Dr. Michael Kilgard

No.

You can still tell they've got a stroke.

But what's interesting is the gains they made in a double-blinded placebo-controlled trial published in Lancet is only in 18 days.

18 days.

You can't play violin very well in 18 days.

You can't bowl very well in 18 days.

In 18 days, they're restoring their function of their hand.

And now we send them home and we enable them to activate their own vagus nerve while they're doing gardening activities or fishing activities or doing the dishes.

And what we're seeing now is although it's slower, they're continuing to make progress day on, day on by activating this network and telling the brain this is really important.

The answer is it's not really important.

It's just gardening.

But we have to kind of lie to the brain a little bit and say, look, you're never going to get over this because the brain is very conservative.

It does not want to forget all of your memories.

It doesn't want to forget your childhood.

It doesn't want to forget your language.

It doesn't want to forget all your skills.

So it's very conservative what it changes.

And after injury, in this case a stroke, there's a hole in your head.

Neurons are dead.

There's a problem.