Discovering the neural mechanisms of skill learning

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?'"

Provided by: Carnegie Mellon University Materials Science and Engineering

Scientists have found a way to help you learn new skills twice as fast

Putting this together with

Why memories of mistakes may speed up learning

and your therapist should have a decent protocol for you to learn all those skills you lost as part of your stroke.

Scientists have found a way to help you learn new skills twice as fast

But I doubt any therapist in the world will do this. Our fucking failures of stroke associations certainly will not.
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The key to learning a new motor skill - such as playing the piano or mastering a new sport - isn't necessarily how many hours you spend practising, but the way you practise, according to new research. Scientists have found that by subtly varying your training, you can keep your brain more active throughout the learning process, and halve the time it takes to get up to scratch.
The research goes somewhat against the old assumption that simply repeating a motor skill over and over again - for example, practising scales on the piano or playing the same level on your game over and over again - was the best way to master it. Instead, it turns out there might be a quicker (and more enjoyable) way to level up.
"What we found is if you practise a slightly modified version of a task you want to master, you actually learn more and faster than if you just keep practising the exact same thing multiple times in a row," said lead researcher Pablo Celnik, from Johns Hopkins University.
The researchers figured this out by getting 86 volunteers to learn to a new skill - moving a cursor on a computer screen by squeezing a small device, instead of using a mouse.
The volunteers were split into three groups, and each spent 45 minutes practising this. Six hours later, one of the groups was asked to repeat the same training exercise again, while another group performed a slightly different version that required different squeezing force to move the cursor.
The third group only completed the first training session, so they could act as a control.
At the end of the training period, everyone was tested on how accurately and quickly they could perform the new skill, and predictably, the control group did the worst after their one training session. But the surprise was that the group that had repeated the original training session actually did worse on the test compared to those who had mixed things up and trained in new areas - in fact, the group that modified their training did twice as well as those who'd repeated the original skill.
So how does that work? The researchers believe it's due to something called reconsolidation, which is a process whereby existing memories are recalled and modified with new knowledge. It's long been suggested that reconsolidation could help to strengthen motor skills, but this is one of the first experiments to test that hypothesis.
This is also why the researchers gave the participants a 6-hour gap between training session - earlier neurological research has shown that's how long it takes for our memories to reconsolidate.
"Our results are important because little was known before about how reconsolidation works in relation to motor skill development. This shows how simple manipulations during training can lead to more rapid and larger motor skill gains because of reconsolidation," said Celnik. "The goal is to develop novel behavioural interventions and training schedules that give people more improvement for the same amount of practise time."
Although there's benefit in mixing things up with your practise, Celnik said the key was adjusting things subtly - for example, adjusting the size or weight of a baseball bat, tennis racket or soccer ball in between practise sessions.
"If you make the altered task too different, people do not get the gain we observed during reconsolidation. The modification between sessions needs to be subtle," he added.
Although these results are pretty exciting, this study has only tested one particular skill-set, and so further research needs to be done to confirm the findings. But if true, finding an easy way to double the rate at which people can learn new motor skills would be a huge deal.
In addition to helping us all tick off our 2016 resolutions in half the time - hello, finally mastering Debussy's Clair de Lune - there are more altruistic impacts of the research. The research has "strong implications for rehabilitation", the authors write in Current Biology. For example, the new information could help amputees learn to use their prostheses faster, or speed up the recover of people who've suffered from spinal injuries or stroke.
We're pretty keen to try it out.

Myelin Vital for Learning New Practical Skills

If this is truly the case, what is your doctor doing to make sure you have enough myelin to recover your skills? ANYTHING AT ALL?
http://www.biosciencetechnology.com/news/2014/10/myelin-vital-learning-new-practical-skills?
New evidence of myelin’s essential role in learning and retaining new practical skills, such as playing a musical instrument, has been uncovered by UCL research. Myelin is a fatty substance that insulates the brain's wiring and is a major constituent of "white matter." It is produced by the brain and spinal cord into early adulthood as it is needed for many developmental processes, and although earlier studies of human white matter hinted at its involvement in skill learning, this is the first time it has been confirmed experimentally.

The study in mice, published in Science, shows that new myelin must be made each time a skill is learned later in life and the structure of the brain’s white matter changes during new practical activities by increasing the number of myelin-producing cells. Furthermore, the team say once a new skill has been learnt, it is retained even after myelin production stops. These discoveries could prove important in finding ways to stimulate and improve learning, and in understanding myelin’s involvement in other brain processes, such as in cognition.

For a child to learn to walk or an adult to master a new skill such as juggling, new brain circuit activity is needed and new connections are made across large distances and at high speeds between different parts of the brain and spinal cord. For this, electrical signals fire between neurons connected by “axons”– thread-like extensions of their outer surfaces which can be viewed as the "wire" in the electric circuit. When new signals fire repeatedly along axons, the connections between the neurons strengthen, making them easier to fire in the same pattern in future. Neighboring myelin-producing cells called oligodendrocytes (OLs) recognize the repeating signal and wrap myelin around the active circuit wiring. It is this activity-driven insulation that the team identified as essential for learning.

The team demonstrated that young adult mice need to make myelin to learn new motor skills but that new myelin does not need to be produced to recall and perform a pre-learned skill. They tested the ability of mice to learn to run on a complex wheel with irregularly spaced rungs. The study looked at thirty-six normal mice and thirty-two mice with a drug-controlled genetic switch to prevent new OLs and myelin from being made. They found the mice that were prevented from producing new myelin could not master the complex wheel, whereas those that could produce myelin did learn, with differences between the two groups’ abilities seen after only two hours of practice.

A second experiment looked at mice that were first allowed to learn to run on the complex wheel before being treated with the drug to prevent further myelin production. When the mice were later re-introduced to the complex wheel, they were immediately able to run at top speed without having to spend time re-learning. This shows that the inability to make new myelin did not affect the mouse’s running ability and that new myelin is not required to remember and perform a skill once learned; it is required only during the initial learning phase.

"From earlier studies of human white matter using advanced MRI technology, we thought OLs and myelin might be involved in some way in skill learning, so we decided to attack this idea experimentally. We were surprised how quickly we saw differences in the ability of mice from each group to learn how to run on complex wheel, which shows just how fast the brain can respond to wrap newly-activated circuits in myelin and how this improves learning. This rapid response suggests that a number of alternative axon pathways might already exist in the brain that could be used to drive a particular sequence of movements, but it quickly works out which of those circuits is most efficient and both selects and protects its chosen route with myelin," said Lead Researcher and Professor Bill Richardson, director of the UCL Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research.

Richardson added: “We think these findings are really exciting as they open up opportunities to investigate the role of OLs and myelin in other brain processes, such as cognitive activities (like navigating through a maze), to see if the requirement for new myelin is general or specific to motor activity. I’m keen to find out the precise sequence of changes to OLs and myelin during learning and whether these changes are needed more in some parts of the brain than others, which might shed light on some of the mysteries still surrounding how the brain adapts and learns throughout life.”

Source: University College London

A Vital Measure: Your Surgeon’s Skill

All this discussion on the skill of surgeons. Where is the comparable reporting of neurologists skill? Or is that an oxymoron? What is your neurologists efficacy? Better than 10%? 

A Vital Measure: Your Surgeon’s Skill

Physical skill learning increases neurogenesis through cell survival in the hippocampus

Ask your doctor exactly what you need to do after exercise to ensure new neuron survival. Don't take,'I don't know'. for an answer.
 http://mss3.libraries.rutgers.edu/dlr/showfed.php?pid=rutgers-lib:38735

DescriptionThe dentate gyrus is a major site of plasticity in the adult brain, giving rise to thousands of new neurons every day. While the majority of these cells die within two weeks of their birth, they can be rescued from death by various forms of learning. The successful acquisition of select types of associative and spatial memories can increase the number of these cells that survive. Here, we investigated the possibility that an entirely different form of learning, physical skill learning, could rescue these new neurons from death. To test this possibility, rats were trained with a physically-demanding and technically-difficult version of a rotarod procedure. Acquisition of the physical skill greatly increased the number of new hippocampal cells that survived. The number of surviving cells positively correlated with performance on the task. Only animals that successfully learned the task retained the cells that would have otherwise died. Animals that failed to learn, and those that did not learn well, did not retain any more cells than those that were untrained. Importantly, acute voluntary exercise in activity wheels did not increase the number of surviving cells. These data indicate that skill learning, and not physical activity per se, increased the number of surviving cells. Moreover, learning an easier version of the task did not increase cell survival. These data are consistent with previous studies revealing that learning rescues new neurons from death, but only when acquisition is sufficiently difficult to achieve. Finally, complete hippocampal lesions did not disrupt acquisition of this physical skill. Therefore, learning this motor skill task does not depend on the hippocampus, even though it can increase the number of surviving cells in the structure. These data, and their implications, suggest that humans who learn new and complicated sports or other physical skills will retain more new neurons than humans that do not engage in effortful activities.