Our results support the idea that wakeful rest plays just as important a role as practice in learning a new skill, said Dr. Leonardo G. Cohen, senior investigator at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. It appears to be the period when our brains compress and consolidate memories of what we just practiced. Understanding this role of neural replay may not only help shape how we learn new skills but also how we help patients recover skills lost after neurological injury like stroke.
The study asked 33 right-handed volunteers to type a five-digit test code with their left hands. Each participant typed the code 41234 on a screen as many times as they could during a 10 second timeframe before taking a 10-second break. They repeated this cycle 36 times.
In a study of healthy volunteers, National Institutes of Health researchers have mapped out the brain activity that flows when we learn a new skill, such
June 10, 2021
Robert Langreth
BLOOMBERG – Tasha Clark tested positive for Covid-19 on April 8, 2020. The Connecticut woman, now 41, was relieved that her symptoms at the time – diarrhoea, sore throat and body aches – didn’t seem particularly severe. She never got a fever and wasn’t hospitalised. So she figured that if the virus didn’t kill her, within weeks she’d go back to her job and caring for her two children.
She significantly miscalculated. More than a year later, she’s a textbook example of a
Covid long-hauler.
Clark suffers from an array of disabling symptoms including blowtorch-like nerve pain and loss of sensation in her arms and legs, spine inflammation that makes it difficult to sit up straight, brain fog, dizziness and a soaring heart rate when she stands.