Motor activation may help cognitive disorder
Motor activation may help cognitive disorder
canadian online pharmacy - Patients suffering from inattention as a result of stroke or traumatic brain injury may be able to overcome their cognitive difficulties through activation of motor movement in the left body space. According to Dr. Ian Robertson (PhD) "attention is basically a preparation to act and therefore if you program a motor movement you can activate the attentional circuits." The senior scientist from the applied psychology unit at the Medical Research Council Cambridge England was speaking at the recent Rotman Research Institute conference on cognitive rehabilitation. "By creating a motor activation on the hemiplegic side we are able to spread activation into those attention circuits which are partly responsible for the spatial inattention. In other words we are getting at the impaired system by activating a related system" Dr. Robertson said. To illustrate his point he related the results of an experiment involving six patients with unilateral neglect but unimpaired mobility. When the subjects were asked to walk through the door all veered to the right. However when told to clench and unclench their left hand as they passed through the door two-thirds straightened their course. "Clearly some of them are doing something with their motor system in the left side of the body which seems to affect their perception system" Dr. Robertson said. The finding prompted him to combine a functional standard approach with an activation approach. To that end patients were taught to place their left arm at the left boundary of whatever activity they were doing (washing eating reading using the telephone etc.) and to scan until they found it. Use of the left arm as a perceptual anchor meant patients were not only benefiting from a cuing effect but were also enjoying a motor activation effect. "We got quite long-lasting and significant improvements in four separate well controlled single-case studies which were later replicated" he told the audience. Dr. Robertson and colleagues have now incorporated this motor activation effect into a small buzzer device with two switches which clips onto a patient's belt. Dubbed the Neglect Alert the unit randomly buzzes and reminds its user to make a unilateral movement to switch it off. The system may be simple and the movement it solicits from the hemiplegic side limited but the effects it has on functional spatial behavior appear to be enduring he said. "There are are two possibilities to what is happening here" Dr. Robertson said. "One is that you are simply drawing attention over here so it's just a rather good form of cuing. The second and more interesting possibility is that attention is an early form of action and therefore if you program a motor movement you will activate the attentional circuits." To test this theory Dr. Robertson's research team compared the effects of using the left arm as a perceptual anchor to moving the fingers on the partially hemiplegic left hand every 10 seconds while doing a cancellation task. They found that scanning to the left did little to reduce the number of errors whereas movement of the left hand did. That positive effect however was confined to instances where left-hand movements were in left-body space. In explaining the results he outlined the three areas of space in which humans are believed to function: - personal body space or the space bounded by the skin - reaching space or the space within which we reach grab and manually operate and - far space or the space within which we move about. "There is reasonably good evidence that these areas of space are controlled by three separate circuits in the brain which are closely interlinked but independent" he said. Dr. Robertson said there are patients who have neglect of one space but not another. "An example of this is a patient who we spent an entire day testing who showed dramatic neglect on standard cancellation tasks but then casually mentioned he was off going to play darts. He had neglect of reaching space but not of far space." Dr. Robertson said left hand movements in left body space improve the patient's cognitive status because the action results in the activation of not one but two circuits the left representation of both body space and reaching space. "That combined activation is enough to overcome the inhibition from the healthy left hemisphere." In closing Dr. Robertson said: "The functional relevance of cognitive rehabilitation is paramount but we must not throw out the cognitive baby with the functional bath water. We must maintain a sophisticated approach and draw on the creativity of cognitive psychology and begin to apply it in a sophisticated way." buy generic viagra online
canadian online pharmacy - Patients suffering from inattention as a result of stroke or traumatic brain injury may be able to overcome their cognitive difficulties through activation of motor movement in the left body space. According to Dr. Ian Robertson (PhD) "attention is basically a preparation to act and therefore if you program a motor movement you can activate the attentional circuits." The senior scientist from the applied psychology unit at the Medical Research Council Cambridge England was speaking at the recent Rotman Research Institute conference on cognitive rehabilitation. "By creating a motor activation on the hemiplegic side we are able to spread activation into those attention circuits which are partly responsible for the spatial inattention. In other words we are getting at the impaired system by activating a related system" Dr. Robertson said. To illustrate his point he related the results of an experiment involving six patients with unilateral neglect but unimpaired mobility. When the subjects were asked to walk through the door all veered to the right. However when told to clench and unclench their left hand as they passed through the door two-thirds straightened their course. "Clearly some of them are doing something with their motor system in the left side of the body which seems to affect their perception system" Dr. Robertson said. The finding prompted him to combine a functional standard approach with an activation approach. To that end patients were taught to place their left arm at the left boundary of whatever activity they were doing (washing eating reading using the telephone etc.) and to scan until they found it. Use of the left arm as a perceptual anchor meant patients were not only benefiting from a cuing effect but were also enjoying a motor activation effect. "We got quite long-lasting and significant improvements in four separate well controlled single-case studies which were later replicated" he told the audience. Dr. Robertson and colleagues have now incorporated this motor activation effect into a small buzzer device with two switches which clips onto a patient's belt. Dubbed the Neglect Alert the unit randomly buzzes and reminds its user to make a unilateral movement to switch it off. The system may be simple and the movement it solicits from the hemiplegic side limited but the effects it has on functional spatial behavior appear to be enduring he said. "There are are two possibilities to what is happening here" Dr. Robertson said. "One is that you are simply drawing attention over here so it's just a rather good form of cuing. The second and more interesting possibility is that attention is an early form of action and therefore if you program a motor movement you will activate the attentional circuits." To test this theory Dr. Robertson's research team compared the effects of using the left arm as a perceptual anchor to moving the fingers on the partially hemiplegic left hand every 10 seconds while doing a cancellation task. They found that scanning to the left did little to reduce the number of errors whereas movement of the left hand did. That positive effect however was confined to instances where left-hand movements were in left-body space. In explaining the results he outlined the three areas of space in which humans are believed to function: - personal body space or the space bounded by the skin - reaching space or the space within which we reach grab and manually operate and - far space or the space within which we move about. "There is reasonably good evidence that these areas of space are controlled by three separate circuits in the brain which are closely interlinked but independent" he said. Dr. Robertson said there are patients who have neglect of one space but not another. "An example of this is a patient who we spent an entire day testing who showed dramatic neglect on standard cancellation tasks but then casually mentioned he was off going to play darts. He had neglect of reaching space but not of far space." Dr. Robertson said left hand movements in left body space improve the patient's cognitive status because the action results in the activation of not one but two circuits the left representation of both body space and reaching space. "That combined activation is enough to overcome the inhibition from the healthy left hemisphere." In closing Dr. Robertson said: "The functional relevance of cognitive rehabilitation is paramount but we must not throw out the cognitive baby with the functional bath water. We must maintain a sophisticated approach and draw on the creativity of cognitive psychology and begin to apply it in a sophisticated way." buy generic viagra online