functional recovery

Whats functional recovery and example of stroke, lesion

• functional recovery = brain recovers abilities previously lost due to brain injury - functions of brain move from damaged to undamaged area

• Lesion - an area of the brain that’s suffered damage through injury or disease = loss of function

• E.g a stroke occurs when something blocks blood supply to part of brain and they’ll lose functions in e.g speech and movement but depends on where in brain stroke’s occurred.

Whats axonal sprouting

• when undamaged axons sprout or grow new nerve endings to replace the old ones in order to reconnect to other neurons

• Can bridge the connection + so enable the communication in the brain to continue

• Axons help transmit info, if an axon is damaged then the connection with other neurons is lost

Whats neuronal unmasking

• when brain damage occurs, dormant synapses become activated to take on the function that was lost because of brain damage - neurons are there but inactive , now unmasked = used to help recover the lost functions

Recruitment of homologous areas - 2 case studies

• homologous = similar

• Where similar areas sometimes in the other hemisphere are used when an area of the brain is damaged

• If Broca’s area was damaged on the left side of the brain the right side would carry out its equivalent function

• Jody Miller - had extreme seizures at 3 years old, so frequent that doctors had to remove her RH - left with half a brain - her brain started to rewire itself and her left hemisphere took over the responsibilities of the right hemisphere - now married, lives a good life but has a little bit of limited movement in her left side

• EB - most of his LH removed at 2 ½ years old because of a tumour - initially had problems w language within 2 years after surgery but recovered most of his lang skills. His lang was assessed over the years as near to normal. When scanning his brain with an fmri machine they found brain patterns for lang tasks in the RH that you’d find in the left = shows plasticity of brain following trauma. Esp brain’s ability to recruit homologous areas in brain. RH took responsibility for LH