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The main objective of our laboratory is to understand how
information processing in the brain goes awry
in neurological disorders and to use that knowledge
to devise or improve interventions
to alleviate those disorders.
So, a focus of my lab is Parkinson's disease.
So, a Parkinson's patient has fairly severe tremor,
and bradykinesia, which is an inability to initiate movement,
or slowness of movement.
The brain can't command movement particularly well.
So deep brain stimulation, if the electrode
is in the right place, and the stimulation
is tuned just appropriately,
is very effective at alleviating the symptoms of Parkinson's,
but it often induces extra symptoms
that aren't normally related with Parkinson's.
These can be as obvious as ocular motor dysfunction,
or as subtle as paresthesias in the arm,
which, your arm feels like it's asleep.
So the side effects associated with deep brain stimulation
come from excitation of neural tissue
that is beyond the neural tissue you're trying to stimulate.
We don't exactly know where that border is.
We don't know exactly what we're trying to do
when we stick an electrode in someone's brain and pulse it,
so if we could better understand the goal
of deep brain stimulation at the neurofunctional level,
we could better target where the stimulation should go,
how much stimulation should be there
so that we could focus on just alleviating symptoms and
cut out all of that extra stuff which is causing side effects.
If we can better understand how restoring
normal information processing to the Parkinsonian brain
alleviates Parkinsonian symptoms, we can apply
that knowledge to devise better ways
to restore normal information processing
to other neurological disorders
to alleviate their associated symptoms.