What Is Brain Circuit Activity?

Different brain areas and actions help you do different things. In this video, NINDS Director Walter J. Koroshetz, MD, discusses plans to measure brain circuits and explains how a closer look at them might one day help doctors better treat stroke.

Transcript

00:00

What we can do-- you know, my ability to wave my hand or talk to you today is a reflection of a brain circuit activity that's going on.

00:07

And we don't really have a good way of measuring that. We use the patient's symptoms to infer what's

00:13

going on in the circuits. We don't really understand how to measure that circuit activity.

00:19

The brain initiative is actually a big project to try and get at developing technologies that allow us to measure brain circuit activity.

00:28

So you could imagine simplistically if I could measure brain circuits in someone after a stroke and I could watch how the circuits change

00:38

in someone who makes a good recovery, look and compare that to the brain circuit activity in someone who doesn't make a good recovery,

00:45

could I develop medicines, or rehab, or cognitive training to kind of push the circuits towards a good recovery pattern versus the not

00:56

so good recovery pattern? We don't really-- we're not able to do that right now.