A Celebratory End to Our Stroke Series
Last night I had the pleasure of attending the Stroke Comeback Center’s 10th Anniversary Gala and presenting John Phillips with his Disruptive Man of the Month t-shirt. Attending the Gala and seeing all the work done on behalf of and by stroke survivors was inspiring.
Photo credit:Rick Martin Photography. www.rickmartin.com
I hope you have enjoyed the series on stroke and women. It is a health issue that sometimes goes undiscussed, but with 15 million people worldwide suffering from a stroke each year, it is critical that individuals be informed of the warning signs and lifestyle changes that can lower risk of stroke sig...
Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - October 31, 2014 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: dw at disruptivewomen.net Tags: Women's Health Source Type: blogs
An Innovative Approach to Stroke & Aphasia Recovery: Part 2, Groups
One day long ago I found myself dancercising in the basement of a bingo hall. This was, to make a gross understatement, way out of my newly single comfort zone. I was awkward at best and going the wrong way at worst, but I was in a group with 200 others trying to do the same thing. I went back, and found a community of people I had little in common with other than this shared experience. I worked harder because I saw them working harder. Soon I knew a few routines and was offering encouragement to newcomers. I was getting more confident; healthier. You probably have a similar story – a group you didn’t expect to ...
Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - October 28, 2014 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: dw at disruptivewomen.net Tags: Advocacy Women's Health Source Type: blogs
An Innovative Approach to Stroke & Aphasia Recovery: Part 1, Life Participation
Here’s the scenario: A 51 year-old woman is having the worst headache she has ever experienced. Let’s call her Linda. She is concerned and decides to lie down to see if it subsides. Alone in the bedroom, she experiences a stroke. She is conscious but cannot move her right side and cannot call out for help. Her husband, let’s call him Jim, finds her, recognizes that something is terribly wrong and calls 9-1-1.
She is taken to the local hospital; the immediate question posed in the emergency room, “What time did symptoms occur?” Jim does not know and Linda cannot answer. She has been diagnosed as ha...
Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - October 27, 2014 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: dw at disruptivewomen.net Tags: Advocacy Women's Health Source Type: blogs
Two post docs in Philly
Postdoctoral Fellowship in Noninvasive Brain Stimulation in Neurorehabilitation and Aphasia Laboratory for Cognition and Neural Stimulation (LCNS), University of PennsylvaniaA postdoctoral fellowship is available in the Laboratory for Cognition and Neural Stimulation (LCNS) under the direction of Roy Hamilton, MD, MS, a behavioral neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). The central thrust of work in the LCNS is to use electrical and magnetic noninvasive brain stimulation to explore the characteristics and limits of functional plasticity in the intact and injured adult human brain. The principle NIH-grant...
Source: Talking Brains - September 26, 2014 Category: Neurologists Authors: Greg Hickok Source Type: blogs
Aphasia and the brain: from syndromes to symptoms to computations
For the first 100 years of modern aphasia research (~since the 1860s) the focus was mainly on syndromes: motor (Broca's) aphasia, sensory (Wernicke's) aphasia, conduction aphasia, and so on. Things changed after the Cognitive... er, make that the Information Processing Revolution (see discussion here or here) when symptoms came more into focus. The symptom approach was an important advance and is still dominant, as the popular method, voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM), highlights. But mapping symptoms isn't the goal. What we are really after are the computations that underlie the sy...
Source: Talking Brains - September 16, 2014 Category: Neurologists Authors: Greg Hickok Source Type: blogs
Best Post of May 2014: Primary Progressive Aphasia (non-fluent/agrammatic variant) in a patient with Pick disease
The next in our "Best of the Month" series is from May 14, 2014:I recently performed an autopsy on a 67-year-old man had a seven-year history of progressive difficulty with halting speech. His wife described him as seeming to be “groping for words”. Three years after initial presentation, he demonstrated profound difficulty both initiating and finishing sentences. His verbal communication was marked by jumbled grammatical errors in which he put words in the wrong order and tense. For example, when asked by his neurologist to recount his activities over the day, he responded: “Go I… the grocery store… to.” He ha...
Source: neuropathology blog - August 25, 2014 Category: Pathologists Tags: Best of the Month series frontotemporal dementia Source Type: blogs
Everything I ever needed to know I learned from Wernicke
Well, not quite, but here's an interesting quote from Wernicke 1874, as translated by Eggert 1977, that foreshadows much current work on sensorimotor control for speech production:Observations of daily speech usage and the process of speech development indicates [sic] the presence of an unconscious, repeated activation and simultaneous mental reverberation of the acoustic image which exercises a continuous monitoring of the motor images. [...This sensory-motor pathway] whose thousandfold use [during development] maintains a continuing significant control over the choice of the correct motor image. […] Apart from impairme...
Source: Talking Brains - July 30, 2014 Category: Neurologists Authors: Greg Hickok Source Type: blogs
Sensorimotor area Spt under attack (but they're shooting blanks): Reply to Parker Jones et al. 2014
A recent report in Frontiers (link to it here) by my good friends Oiwi Parker Jones (first author) and Cathy Price (senior author) challenges the claim that area Spt is a sensorimotor integration area for vocal tract actions. Their attack comes from multiple fronts, both fMRI and lesion data. On the fMRI side they sought to determine whether Spt was more active during repetition tasks, particularly for pseudowords which demand sensory-to-motor translation, compared to two auditory naming tasks. One involved listening to animal sounds and naming the animal and the other involved listening to someone hummin...
Source: Talking Brains - July 29, 2014 Category: Neurologists Authors: Greg Hickok Source Type: blogs
Where does the 10% myth come from?
No one knows exactly. A nice summary of what we do know is provided in a recent WIRED piece here. William James was thought to play a role, based on a quote from Dale Carnegie's book, How to win friends and influence people, but this may have been a misquote. Kolb and Wishaw's classic text, Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology suggests Flourens work in the early 1800s as a likely empirical foundation for the myth. Flourens of course is famous for his empirical attack on phrenology. His method involved ablation studies in a variety of animals--chickens, pigeons, frogs, dogs, rabbits--in which h...
Source: Talking Brains - July 24, 2014 Category: Neurologists Authors: Greg Hickok Source Type: blogs
Two positions available in Stephen Wilson Lab, Univ of Arizona -- Post doc & Lab manager
Postdoctoral position, Language Neuroscience Laboratory, University of ArizonaA Postdoctoral position is available in the Language Neuroscience Laboratory (PI: Stephen M. Wilson) at the University of Arizona. The successful applicant will play a key role on an NIH-funded project investigating the neural correlates of recovery from aphasia after acute stroke.A Ph.D. is required in a relevant field, such as Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Cognitive Neuroscience, or Psychology. The ideal candidate will have (1) experience working with individuals with acquired language impairments, and (2) experience in conducting neu...
Source: Talking Brains - June 23, 2014 Category: Neurologists Authors: Greg Hickok Source Type: blogs
In honor of Rita Sloan Berndt
Rita Sloan Berndt passed away on Tuesday. Rita was an internationally recognized scholar and researcher, dedicated to the understanding of aphasia and its devastating effects on language communication. She was a true force in the field with a research program that was broad in scope. While she focused particularly on deficits in sentence comprehension and production in aphasia, she also examined impairments in reading, lexico-semantics, and category-specific naming. Although Rita published some of the first papers hypothesizing a general syntactic deficit in agrammatic Broca’s aphasia, she was also among the first to cha...
Source: Talking Brains - June 20, 2014 Category: Neurologists Authors: Greg Hickok Source Type: blogs
Talking Brains turns 7!
Today is the 7-year anniversary of the birth of Talking Brains. I thought it would be fun to repost our first blog entry:**********************WEDNESDAY, MAY 16, 2007The Cortical Organization of Speech ProcessingOur new article, "The Cortical Organization of Speech Processing" has recently been published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8, 393-402(May 2007). Although it is an extension of the model we proposed in our 2000 TICS and 2004 Cognition papers, there are several new features in the current proposal. One is the claim that within the ventral stream there are parallel routes from acoustic input to...
Source: Talking Brains - May 16, 2014 Category: Neurologists Authors: Greg Hickok Source Type: blogs
Primary progressive aphasia (non-fluent/agrammatic variant) in a patient with Pick disease
I recently performed an autopsy on a 67-year-old man had a seven-year history of progressive difficulty with halting speech. His wife described him as seeming to be “groping for words”. Three years after initial presentation, he demonstrated profound difficulty both initiating and finishing sentences. His verbal communication was marked by jumbled grammatical errors in which he put words in the wrong order and tense. For example, when asked by his neurologist to recount his activities over the day, he responded: “Go I… the grocery store… to.” He had no difficulty with naming objects or understanding their use. ...
Source: neuropathology blog - May 14, 2014 Category: Pathologists Tags: neurodegen dz (other) Source Type: blogs
The Problem With Running Medical Information Through A Digital Intermediary
In my last post I wrote about the communication difficulties caused by electronic medical records systems. The response on Twitter ranged from sentiments including everything from “right on, sister” to “greedy doctors are only complaining about EMRs because of their price tag.” The disconnect between policy wonk’s (and EMR vendor’s) belief in the transformative power of EMRs and exasperated clinician users of these products is jaw-dropping. Physicians are often labeled as obstinate dinosaurs, blocking progress, while policy wonks are considered by physicians to be living in an alternate ...
Source: Better Health - April 22, 2014 Category: American Health Authors: Dr. Val Jones Tags: Health Policy Humor Opinion Data Digital Electronic Hospital Records Electronic Medical Records EMR Flaws Government Rules HHS Meaningful Use Medical Charts Physician Revolt Poor Communication Quality Care Wonks Source Type: blogs
Six Writers Who Battled the Bottle
Book review.In The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, author Olivia Laing’s stated goal is “to know why writers drink, and what effect this stew of spirits has had upon the body of literature itself.” To which I can only say, best of luck. The goal is impossibly ambitious; the book itself a bit digressive and loosely organized. But Laing has harvested a satisfying litany of literary anecdotes related to drinking, and throws out a few of her own. The writers she submits to scrutiny are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, John Berryman, and Raymond Carver—all of them un...
Source: Addiction Inbox - February 26, 2014 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
