Multiple sclerosis and news buzz about it

I must admit that as a young PT student and newly minted PT who thought I was coming down with whatever new thing I learned about, or had the opportunity of meeting/treating people who had x or y condition, MS probably freaked me out the most. Of late, a very nice massage therapist I know personally, ended up with this diagnosis.

How wonderful that this ailment is currently being highlighted as a condition which could be, potentially at least, reversible with a simple surgical procedure. Who'd have thunk? After all these decades?

Here are the news stories I've come across so far:

CTV W5 The Liberation Treatment
Medpage Radical MS Theory Stirs Interest
BBC: Multiple sclerosis 'blood blockage theory' tested


Nov. 30/09
Edit: I'm back in this post to add a link to Dr. Zamboni's website, Fondazione HILARESCERE.
Some of his papers can be found there. At least for now.

Ego tunnels, conscious entities, virtual bodies and so on.

I have yet to read the book by Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel, but it's in the cart. Meanwhile I came upon a blog post, two in fact, by Peter Hankins at Conscious Entities blog, that set off a little speculative burst in my own brain.

Part I, and Part II.

In particular, this got my attention;

"There are many interesting details in this account, quite apart from its value as part of the overall argument. Metzinger briefly touches on four varieties of autoscopic (self-seeing) phenomena, all of which can be related to distinct areas of the brain: autoscopic hallucination, where the subject sees an image of themselves; the feeling of a presence, where the subject has the strong sense of someone there without seeing anyone; the particularly disturbing heautoscopy, where the subject sees another self and switches back and forth into and out of it, unsure which is ‘the real me’; and the better-known OBE."

It makes sense to me that multiple self-constructions/constructions of self would exist, given that there are many different body representations all throughout the brain, not just the big S1 map stretched over the top of the cortex, the famous one Wilder Penfield mapped out, and I didn't realize there were names already ascribed to the elicitation of their specific distortions..

A body misperception can be the absence of a familiar body sense just as well as it can be one that's displaced onto a mannequin or onto someone or something else entirely, or floating above.. in each case there will be a corresponding shift in neural traffic flow, the brain not operating in its own familiar manner, and part of it noticing that shift and confabulating predictive perceptual fantasies as to possible reasons why. As in the Charlie Rose Brain Series Part II, in which all the various visual perceptual distortions were touched on, body sense is subject to perceptual distortion. The science on this is younger, but is definitely happening, mostly in Europe, mostly referred to as research of virtual bodies, rubber hand illusions, etc etc. discussedmany times on this blog. It's all very fascinating, and likely to have a lot to do with learning to handle human pain issues much more adeptly with fewer drugs at some point.

Meanwhile, it won't be a bad idea to practice feeling your own normal body better, practice using normal brain pathways, strengthen them so that your brain maps don't get all out of whack some day, and in some misguided attempt at trying to locate body parts, make them spasm or make them hurt to be able to find them more easily - the neurological equivalent of lighting flares to see along a dark path.

Other reading:
1. Book review at Naturalism.org

Moving a humanantigravity suit around

I confess that my usual perspective on the nervous system is from outside in - I consider what happens when I put my hand on someone else's body part, and consider ensuing movement output as a consequence, as a nervous system's direct response.. there's almost always that idea of my inputting some sort of talented (or not) sensory input - first. That's how my treatment brain works - it uses the "operator"/"interactor" model, by default, usually, and my conceptualizations end up being informed by it.

I've been away from clinical work for over 4 months now, and my brain is learning to think in different ways. So, when I think of "movement" now, I'm seeing it in more abstract terms. Lately several papers and blogposts about movement have come to my attention. I don't know how they synthesize, yet.. but I'm paying attention to the process, at least. I'd like to outline a few thoughts about them, bearing in mind the role of the brain as predictor, oscillator, simulator. First though, I'm going to just link them here.

1. The Brain in its Body: Motor Control and Sensing in a Biomechanical Context The Hournal of Neuroscience

2. Podcast interview of Barrett Dorko by Rod Henderson, May '09

3. A sensory source for motor variation Nature

4. Physiologically impossible movement of phantom limbs explained at Body in Mind blog (Lorimer Moseley)

5. Tiny Laser-scanning Microscope Images Brain Cells In Freely Moving Animals Science Daily

6. Two Wrongs Make a Right – Abnormal Brain Circuitry May Stop Abnormal Movement BrainBlogger

7. A head of time: For the first time, neuroscientists find brain cells that keep track of time with extreme precision. MIT - Everything gets a timestamp.

8. NOI Notes on Movement as Antigen David Butler's blog/newsletter

9. Primate anterior cingulate cortex: where motor control, drive and cognition interface. 2001

Moving into a robotic hand

Here is another wonderful Mindhacks post: Inhabiting a robot hand Thank you Mindhacks.

This relates to all the posts here to do with robotics, haptics, virtual bodies, virtual body manipulation through mirror therapy or video, and rubber hand illusions. NOI twittered about the Mindhacks post in conjunction with Graded Motor Imagery, the virtual treatment they are promoting. Definitely worth boosting here as well.

Forty Years of Neuroscience

I want to thank MindHacks for constructing such an informative post. Here it is, complete with all its links to Journal of Neuroscience.
Around the Brain in Forty Years.

Self-amputation

There must be dozens of stories of this. A few years ago Oprah had as a guest a young woman who, trapped in a car which had gone off a bridge, hidden from view and possible rescue, self-amputated a leg to escape. About 5 years ago a young man hiking in the Grand Canyon became trapped when a rock tumbled and pinned his hand. He cut off the hand to escape.

It really makes one wonder what pain is, exactly.

In this story from yesterday (twittered by Mo of Neurophilosophy), a young man's leg was pinned by a concrete girder. He managed to cut most of it off himself, but a friend nearby had to help break the bone.

His brain decided the threat to his ongoing existence was greater than any threat from any upcoming nociception. It was capable of downregulating its own sensory input enough to allow him to remain conscious and focused and on task, as it realized this was its organism's only shot at surviving. In this way the seemingly impossible becomes possible, without loss of consciousness, and in spite of what must be a large loss of blood.

Fractals, brains, Pi

A fellow-traveler on SomaSimple found this blogpost, Fractal Thoughts on Fractal Brains by David Pinkus, an interesting sequence of thoughts spurred by an open access article, Broadband Criticality of Human Brain Network Synchronization.

The word "fractal" always conjures up in my mind an image of the Norwegian coastline, then another little tidbit that always has stuck with me, about pi,

"Pi also appears as the average ratio of the actual length and the direct distance between source and mouth in a meandering river (Stølum 1996, Singh 1997)."

From the blogpost:

"The design, results and context for this study are very sophisticated, and the implications are quite abstract. So I’m going to do my best to be clear. First the context: Many natural systems exhibit fractal organization and behavior. A fractal is a branchlike structure. Think of a tree: (1) Trees have many more small branches than large ones. This characteristic is also sometimes called a “power-law” or “inverse power law” or a “1/f” organization. Each of these terms means that there are exponentially more small branches compared to big ones. (2) Trees are “self-similar,” meaning that small branching patterns resemble larger ones. This characteristic is also sometimes called “scale invariance” or “scale free” because no matter the size you are looking at, the general branching shape is the same. (3) The complexity of tree branching patterns can be quantified. Fractals are called “fractals” because they exist in fractional dimensions. A line fits perfectly in one-dimension. A plane (like a piece of paper) fits in two-dimensions. Fractals fit in between a line and a plane (or in the real world between two and three dimensions). More simply, because they are so complex, with huge numbers of tini tiny branches, trees never quite reach three dimensions. If you put them in a box, there will always be some space left over.

You may quickly recognize that many other natural structures besides trees are fractals: Neurons, rivers, the respiratory system, the circulatory system, geological fault lines, snow-flakes, and so on."

As if fractal form doesn't sound complex enough, there is fractal behaviour, apparently:

"Natural systems also produce fractal behavior over time or in dynamics. Earthquakes are a common example. There are many more small earthquakes than large ones (which is nice by the way). Other examples include the size of extinction events in animal species, numbers of academic publications (a few researchers do huge amounts of work and the rest of us do just a little), numbers of hits to web-sites, wait times in stop-and-go traffic, and word usage in literature (i.e., zipf’s law)."

Fractals as verbs as well as nouns. I've often thought of the brain as more verb than noun.