by Brooke Hasch WHAS11.com Posted on February 10, 2014 at 6:34 PM Updated yesterday at 8:24 PM LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WHAS11) -- Its estimated nearly one in four soldiers returning home from war suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or traumatic brain injury. Some will get help, but others will find themselves in the criminal justice system. For more than a year, the Veterans Treatment Court in Jefferson County has given incarcerated veterans a second chance, wiping their slate clean in just 18 months, but it doesnt come easy. William Morris spent 25 years in the military, served three tours in Iraq. "After I came back the first time, I wasn't normal. I didn't know what was wrong with me but there was some definite issues," Morris said. Morris threw himself into combat for years, as his internal wartime scars challenged him over and over again. Loud noises, I'd fall down, panic, Morris said. He was suffering from PTSD. I'd see something on the side of the road and it would remind me of an IED, and I'd black out," Morris said. Morris even opened up about the night he pulled a gun on his young daughter. "I pulled my … Continue reading →

The Art and Science of Jazz The title above is not an abstract statement or a philosophical question. Hence, what follows is not a speculative or metaphysical piece. It is an evaluation of the concrete, experimental data on the merits of music therapy in the treatment of brain injury, particularly one due to a stroke. A stroke or a cerebrovascular accident (CVA) is a sudden event, much like a heart attack, due to either an obstruction in the blood flow or hemorrhage in a specific region of the brain. Various rehabilitative modalities are often required to help victims regain function. Although not a mainstay of post-stroke care, there is a robust, albeit small, body of scientific papers supporting the use of music therapy as an adjunct intervention in certain neurological illnesses. Dr. Michael Thaut of Colorado State University in Fort Collins has conducted pioneering research in this field for close to two decades now. In 2002 he demonstrated that a metronome like beat presented to stroke patients with right arm weakness improved both the speed and accuracy of tasks performed by the affected hand as compared to when the same exercise was attempted in the absence of any auditory cues. … Continue reading →

Like much of what we know about the brain, knowledge of the areas involved in spoken and written language comes mainly from studying the loss of those abilities to trauma or disease. Plagie Beeson, who studies the neural substrates of written language, will talk Monday about The Literate Brain. She will describe where those language centers lie and how she and her colleagues formulate therapies to restore function after those areas are damaged. The lecture, part of the UA College of Sciences series The Evolving Brain, is at 7 p.m. in Centennial Hall on the University of Arizona Mall. Beeson is a professor and head of the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences at the University of Arizona, with a joint appointment in the Department of Neurology. Speech and writing problems usually develop after damage to the left hemisphere of the brain, though a small number of people (usually left-handers) develop those skills in the right hemisphere, she said. Through years of cataloging symptoms and imaging the brain, specialists such as Beeson and her research group have developed a pretty good understanding of where those centers are and can usually predict, before the brain is imaged, where the damage … Continue reading →