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\n Studying the interactions between individual neurons could help researchers study stroke.<\/p>\n
Andriy Onufriyenko\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
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Andriy Onufriyenko\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Neuroscientist Paul Nuyujukian<\/a> likens the brain to a stadium full of people. <\/p>\n To eavesdrop on the crowd you could put a microphone in the middle of the stadium. But to understand the conversations you need to record individual people. He thinks about the brain the same way. <\/p>\n To understand brain disease, he studies neurons\u2014one at a time. And his insights are shedding light on a big global issue\u2014stroke. <\/p>\n The World Health Organization predicts one in four adults<\/a> will have a stroke in their lifetime. Strokes can cause death, or lead to paralysis or speech problems. But there’s still a lot researchers don’t know about how the brain recovers from an event like a stroke. <\/p>\n Nuyujukian directs a lab at Stanford University that studies how the brain controls movement, including after neurological events like stroke. <\/p>\n We get into how he does this, and why he hopes his research could eventually help people who’ve been paralyzed.<\/p>\n Email us your questions about the brain \u2013 or anything else to do with science at shortwave@npr.org<\/a>. We may turn it into an episode in the future!<\/p>\n Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org\/shortwave<\/a>.<\/p>\n Listen to Short Wave on Spotify<\/a> and Apple Podcasts<\/a>.<\/p>\n This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Berly McCoy. Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineer was Ko Takasugi-Czernowin.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Studying the interactions between individual neurons could help researchers study stroke. Andriy Onufriyenko\/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399377,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[103,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-399376","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}