“Thinking cap” is far easier to say than “excitatory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation,” but the message is the same: a helmet that helps people learn.
For the moment, learning is restricted to tracking on-screen targets in the laboratory of physical therapist Lara Boyd at the University of British Columbia. But her brain-tingling technique might eventually help stroke victims recover their coordination.
In an experiment published Tuesday in BMC Neuroscience, Boyd put 30 people into a machine that sent electromagnetic waves into their premotor cortexes, a brain region associated with learning motor skills.
Afterwards, test subjects used a joystick to track a moving target. Sometimes its movements were random, and sometimes they were repeated. After four days of tests, subjects who received a full dose of brain stimulation were better at tracking repeated patterns than those who received a low dose, or none at all.
And the 30 subjects … were that patients or healthy subjects. Healthy subjects will have to be tested very thoroughly on forehand to get at least trustworthy results .. which they often don’t. These skills are not a standard in healthy people either .. our levels are different in this … so maybe they checked improvements on personal levels? From what I read they didn’t …
However .. whatever will help people who had a stroke recover sooner/better … who would not want that.
And if it does not help … it’s at least worth trying it. It takes up less energy at least than physical exercise.
And maybe these muscle pains and such many suffer from after having had a stroke and recovered from it more or less … will get less. Some get stuck with quite a lot of physical stuff which wont really improve completely. Enough to make them even more tired. Even if they look more or less normal again to others. They dont complain that much, consider theirselves lucky that they recovered at least that far again, but hey .. they are enttled to an even better recovery ofcourse, if possible. Therefor I vote for this type of research.