Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: What can we learn with Spontaneous recovery?
Spontaneous recovery is associated with the learning process called classical conditioning, in which an organism learns to associate a neutral stimulus with a stimulus which produces an unconditioned response, such that the previously neutral stimulus comes to produce its own response, which is usually similar to that produced by the unconditioned stimulus. Although aspects of classical conditioning had been noted by previous scholars, the first experimental analysis of the process was done by Ivan Pavlov, a nineteenth-century physiologist came across the associative effects of conditioning while conducting research on canine digestion.
Studies were completed consistently throughout Molaison's lifetime to discover more about amnesia. Researchers did a 14-year follow-up study on Molaison. They studied him for a period of two weeks to learn more about his amnesia. After 14 years, Molaison still could not recall things that had happened since his surgery. However, he could still remember things that had happened prior to the operation. Researchers also found that, when asked, Molaison could answer questions about national or international events, but he could not remember his own personal memories. After his death Molaison donated his brain to science, where they were able to discover the areas of the brain that had the lesions which caused his amnesia. This case study provided important insight to the areas of the brain that are affected in anterograde amnesia, as well as how amnesia works.
Horses affected with this condition rarely recover without surgical intervention, although there have been some instances where horses have recovered without treatment. The recovery time in affected horses can range from three months to three years. Horses may be affected so severely that euthanasia is necessary. It is unknown how long it takes for clinical signs to develop after the exposure to the cause of the condition.
This implied neuroplasticity during the critical period. However, Merzenich argued that neuroplasticity could occur beyond the critical period. His first encounter with adult plasticity came when he was engaged in a postdoctoral study with Clinton Woosley. The experiment was based on observation of what occurred in the brain when one peripheral nerve was cut and subsequently regenerated. The two scientists micromapped the hand maps of monkey brains before and after cutting a peripheral nerve and sewing the ends together. Afterwards, the hand map in the brain that they expected to be jumbled was nearly normal. This was a substantial breakthrough. Merzenich asserted that, "If the brain map could normalize its structure in response to abnormal input, the prevailing view that we are born with a hardwired system had to be wrong. The brain had to be plastic." Merzenich received the 2016 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience "for the discovery of mechanisms that allow experience and neural activity to remodel brain function."
Whereas some men may have refractory periods of 15 minutes or more, some men are able to experience sexual arousal immediately after ejaculation. A short recovery period may allow partners to continue sexual play relatively uninterrupted by ejaculation. Some men may experience their penis becoming hypersensitive to stimulation after ejaculation, which can make sexual stimulation unpleasant even while they may be sexually aroused.
Neuroplasticity is defined as the brain's ability to reorganize itself, lay new pathways, and rearrange existing ones, as a result of experience. Neuronal changes after damage to the brain such as collateral sprouting, increased activation of the homologous areas, and map extension demonstrate the brain's neuroplastic abilities. According to Thomson, "Portions of the right hemisphere, extended left brain sites, or both have been shown to be recruited to perform language functions after brain damage. All of the neuronal changes recruit areas not originally or directly responsible for large portions of linguistic processing. Principles of neuroplasticity have been proven effective in neurorehabilitation after damage to the brain. These principles include: incorporating multiple modalities into treatment to create stronger neural connections, using stimuli that evoke positive emotion, linking concepts with simultaneous and related presentations, and finding the appropriate intensity and duration of treatment for each individual patient.
Priming studies on Cochrane revealed that individuals with severe amnesia can display intact priming capabilities regardless of episodic memory damage. Priming involves initially exposing a subject to a word or image so that a memory of that word or image can be formed. This is meant to improve a subject's recall of that word or image when that word or image is shown at a later time. Cochrane additionally showed that priming effects can last for long periods of time; in one study, researchers presented Cochrane with a list of words, and after 12 months showed him the same words with letters missing. Cochrane was able to complete these fragmented words as successfully as a person with normal brain function who was shown the same list initially. This challenged the previous opinion that patients with anterograde amnesia are incapable of adding information to their declarative memory.
Neuroplastic surgery has adapted reconstructive principles from the fields of craniofacial surgery, and plastic and reconstructive surgery and refined them in order to address challenging deformities which result from Neurosurgical Procedures. The first center for Neuroplastic and Reconstructive Surgery was started at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland by a formal collaboration between the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, under the guidance of plastic surgeon Chad Gordon, and the Department of Neurosurgery under the guidance of neurosurgeon Judy Huang. Upon arrival to Johns Hopkins Hospital, Dr. Chad Gordon formed a multi-disciplinary team of physicians, scientists and engineers. The team’s unified goal was to develop techniques and devices to treat neurosurgical patients. These advances led to several publications and patents, and allowed for the establishment of the first formal fellowship training program in Neuroplastic and Reconstructive Surgery. In March 2018, Dr. Gordon was appointed the Director of Neuroplastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Johns Hopkins.
The body's physical arousal response (vaginal lubrication and engorgement of the clitoris in women and erection in men) occurs due to two separate pathways which normally work together: psychogenic and reflex. Arousal due to fantasies, visual input, or other mental stimulation is a psychogenic sexual experience, and arousal resulting from physical contact to the genital area is reflexogenic. In psychogenic arousal, messages travel from the brain via the spinal cord to the nerves in the genital area. The psychogenic pathway is served by the spinal cord at levels T11–L2. Thus people injured above the level of the T11 vertebra do not usually experience psychogenic erection or vaginal lubrication, but those with an injury below T12 can. Even without these physical responses, people with SCI often feel aroused, just as uninjured people do. The ability to feel the sensation of a pinprick and light touch in the dermatomes for T11–L2 predicts how well the ability to have psychogenic arousal is preserved in both sexes. Input from the psychogenic pathway is sympathetic, and most of the time it sends inhibitory signals that prevent the physical arousal response; in response to sexual stimulation, excitatory signals are increased and inhibition is reduced. Removing the inhibition that is normally present allows the spinal reflexes that trigger the arousal response to take effect.
All drugs and stimulants of the brain can affect how someone learns, consolidates, and retrieves certain memories. For example, cocaine blocks the reuptake of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain, causing an increase of dopamine in the synaptic cleft. This will elicit a rewarding feeling of liberation and security that can become addictive to some people. Although, because of the increased dopamine levels in the brain, consolidation of memory can be affected which will then inhibit the chances of recovering that memory. Studies show that rats who were given cocaine were unable to perform motor tasks as successfully as the control group. Also, cannabis has also shown negative effects regarding the ability to spontaneously recover memories because the plasticity strength of the initial memories are so inhibited due to the reduced neurotransmitters in the synaptic cleft.
Neuroplasticity is most active in childhood as a part of normal human development, and can also be seen as an especially important mechanism for children in terms of risk and resiliency. Trauma is considered a great risk as it negatively affects many areas of the brain and puts strain on the sympathetic nervous system from constant activation. Trauma thus alters the brain's connections such that children who have experienced trauma may be hyper vigilant or overly aroused. However a child's brain can cope with these adverse effects through the actions of neuroplasticity.
Joanne Jozefowski in 1999 through "The Phoenix Phenomenon: Rising from the Ashes of Grief" summarizes five stages to rebuild a shattered life.There is a distinction between grief counseling and grief therapy. Counseling involves helping people move through uncomplicated, or normal, grief to health and resolution. Grief therapy involves the use of clinical tools for traumatic or complicated grief reactions. This could occur where the grief reaction is prolonged or manifests itself through some bodily or behavioral symptom, or by a grief response outside the range of cultural or psychiatrically defined normality.
"With scrapie, the archetypical TSE, which is a natural disease in sheep and goats, the disease can appear suddenly in a flock in the absence of any known exposure to infected flocks (Palsson, 1979). Finally, fields in Iceland, that were left empty for up to 3 years after the destruction of scrapie-infected flocks, were repopulated with known scrapie-free sheep, and some of the sheep in this latter group subsequently developed scrapie (Palsson, 1979). This last 'experiment in nature' has yielded similar results a number of times in Iceland and in the United Kingdom. In one Icelandic farm, flocks have been eradicated three times; each time, the farm was left without sheep for 2 years, and after restocking with sheep from scrapie-free areas, the disease reappeared. Several years ago, a suggestion was made (S Sigurdarson, personal communication) that hay mites would be a good candidate as a vector for scrapie; this led to infection of mice with mite samples prepared from hay obtained from five Icelandic farms. Ten of these 71 mice became sick after injection with mite preparations from three of the five farms (Wisniewski et al, 1996; Rubenstein et al, 1998). The incubation periods ranged from 340 days to 626 days, and these mice had the protease-resistant form Prp of a host-coded glycoprotein, PrP . The protease-resistant form is a marker of TSE disease (Prusiner, 1991; Parchi et al, 1996). For some of these clinically positive mice, the banding pattern on WB analysis was unique (Wisniewski et al, 1996; Rubenstein et al, 1998)."
Even when childhood events are not remembered episodically, they can be implicitly remembered. Humans can be primed and implicitly trained earlier before they can remember facts or autobiographical events. This is most important in terms of emotional trauma. Adults can generally recall events from 3–4 years old, and have primarily experiential memories beginning around 4.7 years old. However, some suggest that adults who had traumatic and abusive early childhoods report an offset of childhood amnesia around 5–7 years old. It has been suggested that this is because stressful experiences can injure memory centers and possibly make it harder to form memories. This coupled with the fact that priming can occur at a younger age may indicate that children in abusive situations have implicit memory connections that were formed in response to the abuse. Whether or not these 'repressed' memories can affect individuals is a matter of considerable debate in psychology.
Post-concussion syndrome, also known as postconcussive syndrome or PCS, is a set of symptoms that may continue for weeks, months, or a year or more after a concussion – a mild form of traumatic brain injury (TBI). The rates of PCS vary, but most studies report that about 15% of individuals with a history of a single concussion develop persistent symptoms associated with the injury. A diagnosis may be made when symptoms resulting from concussion last for more than three months after the injury. Loss of consciousness is not required for a diagnosis of concussion or post-concussion syndrome.
Epineurial repair is a common surgical procedure to repair a nerve laceration via the epineurium, the connective tissue surrounding nerve fibers originating from the spinal cord. It is intended to allow the restoration of sensory function. When a nerve is lacerated or cut, repair is done by sewing the cut ends together through the epineurium to increase the potential of the proximal part growing correctly along the route the degrading distal part leaves behind. Usual sensation and mobility will not be an immediate result because nerves grow at a rate of approximately 1 millimeter per day, so it will take a few months to notice the final outcome. Research in use of nerve grafts and nerve growth factors is being done to speed recovery time.
In contrast to the short-term memory, long-term memory refers to the ability to hold information for a prolonged time and is possibly the most complex component of the human memory system. The Atkinson–Shiffrin model of memory (Atkinson 1968) suggests that the items stored in short-term memory moves to long-term memory through repeated practice and use. Long-term storage may be similar to learning—the process by which information that may be needed again is stored for recall on demand. The process of locating this information and bringing it back to working memory is called retrieval. This knowledge that is easily recalled is explicit knowledge, whereas most long-term memory is implicit knowledge and is not readily retrievable. Scientists speculate that the hippocampus is involved in the creation of long-term memory. It is unclear where long-term memory is stored, although there is evidence depicting long-term memory is stored in various parts of the nervous system. Long-term memory is permanent. Memory can be recalled, which, according to the dual-store memory search model, enhances the long-term memory. Forgetting may occur when the memory fails to be recalled on later occasions.
Surgery can be done in case a nerve has become cut or otherwise divided. Recovery of a nerve after surgical repair depends mainly on the age of the patient. Young children can recover close-to-normal nerve function. In contrast, a patient over 60 years old with a cut nerve in the hand would expect to recover only protective sensation, that is, the ability to distinguish hot/cold or sharp/dull. Many other factors also affect nerve recovery. The use of autologous nerve grafting procedures that involve redirection of regenerative donor nerve fibers into the graft conduit has been successful in restoring target muscle function. Localized delivery of soluble neurotrophic factors may help promote the rate of axon regeneration observed within these graft conduits.
The neuroscientist Donald Hebb (1904–1985) was the first to distinguish between short-term memory and long-term memory. According to current theories in neuroscience, things that we "notice" are stored in short-term memory for up to a few minutes; this memory depends on "reverberating" electrical activity in neuronal circuits, and is very easily destroyed by interruption or interference. Memories stored for longer than this are stored in "long-term memory". Whether information is stored in long-term memory depends on its "importance"; for any animal, memories of traumatic events are potentially important for the adaptive value that they have for future avoidance behavior, and hormones that are released during stress have a role in determining what memories are preserved. In humans, traumatic stress is associated with acute secretion of epinephrine and norepinephrine (adrenaline and noradrenaline) from the adrenal medulla and cortisol from the adrenal cortex. Increases in these facilitate memory, but chronic stress associated with prolonged hypersecretion of cortisol may have the opposite effect. The limbic system is involved in memory storage and retrieval as well as giving emotional significance to sensory inputs. Within the limbic system, the hippocampus is important for explicit memory, and for memory consolidation; it is also sensitive to stress hormones, and has a role in recording the emotions of a stressful event. The amygdala may be particularly important in assigning emotional values to sensory inputs.
Not all people with PCS have abnormalities on imaging, however, and abnormalities found in studies such as fMRI, PET, and SPECT could result from other comorbid conditions such as depression, chronic pain, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). 
Proponents of the view that PCS has a physiological basis point to findings that children demonstrate deficits on standardized tests of cognitive function following a mild TBI. A few studies have shown that people with PCS score lower than controls on neuropsychological tests that measure attention, verbal learning, reasoning, and information processing, but issues related to effort and secondary gain can not be ruled out as contributing to these differences. Recovery as measured by scores on cognitive tests frequently do not correlate with resolution of symptoms; individuals diagnosed with PCS may still report subjective symptoms after their performance on tests of cognitive functioning have returned to normal. Another study found that although children with PCS had poorer scores on tests of cognitive functioning after the injury, they also had poorer behavioral adjustment before the injury than children with no persistent symptoms; these findings support the idea that PCS may result from a combination of factors such as brain dysfunction resulting from head injury and preexisting psychological or social problems. Different symptoms may be predicted by different factors; for example, one study found that cognitive and physical symptoms were not predicted by the manner in which parents and family members coped with the injury and adjusted to its effects, but psychological and behavioral symptoms were.
Neuro-oncology is the study of brain and spinal cord neoplasms, many of which are (at least eventually) very dangerous and life-threatening (astrocytoma, glioma, glioblastoma multiforme, ependymoma, pontine glioma, and brain stem tumors are among the many examples of these). Among the malignant brain cancers, gliomas of the brainstem and pons, glioblastoma multiforme, and high-grade (highly anaplastic) astrocytoma are among the worst. In these cases, untreated survival usually amounts to only a few months, and survival with current radiation and chemotherapy treatments may extend that time from around a year to a year and a half, possibly two or more, depending on the patient's condition, immune function, treatments used, and the specific type of malignant brain neoplasm. Surgery may in some cases be curative, but, as a general rule, malignant brain cancers tend to regenerate and emerge from remission easily, especially highly malignant cases. In such cases, the goal is to excise as much of the mass (tumor cells) and as much of the tumor margin as possible without endangering vital functions or other important cognitive abilities.
In regards to a more general application of procedural learning in our life is with our beliefs and values we can hold to a certain subject. For example, if many times you get extremely jealous of someone having something that you do not have because your family can't afford it when you were young, you could believe that "things in life are hard to come by". When you're an adult another situation could arise that is similar, and the recovery of that association and inner response can show up spontaneously as jealousy again. It is why a lot of people say to themselves, "where does this feeling come from" or, "Why did I do that?" A lot of human reactions are from spontaneous recovery of past associations, not always specifically learned physical behaviours.
One day (24 hours) after learning both sets of associates, participants were again tested. Observed was a spontaneous recovery of B responses such that participants' responses of B items exceeded C items. It appeared that after a rest period, participants could spontaneously remember the initial paired associates that they were not able to remember following the subsequent presentation of a second paired associate list the day prior. This "A-B, A-C" paradigm was replicated by researcher Bruce R. Ekstrand, thus increasing confirmation regarding the existence of spontaneous recovery.
Psychoanalytic therapy is a form of therapy where the patient discusses their life issues with a therapist and the therapist can ask specific questions while using their expertise to find underlying issues. This method of therapy can cause spontaneous recovery that is cued from the therapists questioning. Psychoanalytic therapy has been known to treat many behavioural problems, unconscious feelings and thoughts that effect the present moment. Through recalling specific events and gaining a new perspective, a patient can alleviate the issue they are concerned with.
Although hypnosis and other suggestive therapy is a great way to create spontaneous recovery of memories, false memories can be constructed in the process. False memories are memories that contain facts that are incorrect, yet they are strongly believed by the person obtaining the memory. Research states that a lot of suggestive therapy can cause a false memory in patients because of the intense suggestions given by the trusted therapist. Suggestions can stir up memories from movies, stories, magazines, and many other of the innumerable stimuli one sees throughout their life. Hypnosis is a more relaxed, aware state where subjects can bypass a lot of the conscious doubts and mind chatter and be aware of what comes up from the unconscious.