And, of course, I want to emphasize again the importance of having an accurate
functional neuroanatomical framework for understanding what's going on in your
patient. And in the diagnoses that are common when
presented with a patient with neurological injury or dysfunction, your
principal aim is to localize the lesion. Because once you have an anatomical
picture of where the lesion is localized, then that leads you towards appropriate
intervention. for example it, it, it, does matter, it
should matter, whether the lesion that produces weakness in one side of the body
is localized to the spinal cord, and may be a neoplasm or that this weakness is
attributable to a more acute event up in the cerebral cortex.
And our approach to how we treat such a patient, how we promote rehabilitation
and optimization of health status and functional ability is going to depend
upon having that accurate neuroanatomical framework.
And I'll just encourage you and remind you that great neurology, great clinical
neuroanatomy has been in practice many, many decades prior to the invention of
the magnetic resonance imaging machine. one of my concerns for our modern
education of practitioners in the medical sciences, is that we rely perhaps a bit
too much on imaging without first relying on our capacity to take a history, to
acquire a physical examination findings, and then to build an anatomical framework
that helps us understand the localization of a lesion in the nervous system of a
patient. Prior to the time that we then explored
the anatomy of that patient with our modern imaging methods.
So, obviously we need both. We need the clinical expertise, and we
need the best technologies that can help us understand the nature of injury and
disease that afflicts the nervous system. Now how to study and learn.
Well, I'd like to just briefly remind you of some of my tips that I gave you right
at the onset of the course. And hopefully, I can reinforce them just
a bit now. And that will prepare you for making the
most of this final learning experience. So my tip number one is to follow the
path. So I've tried to give you a path.
I've tried to lay out for you a coherent curriculum through the content of this
course. you'll be the judge as to how successful
I've been in laying out that path. like this beautiful path through the
rainforest in the great Pacific Northwest of, of this continent sometimes the path
is clear. sometimes it's it's, it's not quite so
clear. and we have to blaze a trail forward.
But nevertheless I have tried to give you a path to follow and I would encourage
you to continue to follow that path through the conclusion of the course.
And I'll give you some study tips. in just a moment that will give more
detail to that path that I think will be most productive for you.
But, tip number one is to get yourself organized for this journey even to the
finish line at the end of the course and follow this path.
My second tip is to visualize your knowledge.
I've tried to encourage you to do that via our peer assessment opportunities in
the course, but I certainly would encourage you to continue to improve your
knowledge by making it visible. And I'll say more about that, also, in
just a moment. I think we have wonderful opportunity to
learn spatially. perhaps one of my regrets in this first
iteration of medical neuroscience is that I've not encouraged you to do this more
regularly throughout the course. And in future editions of medical
neuroscience, I think I will exercise some of the spatial learning approaches
that I use here on campus with my own students.
But I just love this concept of letting our medial temporal lobe memory system
not just manage semantic symbols, but do what it has evolved to do, which is to
map our environment and our position within it.
And I love the idea of making your knowledge fill the space around you, and
physically move through that space as a way of building association and
consolidating your learning. And I love this image from an art
installation where myself and my son were embedded in this environment, this
artistic creation. And it was such a wonderful illustration.
For me of what it means to immerse oneself in the knowledge that defines
your environment. Well my final tip for you is to learn
socially. Now that's a challenge for, for many of
us, I know, especially in our global learning community.
But I am just so pleased to see so many of you come together in the discussion
forum and really lend a helping hand to one another in a positive and encouraging
way. I think that's the power of the learning
community that we can build, even in an online course such as this.
So I'm very grateful to all of you that have contributed so well and so
constructively in that process. And encourage you all to continue that,
and even to extend it to face-to-face encounters.
I think it would be wonderful to share with your friends and family some of what
you've been learning in medical neuroscience.
See, if you can't explain to a loved one the ionic basis of the action potential
or the mechanisms of synaptic plasticity that are responsible for learning, and
memory in the nervous system. Or why a particular stroke involving a
particular artery produces the functional impairments that we often see from a
clinical point of view. So learn socially, and I think you'll be
very productive. Well, I want to give a little bit more
detail to my first tip. Follow the path.
And what I want to do is to really focus on learning clinical neuroanatomy, which
gives us a wonderful framework for synthesizing and integrating our
knowledge of medical neuroscience. So, here's a bit of a strategy that I
found to be successful personally, and I know many of my students on campus feel
the same way. So let me just share with you some of
these steps in a bit more detail, and maybe you can freeze frame and capture
some of the specific tips that I'm about to provide for you as you organize
yourself for preparing for this final. So step number one study the pathway.
So know the essential elements of each pathway.
And here is basically a list of the pathways that I want you to be able to
represent in your knowledge and your drawings.