A. Pascual-Leone: Promoting Brain Health: The Next Frontier of Cognitive Neuroscience

Presenter:
Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD
Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Harvard Medical School

Location:
JHA
Apotex Centre
1st Floor
Loftus Hall

Dr. Pascual-Leone is Board Certified in Neurology and Neurophysiology by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. His focus is to understand neural plasticity at system's level. He seeks to identify rules that are invariant across neural systems and domains. He believe that plasticity is the normally ongoing state of the nervous system and that a coherent account of any neurocognitive theory and neural system has to contemplate plasticity as an integral property of the nervous system and the obligatory consequence of each sensory input, motor act, association, reward signal, action plan, or awareness. In this framework, notions such as psychological processes as distinct from organic-based functions or dysfunctions, or of "good" and "bad"plasticity, cease to be informative. Plasticity is the reason for development and learning, the cause of disease, and a mechanism of functional recovery. The challenge is to learn enough about the mechanisms of plasticity in order to manipulate them, suppressing some changes and enhancing others, to gain a clinical benefit and behavioral advantage for a given individual. Read more about Dr. Pascual-Leone.