Berkeley studies brain stimulation to help with stroke therapy
November 15, 2010 | Length: 00:02:18
Through a technique called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), University of California neuroscientist, Flavio Oliveira is researching how decisions are made by studying which hand a person chooses for an action. Oliveira's findings are helping scientists better understand how the brain works which could one day lead to better treatments for stroke patients.
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>> Flavio: My name is Flavio Rivera assumed spelling, I'm a neuroscientist at the University of California Berkeley.
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>> Flavio: I'm studying how people make decisions by looking at one of the most common decisions people make in everyday behavior, which hand they're going to use for an action. This happens hundreds of times during the day where you decide that you're going to use your right or left hand to press an elevator button, for example, or pick up an object. And we don't normally think about this decision-making consciously but our brain has to process a whole lot of information in order to make those decisions. In our experiments our participants play a little game in a very short reality set-up where they have to reach towards targets with their hands and they have to make a choice on whether they're going to use their right or left hand. And when they're doing this, when they're just about to make a decision we stimulate their brain with this technique called transcranial magnatic stimulation or TMS. What TMS does is it creates this magnetic pulses that penetrate the skull and hit the brain non-invasively and harmlessly, but it induces a electrical activity that disrupts the function of a particular brain area where we're targeting. And as we stimulate percipient's brains they end up choosing to use one of their hands more often. So essentially by stimulating the left side of the brain, for example, we're disrupting the planning of the right hand and making people use their left hand more often. So the future for our research and, hopefully, other people's research based on our current findings is that perhaps we can use different simulation techniques to do rehabilitation of patients with neurological disorders such as stroke or even just a better understanding of how decisions are made can help physical therapists, for example, develop better rehabilitation regimes to work with these kinds of patients, this is just the first step.
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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====