Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain—3-Dimensional Proportional System: An Approach to Cerebral Imaging, J. Talairach, P. Tournoux. Georg Thieme Verlag, New York (1988), 122 pp., 130 figs. DM 268

I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

Prospective Cohort Study

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/201/4359/899.2.full.pdf

Phenomenology of perception.

A free-energy principle has been proposed recently that accounts for action, perception and learning. This Review looks at some key brain theories in the biological (for example, neural Darwinism) and physical (for example, information theory and optimal control theory) sciences from the free-energy perspective. Crucially, one key theme runs through each of these theories — optimization. Furthermore, if we look closely at what is optimized, the same quantity keeps emerging, namely value (expected reward, expected utility) or its complement, surprise (prediction error, expected cost). This is the quantity that is optimized under the free-energy principle, which suggests that several global brain theories might be unified within a free-energy framework.

/pdf/the-free-energy-principle-a-unified-brain-theory-3vz1twg7nv.pdf

The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?

Acute stoke interventions and stroke rehabilitation are aimed at salvaging or restoring brain function. How do we know if we have accomplished this goal? We examine the patient. One neurological historian asserted, “Most of the modern neurological examination evolved in a short time span, between 1850 and 1914 …”1. This quote is telling; it implies that the examination itself has not changed much since about 1900. For generations of medical students, residents, and other trainees in neurology, the neurological examination has achieved almost sacred, untouchable status, while at the same time becoming less important, as diagnostic technologies have become ever more sophisticated. Indeed, many of the examination's components have become almost empty ritual. Ask a resident what modern neuroscience has revealed about the mechanisms of, for example, increased tone, neglect, apraxia, and alexia, and how this new knowledge relates to the components of the neurological examination, or how the examination might be updated; you will likely be met with a blank stare. So ironically, even as cognitive neuroscience has advanced, the interest of neurologists in behavior in the broadest sense, and its underlying physiology and anatomy has waned. Thus, current stroke neurologists have largely failed to emphasize the evaluation of the effects of our interventions on brain function.

/pdf/the-future-of-stroke-treatment-bringing-evaluation-of-4u30ius330.pdf

The Future of Stroke Treatment: Bringing Evaluation of Behavior Back to Stroke Neurology

Abstract It has become a truism that the brain is a complex structure. One idea associated with complex systems is that of emergence, which is often characterized as the occurrence of a novel collective property that results from the interactions of individual parts, each of which alone do not have that property. Pessoa in his book argues, plausibly, that given that cognition is the most complex thing the brain does then it will need a new emergence-inflected science to understand it. His subsequent argument, however, does not follow, namely that this will take the form of distributed networks with identity-switching nodes that morph pluripotently from one computation to another. This is not true for whole organisms, which became more complex through compartmentalization and specialization. The brain did the same with hierarchically organized specialized areas.

Modular Brain, Entangled Argument

Cortical reorganization has been suggested as mechanism for recovery after stroke. It has been proposed that a form of cortical reorganization (changes in functional connectivity between brain areas) can be assessed with resting-state fMRI. Here we report the largest longitudinal data-set in terms of overall sessions in 19 patients with subcortical stroke and 11 controls. Patients were imaged up to 5 times over one year. We found no evidence for post-stroke cortical reorganization despite substantial behavioral recovery. These results could be construed as questioning the value of resting-state imaging. Here we argue instead that they are consistent with other emerging reasons to challenge the idea of motor recovery-related cortical reorganization post-stroke when conceived as changes in connectivity between cortical areas.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/06/26/681320.full.pdf

No evidence for motor recovery-related cortical reorganization after stroke using resting-state fMRI

Athletes devote their lives to practicing their chosen sport so as to attain the highest level of skilled performance. A perennial question is why are some athletes better than others? Most debates on this issue reduce to genetics (natural abilities) vs differences in accumulated deliberative practice. In contrast, the target article under discussion here reports on a study that identified psychosocial factors (obsessiveness, ruthlessness) and early life experiences (trauma or loss) that distinguished those athletes at the Olympics and World Championships that medaled over those that did not. The interpretation seems to be that other factors and not just skill make true winners. The point will be made here, however, that psychosocial factors might just predict more devotion to practice at the expense of everything else. If this is true then perhaps the most successful athletes really are just the most skilled.

John W. Krakauer

Papers

The Future of Stroke Treatment: Bringing Evaluation of Behavior Back to Stroke Neurology

Modular Brain, Entangled Argument

No evidence for motor recovery-related cortical reorganization after stroke using resting-state fMRI

In search of the golden skill.

Radiation-induced intracranial vasculitis on high-resolution vessel wall MRI.