Dr. Michael Kilgard

But they don't make enough change to get people to lose their diagnosis.

We're still not there yet, but we've now gone all the way through animal studies showing that animals with stroke benefit from physical therapy, but they don't make a complete recovery.

When we add this brief burst, they make recoveries they couldn't otherwise make.

We did it with hemorrhagic stroke.

We did it with ischemic stroke.

We did it with peripheral nerve injury.

We did it with spinal cord injury.

And we finally said, this is working so well, we should go try this in humans, fully expecting it not to work.

Why would it not work?

Because it usually doesn't work.

Lots of things work under careful laboratory conditions, and you show up in the real world, and you're stymied.

You can't figure this out.

And one reason for that is because in the lab, we can adjust the condition to be just bad enough, and the treatment can be very powerful, and there's no side effects and all that stuff.

Doctors get patients who show up.

They get the car accident.

They get what they get.

They don't get to make it and adjust it.

So it was very humbling.

To try to ask the first participants, the first ones actually had tinnitus or tinnitus, the ringing of the ears.

Later participants had stroke, now spinal cord injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.