Word: pascual
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...fairly modest experiment, as these things go, with volunteers trooping into the lab at Harvard Medical School to learn and practice a little five-finger piano exercise. Neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone instructed the members of one group to play as fluidly as they could, trying to keep to the metronome's 60 beats per minute. Every day for five days, the volunteers practiced for two hours. Then they took a test...
...finding was in line with a growing number of discoveries at the time showing that greater use of a particular muscle causes the brain to devote more cortical real estate to it. But Pascual-Leone did not stop there. He extended the experiment by having another group of volunteers merely think about practicing the piano exercise. They played the simple piece of music in their head, holding their hands still while imagining how they would move their fingers. Then they too sat beneath the TMS coil...
...Mental practice resulted in a similar reorganization" of the brain, Pascual-Leone later wrote. If his results hold for other forms of movement (and there is no reason to think they don't), then mentally practicing a golf swing or a forward pass or a swimming turn could lead to mastery with less physical practice. Even more profound, the discovery showed that mental training had the power to change the physical structure of the brain...
Ocean-water patterns also play a role in human health. Mercedes Pascual and her colleagues at the University of Michigan have been poring over more than a century's worth of data on cholera outbreaks in Bangladesh and tying them to detailed temperature reports of the surface waters of the Pacific Ocean. True, Bangladesh isn't anywhere near the Pacific, but the researchers are using the temperature data as an indication of a larger weather pattern called the El Niņo/ Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. What they have found is that the severity of an epidemic is linked to water...
Using a slightly different approach, Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone at Harvard Medical School is beginning to see improvements in his stroke patients' speech. Instead of boosting activity in the compensating areas of the brain, Pascual-Leone is trying to disrupt the neural pathways that block recovery. "What the brain tries to do as a first-line response is to shut down activity in damaged areas," he explains. That gives the neurons that are only slightly damaged a chance to recover before coming back online. But in some stroke patients, the inhibitory network never lets up. By weakening those neurons with...