Word: neural
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...motorcycle trip to the U.K. to visit his sister, he was in an accident and broke his neck. Except for some minor movement in his shoulders, left arm and left hand, he was paralyzed below the neck. Holgersen underwent an experimental surgical procedure to implant a neural prosthesis - an interface between an electronic device and the human nervous system - to bypass the damaged stretches of his spinal cord and restore some movement to his limbs...
Paralysis results from neck and spinal cord injuries because the neural traffic that moves between the brain and the muscles is severed or blocked. Like a kink in a garden hose, spinal trauma cuts off the flow of information that travels along afferent nerves, which send signals from the body to the brain, and efferent nerves, which carry instructions from the brain to the body's musculature. In many cases of paralysis, though, the motor and sensory nerves below the level of the lesion remain intact and could function again...
Take, for instance, the case of pain as an example of conscious experience. Distinguished philosopher of mind Jaegwon Kim writes, in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, that anti-physicalists have adduced the argument that “even if, say, pain should turn out to have a single neural-physical correlate across all organisms and other possible pain-capable systems, how could the painfulness of pain be a neurobiological property? In moving from the mental to the physical, we lose, it has been argued, what’s distinctively mental about mental properties...
...that folic acid may reduce the risk of heart disease, but it is best known for its role in preventing spina bifida and other birth defects. Indeed ever since 1998, when the Food and Drug Administration mandated that it be added to cereal products, the number of so-called neural-tube defects has dropped nearly...
Borsook said he agrees that although there is no “magic potion” for the treatment of chronic pain, his study’s findings could lead to the creation of drugs that will target pain-related neural circuits more directly...