Young stroke victim boosts Big Bike

ALLISTON - The Heart and Stroke Foundation's Big Bike For Heart makes an annual appearance at the Alliston Potato Festival and its riders help raise money to fight some of Canada's most deadly diseases.
This year riders got an added bit of motivation though. Beeton resident Nicole Fournier was only eight years old when she suffered a stroke. Yet six years later, and after a lot of hard work, Nicole is able to stand up in front of groups like the Potato Festival riders and tell her story.
"Strokes don't just happen to adults," said Nicole, now 14.
It's something her father had never considered, but learned all to quickly on Canada Day in 2004. Nicole had been a very active child, competing in several sports, including swimming. She had no prior medical conditions. Her father was watching her swim in a pool in Bolton when the stroke hit...Next

Phonological Deficits in Aphasia

The View From Planet Kerth: To gripe or not to gripe, that is the question

I had a conversation the other day with a doctor who is the head of a neurotrauma rehabilitation center. His specialty is dealing with patients who have suffered strokes or other injuries to the brain.
He told me the story of one of his patients, an elite athlete who was training on a bicycle when he crashed and suffered brain damage. Initially he was paralyzed from the accident, but through intensive therapy his limbs began to regain some of their strength.
Still, the path was long for him, and after two years he was barely able to walk, let alone to bicycle or compete as an elite athlete...Next

Jstandard: Miryam Wahrman's Cover Stories on Aphasia

The Jewish Standard has outstanding cover stories by Professor Miryam Wahrman, science correspondent.

Got ____? Aphasia: At a loss for words

Miryam Z. Wahrman, Science Correspondent • Cover Story

It’s hard to daven properly because I have to learn again,” said Avi Golden, who is recovering from a stroke that left him with aphasia — difficulty in communicating — as well as difficulties in using his right arm. Golden, who is an Orthodox Jew, has made great strides in his recovery over the last three years, with the help of the Adler Aphasia Center in Maywood, but he has a hard time with prayer, as the stroke left him unable to read Hebrew. On Shabbat he goes to synagogue, but he has not yet felt ready to be called up to the Torah for an aliyah. “I look and I pray,” he said. “It’s frustrating, but it’s good also.” In September he is planning to start taking classes at Lehman College in the Bronx, where he will be working with the speech clinic “to learn Hebrew again.”

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Web Semantics: Chinese digital dysgraphia

*Nicholas Carr, a guy with a native genius for finding out that Google is making us stupid:
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/07/forgotten_chara.php
“Forgotten characters
JULY 22, 2010
“As software obviates the need for Chinese to sketch by hand the characters that make up their written language, they are coming to realize that those characters are being erased from their memories. Barbara Demick recently reported on this “long descent into forgetfulness” in the Los Angeles Times:
“This is a strange new form of illiteracy — or, more exactly, dysgraphia, the inability to write — that is peculiar to China … The more gadgets people own — cellphones, smart phones, computers — the less often they go through the elaborate sequence of strokes that make up Chinese characters. Whether on their computers or texting on phones, most Chinese use a system where they type out the sound of the word in Pinyin, the most commonly used Romanization system — and presto, they are given a choice of characters to use.
“Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at Penn, calls it an epidemic of “character amnesia”:
“Because of their complexity and multiplicity, writing Chinese characters correctly is a highly....Next...

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