Unlocking paralysis

Monday August 6, 2012 Rehab: One thing I saw when I first entered rehab was a video about ‘learned paralysis’. It was a lecture by VS Ramachandran that I found on the Internet [ link ]. Although my paralysis wasn’t learned in the sense he talks about ..it made me realize how much of a stroke is information-based. Transmission from the motor areas of my brain had been interrupted. Rehab was going to depend on me finding pathways around this. I needed to re-establish contact with the left side of my body. To me this meant flooding my brain with information. Tuning-in to internal (proprioceptive / kinesthetic) as well as external sources (visual / tactile). So, even though my paralysis wasn’t ‘learned’ ..I was going to have to re-learn and re-juvenate neural-pathways to unlock it. Gaining a better sense of ‘somatic awareness’ was the first step.