On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

How can we help our brain-traumatized soldiers and vets? Nancy raises a ‘ call for ACTION ’ .
Nancy Martin-Crisco wrote a heart-rending response to a blog I posted  (“How to get PTSD. Twice. Worse.”) that you all should read. Her son Christopher was diagnosed with PTSD after service in Afghanistan. After a few months stateside, he was redeployed to Baghdad. It was NOT good for him. Addiction, divorce, separation from his child, depression, anxiety, anger management issues, problems with relationships, poor focus, still PTSD, a feeling of worthlessness and shame because he’s here, with us, discharged because of his addiction after 10 years in the Army, instead of with his fellow soldiers, who he f...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - May 1, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Brain Fitness Brain Trauma, Injury BrainHQ Cognitive impairments Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, et alia Source Type: blogs

Ethics class
I delivered a lecture about ethical considerations related to the neuroscience of brain plasticity to a class at Stanford last night, and thought it might be fun to reiterate some of the issues raised for those bright young men and women struggling to understand how to behave in their professional lives. The class is organized by Bill Hurlbut, a Stanford neurologist and bioethicist who serves on the President’s Council for Bioethics, and Bill Newsome, a distinguished neurobiologist (member of the National Academy of Sciences) on the Stanford faculty who has had a long interest in neuroscience-related issues of philos...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - April 1, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Brain Fitness BrainHQ Childhood Learning Cognitive Impairment in Children Cognitive impairments Source Type: blogs

Down Syndrome children can greatly benefit from EARLY training
A child therapist who I very greatly respect, Ann Osterling (from Champaign, Illinois) wrote me an email message in response to my (undoubtedly superficial) comments about Down Sydrome that I thought everyone interested in helping these kids would enjoy reading. In her words: You threw out the idea of intensive early intervention as one option for improving the learning outcomes of children with Down Syndrome. Not only do I agree, but we actually have already seen the tremendous positive impact of early intervention (in these) children. If I had Down Syndrome when I was born 50 years ago, it is highly likely that I would h...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - March 1, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Autism Origins, Treatments Brain Fitness BrainHQ Childhood Learning Cognitive Impairment in Children Cognitive impairments Language Development Reading and Dyslexia Source Type: blogs

Memory restoration in a bad brain
There are now a number of published studies that have revealed that the progression of Alzheimer’s-like pathologies can be slowed down by housing mice or rats in enriched (vs impoverished) environments. I’ll discuss this growing body of literature supporting the prophylactic or rejuvenative power of exercising your brain and body (at least if you’re a small rodent) by just learning new things and having fun every day, in future blogs. A new twist on this story comes from a study led by Dr. Li-Huei Tsai, a MIT scientist who (with her colleagues) has developed one of the most useful mouse models of Alzheime...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - February 1, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Alzheimer’s Brain Fitness BrainHQ Posit Science Source Type: blogs

Pain and Circumstance
My wife Diane and I visited our friend Mary in the hospital on Friday. Mary had just had her “knee replaced” — which is a rather spectacular modern procedure, unimagined not too many years ago. Another modern, commonplace aspect of this kind of surgery was being “enjoyed” by Mary – her morphine-on-demand dispenser! Her machine delivered a small dose of morphine intravenously every time she thought she needed it, with the proviso that no request would be granted until 6 minutes had passed since the last slug. Mary’s setup, combined with Memorial Day, reminded me of a landmark stud...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - January 1, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Aging and the Brain Brain Fitness BrainHQ Source Type: blogs

A brain fitness graduate comes home
A couple of weeks ago, Jerry Emmons shared his story with Posit Science. It seems that the 84-year-old was spending much of each day re-living old, painful World War II memories. He had been the only survivor in his crew and the horror was haunting him more and more. “Post-traumatic stress disorder,” said his doctor. And it was getting worse. PTSD was just one of Jerry’s cognitive challenges. He was losing control: getting lost while driving and walking, feeling afraid of going out, having difficulty remembering everyday things that were crucial to his welfare, and causing his wife Marline no end of wor...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - December 1, 2020 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Aging and the Brain Alzheimer’s Brain Fitness Brain Trauma, Injury BrainHQ Cognitive impairments Posit Science Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, et alia Source Type: blogs

Overlooking Down Syndrome
Dazee is frustrated because we have not included any discussion of Down Syndrome at this site, even while autism and other forms of severe disability are frequent topics of consideration. There are several reasons for our neglect. First, the principal contributor to this blog has no experience with these kids. He hasn’t studied them (or animal models of this inherited malady) directly, in any meaningful way. There are better authorities out there in the scientific community. Second, these children differ from other kids with cognitive impairments that we’ve studied, by the fact that their condition commonly r...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - November 1, 2020 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Autism Origins, Treatments Brain Fitness BrainHQ Childhood Learning Cognitive Impairment in Children Cognitive impairments Language Development Source Type: blogs

Jacksonville is moving UP!
Jacksonville, Florida is making an unprecedented attempt to move up in the world. How can a large American city accomplish that? There is one slow-but-certain way: Improve the brain potential of, and the possibilities for achievement for EVERY child. How on earth could an entire city begin to achieve THAT? Led by a great Superintendent of Schools (Dr. Joseph Wise), and an enlightened school-administration team and Board (and by other key civic leaders), Jacksonville is investing heavily in new technical infrastructure, in computers, and in the most advanced computer-based brain-plasticity-based training programs so that an...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - October 1, 2020 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Autism Origins, Treatments Brain Fitness BrainHQ Childhood Learning Cognitive Impairment in Children Cognitive impairments Language Development Reading and Dyslexia Source Type: blogs

How to get PTSD. Twice. Worse.
I just read disturbing comments by a highly respected University of California doc Karen Seal [who screens and treats returning veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan at San Francisco’s famous Ft. Miley Veterans Administration Hospital, one of our premier VA Research Hospitals] about the redeployment of young soldiers treated for PTSD and other neurological and psychatric problems back to Mid-East war zones [http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,136020,00.html]. Effective last December, service members with a “psychiatric disorder in remission, or whose residual symptoms do not impair duty performance” may ...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - September 1, 2020 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Brain Fitness Brain Trauma, Injury BrainHQ Cognitive impairments Posit Science Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, et alia Source Type: blogs

EVERYONE doesn ’ t feel the pain
Neil Pearson wrote an inspirational and informative comment from a soldier on the front lines of pain therapy about my last entry [which described another neurological confirmation of an empathetic response actually engaging the pain centers of the brain, when a subject witnessed realistic (fake) videos of inflicted pain]. If pain is an issue for you, I encourage you to read his comment. I forgot to mention something important in my brief report. Beyond stoicism, perhaps not so very far in distance, is the psychopath whose brain simply does not respond to witnessing pain. A number of studies have now shown that the brains ...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - August 1, 2020 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Aging and the Brain Brain Fitness Brain Trauma, Injury BrainHQ Cognitive Impairment in Children Posit Science Source Type: blogs

I feel your pain
In the May issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex, a group from the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki, Japan reported interesting results from a study in which “pain centers” in the brain were shown to be activated by WITNESSING pain afflicted to others. If you see someone being poked with a sharp needle in a (fake) movie, your brain responds as if YOU’VE been poked, and your brain responds as if YOU hurt. (I can almost see you wincing, as you read this!) IT HURTS, WHEN YOU THINK IT SHOULD. If I flash a red light each time I burn your skin, you’ll learn that the red light means...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - July 1, 2020 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Aging and the Brain Brain Fitness Brain Trauma, Injury BrainHQ Cognitive impairments Posit Science Source Type: blogs

West Nile virus is also on the list
In Caldwell, Idaho, on the Snake River in Western Idaho, Dr. Carolyn Rees tells us that she was at ground zero during a West Nile Virus epidemic “leaving many people with post-encephalitic brain damage”. A review of the research literature on WNV includes a number of studies now documenting enduring memory and other cognitive losses as a predictable outcome of a WNV infection. The prevalence of this kind of virus (an “arborvirus”) is growing continuously in the US. The disease is primarily spread via mosquito-transmitted infections in birds. Where the disease has had a long history, some mammals are...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - June 1, 2020 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Aging and the Brain Alzheimer’s Brain Fitness Brain Trauma, Injury BrainHQ Cognitive impairments Posit Science Source Type: blogs

One million children
Sometime over the next days, the millionth child willl enroll in a Fast ForWord language or reading program. For Paula, Bill, Steve, Bob, Glenn …………. and the thousands of other good people who have helped make, sell, manage, train, support, HELP those million children — THANK YOU! One of the nicest things that can happen to a nerdy scientist like myself is for a parent or grandparent or aunt or teacher come up to me in some public place (or in a letter or email) and thank me, for saving a child’s bacon. When this kind of message is delivered, I know, as do my colleagues who get these mes...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - May 1, 2020 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Autism Origins, Treatments Brain Fitness BrainHQ Childhood Learning Cognitive Impairment in Children Cognitive impairments Language Development Posit Science Reading and Dyslexia Source Type: blogs

Understanding other brains
Alan Towers wrote an instructive, poignant comment about the difficulty that he had understanding that his schizophrenic son could not be EXPECTED to “make sense”, if sense was defined by the standards that applied for Alan, or for the wider society. Because so many people who live with psychotic illness or substantial neurological impairment require that their affected loved ones operate by THEIR rules and THEIR logical constructs and world view, they often abandon their children, relatives and friends as uncorrectible and irrecoverable, as lost souls. I’ve had a conversation about this subject with a nu...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - April 1, 2020 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Aging and the Brain Alzheimer’s Autism Origins, Treatments Brain Fitness BrainHQ Cognitive Impairment in Children Cognitive impairments Posit Science Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, et alia Source Type: blogs

As if the damn headache wasn ’ t bad enough …
This study was particularly compelling because of the methods used to document the physical consequences of a migraine episode. The University of Rochester scientist Maiken Nedergard and her colleagues used a 2-photon microscope to actually visualize the synapses on cortical pyramidal cells, through the time course of the “headache”. She must have been stunned by first witnessing the large-scale chaos generated by the migraine sequelae, because the spines (synapses) of cortical neurons swelled and then disintegrated right before her eyes IN VERY LARGE NUMBERS. Some cortical neurons lost the MAJORITY of their sy...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - March 1, 2020 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dr. Merzenich Tags: Aging and the Brain Alzheimer’s Brain Fitness Brain Fitness Program BrainHQ InSight Language Development Posit Science Source Type: blogs