Turning Passion Into Action

Turning thought into action.

Patients with spinal cord injury, subcortical stroke, neuromuscular diseases (including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), and limb amputation have at least two characteristics in common: a brain that wants to direct movement and a body that fails to respond accordingly. Despite intact cortical function , central motor commands in persons with these paralyzing disorders are " disconnected " from t...

Synaptic vesicles: turning reluctance into action.

Vesicle availability partly determines the efficacy of synaptic communication in the CNS. The authors recently found that some hippocampal glutamate vesicles exhibit reluctance to exocytose during short, high-frequency action potential trains. These same vesicles can be "coaxed" into exocytosis by increased Ca(2+)entry, by direct depolarization of synaptic terminals, or by challenge with hypert...

Turning an Action Formalism into a Planner - A Case Study

The paper describes a case study that explores the idea of building a planner with a neat semantics of the plans it produces, by choosing some action formalism that is \ideal" for the planning application and building the planner accordingly. In general|and particularly so for the action formalism used in this study, which is quite expressive|this strategy is unlikely to yield fast and eecient ...

Power effects on cognitive control: Turning conflict into action.

Power is known to promote effective goal pursuit, especially when it requires one to overcome distractions or bias. We proposed that this effect involves the ability to engage and implement cognitive control. In Study 1, we demonstrated that power enhances behavioral performance on a response conflict task and that it does so by enhancing controlled processing rather than by reducing automatic ...

Closing the health care disparities gap: turning evidence into action.