Tuesday, March 18, 2003

Sleight of Hand as the Brain Compensates for Deficits We have always known that in brain injury such as stroke, new pathways can be established to take over some of the functions of the damaged areas. In an article in this month’s Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers assessed the inter-hemispheric communication in the corpus collosum. In a test of handedness and task learning, they studied how well your dominant hand can learn a new task and evaluated how well the non-dominant hand can learn the same task. Comparing a patient with a commissurotomy with normal controls, they found that if the dominant hand learns the task first, the nondominant hand can also perform it. However, if you first learning something with your nondominant hand, it does not become generalized to your dominant. In addition, they also showed that the transfer of information from dominant to nondominant side of the brain did not depend on the corpus callosum. They point out that “the results suggest that when the dominant right arm is used in learning dynamics, the information could be represented in the left hemisphere with neural elements tuned to both the right arm and the left arm. In contrast, learning with the nondominant arm seems to rely on the elements in the nondominant hemisphere tuned only to movements of that arm.” Although more research needs to be done, this offers some interesting possibilities and directions for physical rehabilitation. Perhaps rather than wait for some future gene studies to create a personalized brain map for each of us, we should create a baseline profile of our dominant and non-dominant brain characteristics over a regular time period.  Much like doing a regular baseline bloodwork series, we can compare changes over time and target rehabilitative efforts. This has been suggested in Alzheimer’s and other disabling dementias. 11:38:10 PM    comment []

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