I just read a comment about my visual migraine aura video in YouTube

The shaping and flashing of it is near perfect; however, it needs Color, and, some auras loop into a closed figure, while expanding outward. Your simulation seems most accurate near the end of it, when the aura is larger and wider. I'm very very pleased that so many people are doing simulated Auras for migraine sufferers, this is extremely important educational information. I wonder if anyone has studied to see if weed has any treatment effect on migraine? I would use it if so.

I guess that this questions was asked by many people and probably answered by some of them in a self-experiment.

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Nature repeatedly reinvented certain control strategies shared among different body systems to maintain our physiological machinery. Each strategy not only works in a generic way and it also can fail in a generic way. Understanding these universal mechanisms can help to infer from symptoms the underlying pathology.

The two previous posts What is physiology? and Physiology organized by major body systems lay the basis. However, you don't have to read through these posts to understand this one.  (More)

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It may seems stubbornly self-centered, but it does make sense to organize physiology by the major human body systems. In fact in Europe, the minimum standard and learning outcomes in physiology will soon be organized this way thanks to the Bologna process.

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I am a physiologist. This is my outing in three parts. First, I will show that you cannot get easily an answer to What is physiology? In a second post, an answer is coming from the editorial of the current issue of Acta Physiologica, which aims at a harmonization between European physiology curricula. Finally, I will identify overarching concepts that define physiology. These concepts date back to the nineteenth centure but are still valid today.

Actually, I am a physicist—by training. I am a physiologist by heart.

Beginning with this posts, I will explain what physiology is. This and the subsequent posts are based on the first lecture that will be given in a new course called "Dynamical Diseases", which I am developing right now for the winter semester 2010 at the TU Berlin. I will start the course with the question:

What is physiology?

Of course I have a good idea what physiology is and I had it before I decided to develop this course. But once you teach, you need a thorough understanding of what you are talking about, even about short remarks within the introductory part of the first lecture. You never know what students might ask.

So I began a journey to  better understand what others think physiology is.

From the meaning of the word physiology in ancient Greek we deduce that it is the study of nature. But so is physics. And clearly physics and physiology are different disciplines.     

Physiology, Wikipedia (note that this post refers to the version in August)

Here is a simple answer from Wikipedia [1]: (More)

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Jack Cowan had a profound impact on mathematical neuroscience. A large number of his pupils hold chairs today in the field of mathematical biology and computational neuroscience. What is actually the difference between mathematical and computational neuroscience, if there is any?

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Medical information is often given in the web. Although diagnosing yourself or even getting medical advice from the web is definately not a good idea, you can assume greater responsibility for your health by staying informed.

Over the years, people have contacted me because they recognized their visual migraine aura symptoms in my computer simulations of such visual field defects, which are presented on various web sites. Some people who contacted me had not even been diagnosed before with migraine, but later were. My impression is that quite a lot often deal with their problem alone using self-prescribed drugs for their headaches.  (More)

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The statement made in the title often marks a major step in our understanding of something that happened but should not have. In a scientific context, this can result in a shift of paradigm.

This cannot happen ... unless, of course, my assumptions were wrong.

You may ask What cannot happen? I have indeed something in mind. But let me just for a little longer stay in the abstract and call it it.

It cannot happen. Three words that say so much more. Who ever said or wrote them obviously thought about the possibility of it, or was forced by someone else to think about it, but than asserts that it cannot happen.

So what is my actual topic? What is it?

 © Copyright Penny Mayes and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

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Mathematics is as sharp as a scalpel and cuts brain malfunctioning into pieces. 

The first part of my title is copied from an awareness campaign of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, better known as SIAM.

In this campaign, mathematics behind everyday life is explained on 16 posters, such as "The Math behind Stopping and Preventing Fires" or "The Math behind Cardiology and Heart Attacks".

In some sense my blog is surely also an awareness campaign:
The Math behind Neurology.

In which way do I think math matters in neurology?  (More)

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Can  the application of appropriate light during a migraine attack reduce its severity?

An article in Nature Neuroscience, published online two weeks ago, presents  "A neural mechanism for exacerbation of headache by light" (so its title). Bright light can worsening headaches. This is known to many of us from "memories of the painful mornings after the night before", so we read in the accompanying  News and Views. That is correct.

The article is about migraine headaches.  It proposes a mechanism how migraine headaches can be modulated by retinal input. If light can worsening a headache, can it also help? Many sufferers escape to a dark room. Is there an alternative? A question I would like to address is, which, if any, spatial or temporal frequencies attenuate a migraine attack? That would allow us to design much simpler medical devices than the migraine zapper is. 

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Therapeutic magnetic stimulation in migraine is widely discussed. Known as the migraine zapper, a transcranial magnetic stimulator became an FDA approved investigational medical device. But what about other external stimulation techniques, like electrical currents or light flashes? Should we invent migraine frizzlers and migraine scintillators, too, or is that all fringe science?

The application of transcranial stimulation at the beginning of a migraine attack may abort the attack or reduce its severity significantly for same patients.  This is tested in a randomized, sham stimulation controlled investigation to assess the safety and to demonstrate that the method is effective as an add-on therapy in reducing attacks.  (More)

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Modern thermodynamics provides concepts that elucidate certain aspects of migraines. While medical physics is traditionally related to diagnostic instruments, with these theoretical concepts, a new avenue opens up how physics enters clinical research.

I openly confess that I wrote the title to catch your attention, yet I believe that this phrase stands on solid scientific grounds.  (More)

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Neural dynamics in the brain during migraine attacks is actually not chaotic but a complex pattern formation process. Chaos, that is, unpredictable behavior, enters migraine research by investigating methods that were originally developed to control chaos. These methods can be adapted to control also the formation of other complex patterns, and therefore to explore novel migraine treatments.

If you google the terms migraine and chaos, you get a lot of hits like (More)

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Theoretical physics and clinical neurology are as distant as black and white for you? Well, maybe. But than we need gray. Gray matters.

June 11, I started to write for my first blog "M.A.D. Lab Blog", which I now moved to SciLogs. Initially, my blog was named  "M.D. Lab Blog". But as I am not a medical doctor, although I blog about migraines, I inserted later my middle initial, i.e., the letter A, in the blog name not to confuse MD for a degree.

I have no problems being M.A.D., nonetheless, I changed the name to Gray Matters. Because it does, (More)

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