an award shows that the Burke Rehabilitation Hospital is a complete failure at stoke rehab and recovery.
We'll see if they post my reply; "The need for this award shows the Burke Rehabilitation Hospital is failing at getting stroke survivors to 100% recovery." We need to be commenting on all stroke stories pointing out the failures of our stroke medical professionals and keep doing that until they take responsibility for those failures. http://harrison.dailyvoice.com/events/burke-announces-honorees-for-annual-awards-dinner/711934/
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. -- Burke Rehabilitation Hospital is honoring those who make a difference at its annual Burke Award Dinner.
The dinner will be held June 8 at 6 p.m. at Brae Burn Country Club at 39 Brae Burn Drive, Purchase, NY.
Burke is honoring Barbara Rubin Kessler and Steven Kessler, Scarsdale
residents. Barbara experienced a severe ischemic stroke that left her
unable to walk or talk and paralyzed on her right side.
After rehabilitation at Burke, Barbara was able to regain function
but was diagnosed with aphasia, a communication disorder that results
from damage to the parts of the brain that contain language. Today, she
is active as a national advocate for brain trauma and stroke patients
with aphasia and other challenges and is on the board of the National
Aphasia Association.
Her husband, Steven is Barbara's caregiver. He works with her on
advocacy for brain trauma, stroke and aphasia patients, and their
families. He is also committed to improving medical care for returning
U.S. war veterans.
Dr. Michael James Reding, a Yorktown Heights resident, is the former
director of the Stroke Rehabilitation Program at Burke and current
volunteer clinical researcher at Burke and the Burke Medical Research
Institute is also being honored.
Reding was the medical director of the Stroke Rehabilitation Program
at Burke from 1980 until 2013 when he assumed emeritus status. He was
also one of the founders of Burke’s Neurorehabilitation Fellowship
Program. He is currently a full-time volunteer clinical researcher at
Burke and the Burke Medical Research Institute.
John Berman, co-anchor of “CNN Newsroom,” is serving as MC for the evening.
“It is a privilege to honor these inspiring individuals, who
exemplify the Burke mission and our unparalleled commitment to helping
patients recover from life-changing illness, injury, or surgery,” said
Jeffrey Menkes, president, and CEO of Burke Rehabilitation Hospital.
“Each of these honorees has demonstrated great compassion and dedication
to advancing the field of rehabilitation and enabling people to reclaim
their lives.”
Every medical school should have stroke survivors describe the fucking failure of their recovery to new medical students. If you are asked, don't hold back and just say you are glad you are alive thanks to the ER doctors. Say how fucking mad you are at the PMR docs and neurologists for not getting you to 100% recovery. http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2017/01/30/telling-patient-stories-to-teach-new-medical-students/
7 pages, Totally not understandable by any stroke survivor, the word protocol is never used. But then not being understandable is the whole point. If you can't understand something you can't ask why your recovery is so fucking bad.
I bet your doctor will not sign up as a researcher to study these brains and come up with ideas on how to make your stroke recovery easier. I also bet our fucking failures of stroke associations will do nothing with this. http://www.scpr.org/news/2016/11/17/66247/brain-boost-usc-launches-cutting-edge-neuroscience/
This state of the art center hopes to foster collaboration between neuroscientists around the world.
It's the brain child (pun intended) of Arthur Toga, PhD, director of
USC's Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute. Toga helped design the
building and will be spearheading many of the projects there.
The USC Mark and Mary Stevens Hall will house the USC Mark
and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute, where
researchers will conduct advanced studies on brain diseases like
epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease. Assassi Productions, Courtesy of SmithGroupJJR.
One of its central features is a room full of humming, glowing
servers housing one of the largest repositories of brain data in the
world.
Toga says any researcher can apply for an account to access the hundreds of thousands of brain scans in the collection.
“The goal here is to share the wealth, the wealth in data,” he said.
“Since we still have so much to learn, the more minds that are examining
this data, the better off we’ll all be.”
So far researchers from more than 200 countries have worked with the
database which includes magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron
emission tomography (PET) scans, genome data and records of blood
and cerebrospinal fluid samples.
The first floor of USC Stevens Hall houses the world’s
largest brain research data repository, currently holding 2,867
terabytes of information from every continent except Antarctica. Richard Carrasoc / Keck Medicine of USC
Toga hopes this robust collection will help scientists gain a better
understanding of how things like Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia
take hold in the brain.
The University of Southern California has been trying to raise its
reputation as a center for cutting-edge neuroscience in recent years. In 2013, USC acquired Toga's lab from UCLA, and last year the school was embroiled in a legal battle over another brain researcher who came over from UC San Diego.
The new facility is the latest move in USC's effort to burnish its credentials in the hard sciences.
In addition to the brain scan collection, the center houses a massive MRI machine, and Toga hopes to add another soon.
The building also includes a conference room tricked out with a
theater-sized LED screen that will be used to display high definition
renderings of the brain.
"“We need to get close to the data, and visualizing it is critical to doing that,” Toga said.
Much of Toga's work is funded by federal grants, including a $21.7
million award from the National Institutes of Health to study epilepsy.
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This exemplifies the conundrum you and your doctor face. Too early use of something like this leads to compensation, not recovery. Recovery is damned hard work, there are no shortcuts, magic, or miracles. Hopefully your doctor has protocols that actually fix your memory. The most important part of this is listening to the signals neurons produce. With a great stroke association that would lead to immediate research to listen in on neurons undergoing neuroplasticity so we could make neuroplasticity completely repeatable under controlled conditions. That to me is even more important because it would be generalizable to all of stroke rehab.
Or would these be better for listening in?
A startup named Kernel
came out of stealth mode yesterday and revealed its ambitious mission:
to develop a ready-for-the-clinic brain prosthetic to help people with
memory problems. The broad target market includes people with
Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, as well as those who have
suffered a stroke or traumatic brain injury.
If the company succeeds, surgeons will one day implant Kernel’s tiny
device in their patients’ brains—specifically in the brain region called
the hippocampus.
There, the device’s electrodes will electrically stimulate certain
neurons to help them do their job—turning incoming information about the
world into long-term memories.
Kernel’s device will be based on a research effort led by Ted Berger, director of the Center for Neural Engineering at the University of Southern California. Berger tells IEEE Spectrum
that his experiments with rats and primates make him confident that
“it’s really time” for a clinical device. “We’re testing it in humans
now, and getting good initial results,” he says. “We’re going to go
forward with the goal of commercializing this prosthesis.”
Berger’s pioneering work on memory prosthetics was featured in an IEEE Spectrum article reporting on attempts to end all physical, emotional, and intellectual disabilities.
In Berger’s approach, electrodes in the hippocampus first record
electrical signals from certain neurons as they learn something new and
encode the memory. These electrical signals are the result of neurons
“firing” in specific patterns. Berger studied how electrical signals
associated with learning are translated into signals associated with
storing that information in long-term memory. Then his lab built
mathematical models that take any input (learning) signal, and produce
the proper output (memory) signal.
An implanted memory prosthetic would have electrodes to record
signals during learning, a microprocessor to do the computations, and
electrodes that stimulate neurons to encode the information as a memory.
For people who have difficulty forming lasting memories on their own,
the prosthetic would provide a boost. “We take these memory codes,
enhance them, and put them back into the brain,” Berger says. “If we can
do that consistently, then we’ll be ready to go.”
Prior research on memory prosthetics by both Berger and other neural
engineers has received funding from DARPA, which also aims to develop a clinical device within the decade.
But the money behind Kernel, the new startup, comes largely from tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who sold his payments company to PayPal for US $800 million in 2013. Johnson then started a venture fund called the OS Fund,
which aims to “rewrite the operating systems of life” for the benefit
of mankind. USC’s Berger says that Johnson “isn’t just trying to make
his next $800 million” with Kernel (which Johnson will run as the
company’s CEO). “He thinks the next big challenge for the human race is
how to improve our brains,” says Berger.
The funding will support more human trials, which are conducted with
hospitalized epilepsy patients who have temporary electrodes placed in
their brains as part of their regular treatment. In human tests so far,
the researchers have recorded from the hippocampus while the patients do
memory tests, and have also been able to electrically stimulate the
hippocampus to enhance the patients’ memorizing abilities.
Many fundamental questions about the science of memory formation
remain to be answered, making it all the more remarkable that Kernel’s
founders are already aiming to build a clinical device. For example, is
there a common code for memories? If two people memorize the same list
of words, do their electrical signals match, or do they each use a
unique pattern of signals to encode the memory?
Berger says that in rats, the researchers did detect a “significant
common code,” but that they couldn’t find one in their primate
experiments. However, he adds, they studied far fewer primates, so
they didn’t have as big a dataset to analyze. As for humans, “even if
there is a generalized memory code, it’s going to be tough to find it
using the tools we have right now,” Berger says.
The problem is that humans have way more neurons than rats; we have
about 86 billion, while rats have about 200 million. So electrodes
placed in the human hippocampus will record from a much smaller
percentage of the neurons there. “Our information will be biased based
on the neurons we’re able to record from,” Berger says. One of Kernel’s
goals will therefore be to develop implants with denser arrays of
electrodes that can record from more neurons.
If Kernel succeeds in turning basic science into an actual product,
it wouldn’t be the first brain implant to hit the market. Implants are
already used in a technique called deep brain stimulation (DBS), which
has become an accepted therapy for Parkinson’s disease
and an experimental treatment for depression and many other
neuropsychological disorders. And in 2013, regulators approved the first
brain implant for epilepsy; it monitors the brain for oncoming seizures and tries to prevent them.
Welcome to the age of the bionic brain.
1Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
2Google Deepmind, United Kingdom
3Northwestern University, USA
Neuroscience has focused on the detailed implementation of
computation, studying neural codes, dynamics and circuits. In machine
learning, however, artificial neural networks tend to eschew precisely
designed codes, dynamics or circuits in favor of brute force
optimization of a cost function, often using simple and relatively
uniform initial architectures. Two recent developments have emerged
within machine learning that create an opportunity to connect these
seemingly divergent perspectives. First, structured architectures are
used, including dedicated systems for attention, recursion and various
forms of short- and long-term memory storage. Second, cost functions and
training procedures have become more complex and are varied across
layers and over time. Here we think about the brain in terms of these
ideas. We hypothesize that (1) the brain optimizes cost functions, (2)
the cost functions are diverse and differ across brain locations and
over development, and (3) optimization operates within a pre-structured
architecture matched to the computational problems posed by behavior. In
support of these hypotheses, we argue that a range of implementations
of credit assignment through multiple layers of neurons are compatible
with our current knowledge of neural circuitry, and that the brain's
specialized systems can be interpreted as enabling efficient
optimization for specific problem classes. Such a heterogeneously
optimized system, enabled by a series of interacting cost functions,
serves to make learning data-efficient and precisely targeted to the
needs of the organism. We suggest directions by which neuroscience could
seek to refine and test these hypotheses.
This is an interesting conundrum for you and your doctor to solve. How much of your use of technology; smartphones, tablets, calculators is compensation vs. recovery. Do you need to ditch these because in order to recover better you need to do everything the hard way to get the fastest recovery? My example is; when I moved to Michigan I did not use a GPS to get around, I needed to learn the streets and addresses the normal way, by repetition. I didn't go all the way because I still relied on my phone to keep track of phone numbers, probably setting back my memory skills. Discuss. http://exclusive.multibriefs.com/content/cognitive-offloading-help-or-hindrance/education
Roughly two-thirds of Americans (68 percent) have
smartphones, and nearly half (45 percent) own tablet computers. Such
devices tell us the time, date, sunrise, sunset, weather, what we need
to do, when we need to do it and how we can get there. We can sync our
calendars as well as our grocery to-do lists on all our devices. We use technology to carry
out even the simplest of tasks. Instead of writing, we type. Instead of
using our mental math skills, we use a calculator. As
an extension of our brains, these electronic devices help us to be
faster and more efficient. They save us from needing to remember andreduce the effort necessary to perform a mental task. But are all these devices contributing to a weak memory muscle? Memory
is of such critical importance to our very existence. Like most of the
brain's processes, memory remains a bit of a mystery. We often talk about memory as a single thing, when, in fact, it's a congregation of several complex processes.
As such, managing incoming information is also a complex
function, involving the limbic system — the hippocampus, amygdala,
cingulate gyrus, thalamus, hypothalamus, epithalamus, mammillary body
and other organs, many of which are relevant to the processing of
memory.
According to Evan F. Risko, a
Canada Research chair in Cognitive Psychology at the University of
Waterloo, and co-author Sam Gilbert, a Royal Society research fellow at
University College London, if we program a smartphone to remind us of an
upcoming appointment, we have engaged in "cognitive offloading."
This means we are using physical action to alter the information
processing requirements of a task to reduce cognitive demand. We write appointments down
and set reminders with our smartphones or tablets, eliminating the need
to use our internal cognitive abilities because we think we are being
more efficient or simply because we are on mental overload. Offloading
may helps us get more done faster, but storing information on our
smartphones, computers or tablets may cause us to become reliant on
them, ultimately affecting how we remember.
To test this theory, Risco and Gilbert sent participants off to a
museum equipped with digital cameras. What they discovered was that
taking photographs of objects degraded participants' abilities to
remember what they saw compared to the objects they didn't photograph.
In an earlier study,
when participants took a photo of each object as a whole, they
remembered fewer objects and fewer details about the objects and the
objects' locations in the museum than if they only observed the objects
without photographing them. When participants zoomed in to photograph a
specific part of the object, their subsequent recognition and detail
memory was not impaired. In fact, memory for features that were not
zoomed in on was just as strong as memory for features that were zoomed
in on.
Risko and Gilbert plan to focus on the way offloading changes the
way we think in addition to what's happening in the brain when we
offload. They are also interested in the long-term consequences of
living in busy, high-tech environments that encourage us to constantly
offload our cognition.
According to Risko, there is much discussion about whether
devices like smartphones are ruining us cognitively, but research
addressing the long-term cognitive consequences of offloading to a
variety of devices is limited at this point in time.
About the Author
Dorothy L. Tengler, MA, is a freelance medical
writer/communication specialist with nearly 20 years of experience in
the pharmaceutical and medical communication industries. She has
developed educational and medical marketing materials, including
monographs, slide kits, health articles, primary and review manuscripts,
and pharmaceutical sales training materials.
This is great and not so great at the same time. For those needing this it opens up lots of possibilities. But the downside is that this compensation technology if relied on too much will stop your recovery. Recovery is damned hard and while this may look like recovery you have to understand you may have limited your real recovery by accepting the easy way out. Up to you to decide. http://www.controlbionics.com/
“There is no greater feeling in the world than watching a patient,
connected to their NeuroSwitch for the first time, realize that the
world has opened back up for them. It’s real communication, functional communication.“Caitlin Smith, MA CCC-SLP
If you are paralyzed, suffer from loss of speech, and loss of motor
control, the NeuroSwitch provides the easiest, most effective way to
communicate and control your environment. The NeuroSwitch is made for
people with conditions such as acute spinal cord injury (SCI), ALS (Lou
Gehrig’s Disease), MND (motor neuron disease), or cerebral palsy. The NeuroSwitch is the only assistive communication device that works from diagnosis to advanced stages of ALS/MND.
The NeuroSwitch enables you to control a computer using your body’s
EMG signals. EMG stands for “electromyography,” which is the measurement
of electrical activity associated with the activation of a muscle group
as detected by non-invasive electrodes on the surface of the skin. EMG
signals have been used in clinical and research settings since the
1980s, for things like diagnosis of neuromuscular diseases,
rehabilitation, and controlling prosthetic devices.
The EMG technology in the NeuroSwitch has been fine-tuned for over 7
years especially for people with severe paralysis. It can detect and
amplify the faintest EMG signals. It also adapts to your body’s changes
over time, requiring no manual recalibration.
Hopefully your doctor has a good understanding of this when choosing which protocols will address specific damage. I almost spit my soda thru my nose just rereading that sentence. But stroke is too serious to joke about, so you may as well start crying about the lack of knowledge on how exactly you will recover. http://www.dana.org/Publications/ReportOnProgress/A_Bayesian_Approach_to_the_Brain/ Florent Meyniel, Ph.D.Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Neurospin, CEA,
University Paris-Saclay, France
Bayesian
concepts are appealing to many researchers in fundamental and applied research,
including neuroscience. Bayesian tools, part of probability theory, are useful
whenever quantitative analysis is needed, such as in statistics, data mining,
or forecasting. However, Bayesian concepts have much further reaching
implications in neuroscience. They are essential to the way we think about the
brain. BAYES’ RULE BASICS The
mathematical foundation of Bayesian concepts stems from the so-called Bayes’
rule, named after one of its contributors, the 18th century British
Reverend Thomas Bayes. Let's consider a practical example of how Bayes' rule
works. A medical doctor faced with the following data D, a patient with
a cough, contemplates three hypothetical diseases: a lung cancer (H1),
a cold (H2) or gastroenteritis (H3). The relative merit
of each hypothesis can be deconstructed as follows according to Bayes’ rule.
Patients usually cough when afflicted by lung cancer or a cold but rarely in
the case of gastroenteritis. Therefore, the likelihood of the potential cause
for the cough is high under H1 and H2 and low under H3.
Second, a cold and gastroenteritis are much more prevalent diseases than lung
cancer in the general population. The a priori likelihood
of H2 and H3 is much higher than that of H1.
Given that only H2 scores high both in a priori and current
evidence, the most likely disease given the symptoms is a cold. Stated
more generally, Bayes’ rule says that our degree of belief in a hypothesis H
given some current data D depends on the a priori likelihood of
this hypothesis (what we know about it, independent of the current data), and
the likelihood of the current data given this hypothesis. Formally, degrees of
belief and likelihoods correspond to probabilities [1] and Bayes’ rule reads: p(H|D) = p(D|H)*p(H)/p(D). Bayes’
rule distinguishes between our belief a priori in the hypothesis p(H)
and our belief in this hypothesis a posteriori, p(H|D), once particular
data are considered to evaluate it. The notation p(D|H) is a shorthand for the
probability of D given that we know H (the so-called likelihood of the
data) and p(H|D) for the probability of H given that we know D. Several
aspects of Bayes’ rule are noteworthy. First, it is extremely general – H and D
may be any sort of variables as long as they can be assigned a probability.
Second, Bayes’ rule is quantitative: the posterior probability on the
left hand side accepts only one value that depends on the terms in the right
hand side. This means that Bayes’ rule offers a unique way to combine uncertain
quantities such as current evidence and prior knowledge in order to estimate
the likelihood of a conclusion.In
that sense, Bayes’ rule is normative: any other estimate is an over- or
under-estimation of the likelihood of the conclusion. This normative nature of
Bayes’ rule can be seen as an extension of classical logic. With classical
logic, one can derive the validity of a conclusion, which is either true or
false from premises that are known for sure. With Bayes’ rule, one can derive
the likelihood of a conclusion, which varies on a continuum, from premises that
suffer from uncertainty. Another key
aspect of Bayes’ rule is its symmetry: p(H|D) and p(D|H) appear on opposite
sides of the equation which allows going from one to the other. The likelihood
of current data given a particular hypothesis – p(D|H) – corresponds to solving
a direct or “forward” problem: estimating what should be observed given a known
cause. Bayes’ rule allows reversing the logic to infer what might be the
unknown cause of particular observations – P(H|D). HOW THE BRAIN IS BAYESIAN With
these mathematical foundations in mind, the brain can be said to be Bayesian in
at least three ways. A first key idea is that the brain computes and represents
quantities that are probabilistic [2].
In the perceptual domain, this means that every feature of a visual scene is
represented by probabilities. For instance, the orientation of a line is not
encoded as a single tilt value, but as a distribution of tilt values across
several neurons in the visual cortex. Indeed, each of these neurons is tuned
for a particular orientation and it responds more intensely when the input data
conform to its preferred orientation. Such a neuron therefore acts as a
“likelihood detector”: its activity signals the probability of the line having
its preferred orientation. Because
different neurons are tuned to different orientations, their activity
collectively encodes the likelihood of the tilt [3]. This probabilistic view may contrast with
the apparent “oneness” of perception. When viewing a scene, we access only one
percept at a time, and not distinct hypothetical percepts associated with
probabilities. However, recent theories show that this all-or-none processing
is the exception rather than the rule in the brain. This “oneness” results from
conscious processes that select and amplify one possible interpretation among
many [4]. By contrast, most brain
processes operate without consciousness and rely on distributions of values and
probabilistic computations. A
second Bayesian view of the brain is that the internal knowledge and percepts
represented by neurons are constructed following Bayes' rule. This internal
knowledge therefore constitutes a posterior belief about the causes of the inputs
received by the brain [5,6]. This
inference is usually fraught with uncertainty as the brain must make sense of
the world based on inputs that are limited and ambiguous. For instance,
different three-dimensional shapes in the world may result in the same image
once they are projected onto our eyes. There is therefore a real challenge for
the brain to perceive the world despite the paucity and the ambiguity of its
inputs. This is an old idea in psychology, identified by the 19th century
German scientist von Helmholtz. The Bayesian framework is made to handle
inference from uncertain data, and it
even offers a principled remedy: combining the uncertain evidence
provided by sensory inputs with prior knowledge. There
is ample experimental evidence that perception relies on prior information to
compensate for the poverty of the inputs received. Many biases and visual
illusions reveal this automatic reliance on prior information. For instance,
when observers are asked to evaluate the tilt of a line, they tend to perceive
lines that are nearly vertical as purely vertical, and nearly horizontal as
purely horizontal. These orientations are indeed much more frequent in our
world. The perceived orientation of a line that weakly departs from these
frequent orientations is therefore dominated by our prior expectations [7]. Studies in non-human animals showed
that these priors are learned during development from experience. As a result,
priors become part of our cortical networks in such a way that they shape their
spontaneous activity [8]. When there is
no stimulus to drive neuronal activity, the spontaneous activity is dominated
by prior expectations. This is because in the absence of input data, the
posterior probability in Bayes' rule boils down to the prior probability. Lastly,
Bayes' rule allows for inferring the causes of current observations. By
building on this knowledge of the causes, one can in turn predict future
observations [5]. This predictive nature
of Bayes' rule is the third pillar of the Bayesian view of the brain. Brain
imaging and recordings of neurons show that the brain constantly uses previous
observations to form expectations about the upcoming events. Such expectations
can build up rapidly even in very simple contexts. For instance, upon hearing
the four tones “bip”, “bip”, “bip”, “bip” in a row, you may expect that the
fifth sound will be another “bip”. Several brain regions increase their
activity if the fifth sound is “bop” instead of “bip” [9–11]. This increased activity signals
that there is an error: the current expectation appears violated.
Interestingly, this error signal is much larger when the expectation was high.
An even larger response is recorded if the deviant sound occurs after ten
repetitions of “bip” as compared to only four such repetitions. These error
signals are actually quantitative: in this simple experiment, they match the
expected frequency of sounds that can be inferred using Bayes' rule and the
sounds already presented. It is noteworthy that individuals with schizophrenia
exhibit significantly lower error signals on electroencephalograms than do
healthy individuals in this kind of paradigm, suggesting that statistical
inference might be impaired in this pathology. [12,13]. Other experiments used carefully
designed sequences of stimuli to show that the brain is capable of learning
more complex statistics and even abstract rules [14,15]. Remarkably, experiments in infants
and babies showed that this Bayesian machinery operates early in life. Young
babies are already capable of quantitative predictions based only on a few
observations [16,17]. A
major strength of the Bayesian view of the brain is its unifying power. The few
examples reported here show that many brain processes can be accounted for by
Bayesian principles. It is true across species (in humans and other animals),
spatial scales (from single neurons to neuronal networks to brain-scale
circuits), cognitive domains (perception, learning, decision making) and stages
of development (in neonates, infants and adults). It may even be true of
evolution. This is because Bayes' rule is normative: if a particular process
deviates from it, then other processes, closer to Bayes' rule, will do better.
By selection, processes should gradually approach Bayes' rule, as we see in
well-tuned systems such as the human visual cortex. FUTURE
CHALLENGES This
Bayesian view has proved quite successful in neuroscience, although controversy
should be acknowledged [18,19].
Challenges nonetheless remain for the future. The most critical one is that
Bayesian principles constrain what computations should be, but they leave their
implementation entirely open. Indeed, there are often many different ways to
solve the same computation. Future works will aim at identifying the specific
algorithms that the brain uses for Bayesian computations. Another
challenge is that Bayesian views have been applied so far mostly to perception
because this is the domain in which neuroscience is the most advanced. However,
future works will probe Bayesian computations in other domains, such as
decision making [20–23]. They should
also probe the extent to which Bayesian computations and their associated
uncertainty levels are accessible to introspection. Recent studies showed that
the “sense of confidence” – the degree of belief that we attach to our
percepts, memories and decisions – is actually much more sophisticated in
humans than previously envisaged [24,25].
Wrong, wrong, wrong!!! Realistically the only person who is going to help you recover is yourself. YOU have to do all the exercises/work. All these people listed just tell you maybe what you need to do to recover. There are no pills, no magic, no miracles to recovery. It is an insane amount of work on YOUR part to recover. These people may be nagging or cheerleading you on your exercises but YOU have to do them. The sooner you learn that the less you will be depressed. http://www.everydayhealth.com/news/recovering-from-stroke-9-people-who-will-help-you-heal/
We need more innovative people like this in stroke rather than the moribund fossils in our stroke associations. So instead of your therapist asking you if you are tired and want to quit, they should be driving you to exhaustion every session. An excellent example of what a protocol should look like. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/helping-hand-annals-of-medicine-karen-russell
A couple of fascinating paragraph from here:
Stroke-induced injury to the brain may
have a silver lining, neurologically speaking. The tissue death that
results from stroke appears to trigger a self-repair program in the
brain. For between one and three months, the brain enters a growth phase
of molecular, physiological, and structural change that in some ways
resembles the brain environment of infancy and early childhood. The
brain becomes, as one researcher told me, “exquisitely sensitive to our
behavior.” What follows is a sort of “G.P.S. recalculating” period.
Networks of brain cells begin to reroute around the stroke lesion, and
neurons adjacent to the lesion start to take over some of the dead
cells’ functions. S. Thomas Carmichael, a neuroscientist and neurologist
at U.C.L.A., compared the period of plasticity to the explosion of
seedlings after a forest fire: it’s a fecund time, but those shoots are
tender, vulnerable, easily damaged. He cautioned that it’s essential to
harness that growth. “You wouldn’t turn this growth phase on and plunk
somebody in front of the television to binge-watch ‘Modern Family,’ ” he
joked.
But,
for many patients, that is essentially what happens. A 2004 University
of Melbourne study, titled “Inactive and Alone,” showed that, in the
early weeks of acute-stroke care, most patients spend fifty-three per
cent of their time in their hospital beds. According to a later study,
stroke patients who receive physical therapy for their paretic arm make,
on average, thirty-two reaches per session. When neuroscientists
perform studies on post-stroke mice, rats, and monkeys, the animals are
required to make as many as four hundred to five hundred reaches per
session. “Around thirty reaches per rehab session is having no impact on
impairment,” Krakauer said. “We are providing physical therapy at
homeopathic doses.”
Another
problem, Krakauer said, is that patients are being prematurely made to
learn compensatory strategies. They lean heavily on their good side to
get out of bed, to get to the toilet, to wash and feed themselves. As
one neurologist described it, learning such strategies can mean “the
difference between having someone wipe your butt and wiping your own
butt.” But Krakauer worries that the accommodations that make a patient
more independent in the short term actually “stamp in suboptimal
strategies.” True recovery, for Krakauer, would mean that a patient was
able to move her paretic arm as she did before the stroke.
I quit reading on the first page when they talked about you can learn ways to compensate. I really expect my therapists help me recover not just compensate. But then this is from the NSA so I don't expect anything useful from them at all. WE have to demand recovery otherwise our stroke medical professionals will never get off their asses and do the right thing.
A couple selected sentences;
Without microbes, there is a much higher level of stress steroids from the hypothalamus (corticosteroids) and a lower level of BDNF, (brain derived neurotrophic factor stimulates new neurons and brain connections).
Mice without microbes have decreases in several important neurotransmitters and factors. BDNF is lower, which affects the development of new brain cells for memory.
Also, microbes make many other small molecules that can be neuro modulators or new neurotransmitters. This includes serotonin, dopamine, GABA, epinephrine, acetylcholine and others.
Mice
without microbes have decreases in several important neurotransmitters
and factors. BDNF is lower, which affects the development of new brain
cells for memory. - See more at:
http://jonlieffmd.com/blog/microbes-effect-on-the-brain#sthash.O7jw4XzD.dpuf
Without
microbes, there is a much higher level of stress steroids from the
hypothalamus (corticosteroids) and a lower level of BDNF, (brain derived
neurotrophic factor stimulates new neurons and brain connections). -
See more at:
http://jonlieffmd.com/blog/microbes-effect-on-the-brain#sthash.O7jw4XzD.dpuf
Knowledge
regarding neuroplasticity post-stroke is increasingly expanding. In
spite of this, only a few physiotherapy interventions have been able to
demonstrate effectiveness in achieving recovery of lost sensorimotor
control. The aims of this review article are to highlight and discuss
challenges for physiotherapists working with patients post-stroke, to
question some current assessment methods and treatment approaches, and
to pose critical questions indicating a possible new direction for
physiotherapists in stroke rehabilitation. Differentiation between
recovery and compensation post-stroke is increasingly being emphasized.
Implementation of this goal in the clinic is insufficient, with a lack
of assessment tools with potential to discriminate between the concepts.
Large-scale reviews are performed without considering whether
functional gains are achieved through “more effective” compensatory
strategies or through recovery. Cortical plasticity in
neurorehabilitation research and voluntary control in contemporary
treatment methods are in focus. Challenges for physiotherapists in
stroke rehabilitation consist of rethinking, including looking upon the
body under the influence of gravity, focusing on implicit factors that
impact movement control and developing new assessment tools. The
introduction of a new assessment and treatment concept aiming at
expanding the boundaries of center of mass movements towards the paretic
side is proposed. In conclusion, we need to assume our responsibilities
and step forward as the experts in movement science that we have the
potential to be.
Does your doctor even have the word recovery in their vocabulary? My definition of it has changed considerably. Now it's doing whatever I want to do, not what I used to do. I will probably never paddle a whitewater canoe safely in class III water ever again. That was a big part of my life and I have trophies to prove it.
8 years of recovery and I've still a long ways to go. My goals are extremely high but then I could do it all before and I still want to get back to most of the stuff I used to do. Running, biking, whitewater canoeing, swimming.
I can't really see any improvement in the stroke world. Our stroke associations are still worthless, they can't get away from the lazy press release concept and still think F.A.S.T. and tPA are what the focus should be on.
I'm still probably happier than at any time in my life. I've made wonderful friends here in Michigan, I'm no longer married, and I know what I'm going to do for my purpose in life.
The
bad news: Women who survive stroke have a worse quality of life than
men, according to a study published in the Feb. 7 online issue of the
journal Neurology.
Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center compared
the quality of life in men and women who had a stroke or transient
ischemic attack (TIA). A total of 1,370 patients ages 56 to 77 from the
AVAIL registry – a national, multicenter, longitudinal registry of
ischemic stroke and TIA patients – were included in the study.
The
patients’ quality of life was measured at three months and one year
after a stroke or TIA using a formula that assesses mobility, self-care,
everyday activities, depression/anxiety and pain.
“We found
that women had a worse quality of life than men up to 12 months
following a stroke, even after considering differences in important
sociodemographic variables, stroke severity and disability,” said Cheryl
Bushnell, M.D., associate professor of neurology at Wake Forest Baptist
and senior author of the study.
“As more people survive
strokes, physicians and other healthcare providers should pay attention
to quality of life issues and work to develop better interventions, even
gender-specific screening tools, to improve these patients’ lives.”
The
study findings showed that at three months, women were more likely than
men to report problems with mobility, pain/discomfort and anxiety and
depression, but the difference was greatest in those over age 75. At one
year, women still had lower quality of life scores overall than men but
the magnitude of those differences had diminished, Bushnell said.
“The
reason we do these types of studies is to be able to add different
variables sequentially to determine what accounts for these gender
differences,” Bushnell said. “We found that age, race and marital status
accounted for the biggest differences between men and women at three
months, with marital status being the most important. Even though the
women in the study were older than the men, our study showed that age
really had very little effect on quality of life.”
The results
suggest that further research on mobility, pain or discomfort and
anxiety/depression may provide a clearer understanding for how to
improve the lives of women after stroke, Bushnell added.
The
next step for the Wake Forest Baptist team will be to look at the
trajectory of cognitive decline in men and women before and after
stroke, she said.
Co-authors of the study are Mathew J. Reeves,
Ph.D., Michigan State University; Xin Zhao, M.S., Wenqin Pan, Ph.D.,
Louise Zimmer, M.A., M.P.H., Eric Peterson, M.D., M.P.H., of Duke
Clinical Research Institute; Janet Prvu-Bettger, Sc.D., Duke University
School of Nursing; and DaiWai Olson, Ph.D., R.N., University of Texas
Southwestern.
Support for the study was provided by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke KO2 NS058760.
Adam H. Marblestone1*, Greg Wayne2 and
Konrad Kording3
Dorothy L. Tengler, MA, is a freelance medical
writer/communication specialist with nearly 20 years of experience in
the pharmaceutical and medical communication industries. She has
developed educational and medical marketing materials, including
monographs, slide kits, health articles, primary and review manuscripts,
and pharmaceutical sales training materials.
