Specialist Orlando Gonzalez, 23, is recovering from a brain injury received when a suicide bomber hit his infantry squad in Afghanistan. But otherwise not much is even tried to address the underlying injury. David Elkin, a psychiatrist at San Francisco General Hospital. patients in the hope of freeing up a patient’s cognitive reserves, said Dr. Sim said.ĭoctors sometimes prescribe medications to treat anxiety or depression in T.B.I. Patients are given scheduling apps for their hand-held devices and taught ways to compensate for memory loss, Dr. patients are mostly helped with “compensatory” strategies, said Tiffanie Sim, a neuropsychologist who sees many such patients at the VA’s Polytrauma Transitional Rehabilitation Program in Palo Alto. The commercially available software, which will be modified only slightly for the veterans study, presents challenges that increase in difficulty in increments small enough that fine-tuning adjustments can be made and then reinforced in the users’ brains. The objective of his software, he says, is to clarify a strong signal by repeatedly practicing simple tasks, like recognizing repeated visual patterns. Merzenich calls the “noisy” brain, is like a radio that, for any number of reasons, is badly tuned to its intended station. The question is, Can the same processes be employed to correct for brain damage? It is well established that this happens when we learn a new skill, like dancing. By doing specific brain exercises that focus and refine attention, he says, you can adjust the underlying structure of your brain. Merzenich’s core claim is that brain structure is always changing, based on what people do and what they pay attention to. Merzenich and his colleagues at the university had brought much of the neuroscience field around to the idea that brain change, or plasticity, was the rule rather than the exception.ĭr. Merzenich did not think that was true, and eventually his research showed that the brains of primates continued to change well into maturity.īy the mid-2000s, Dr. The idea of neuroplasticity dates to the 1980s, when the conventional scientific wisdom held that once people reached adulthood, their brains were hard-wired and would remain that way for life. “But will it actually work to help veterans? I can’t talk to that.” support clinic at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. “It is theoretically reasonable,” said Gary Abrams, director of neurorehabilitation at U.C.S.F. patients and also those who have been determined to have autism, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia and other psychiatric and neurological diseases. Such software could potentially help T.B.I. If the Posit Science software is proved effective, it could become one of the first medical applications of an approach to brain improvement that remains controversial. Posit Science, based in San Francisco, is one of several companies, including Nintendo and Luminosity, that sell brain health software products to consumers. to study the effectiveness of Posit Science software in restoring memory and attention in victims of traumatic brain injury, or T.B.I. But some neuroscientists now see great potential in techniques of manipulating the brain’s “neuroplasticity,” its propensity to rearrange its neuronal structure in response to behavior and stimuli.Įarlier this year, the Department of Defense awarded a $2 million grant to Brain Plasticity Inc. In some cases symptoms last only weeks or months sometimes they persist indefinitely.įinding any sort of treatment, much less a cure, has not been easy. Some 400,000 current and former American soldiers suffer from traumatic brain injuries, which can cause memory loss, lack of concentration, depression, anxiety attacks and other problems.
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