Diego S Maranan

University of the Philippines Open University | UPOU · Faculty of Information and Communication Studies

I'm helping set up a new journal, and I'm trying to avoid building Word/LaTeX templates from scratch. There are a ton of templates out there for existing journals, of course! I would love to simply reuse any of them, perhaps tweaking them slightly for our own journal. But I haven't found a template that explicitly allows for modification and reuse. Does anyone have any suggestion where to look or if you have one you are willing to share?

For example, is anyone tracking (or modeling) deaths due not to COVID-19 per se but because people do not have access to regular medical services (e.g., dialysis, chemotherapy) to address their existing conditions, because medical services are all maxed out, and/or because of travel restrictions, and/or because supply chains may have been disrupted, etc.? I've started compiling readings on this issue on https://www.zotero.org/groups/2479192/the_world_after_covid-19/collections/GJUZXQ25

Hi, design research and cognitive science colleagues. I'm looking for theories/frameworks/writings about how we learn about the physical world and how we transfer that knowledge to very unfamiliar situations. So for example, we learn that hollow things like balls and tupperware containers float, and we use that knowledge to use a refrigerator as a life raft during a flood, even we may never had had a chance to ever test that. Do we build mental models of how objects with certain properties interact with the human body and with the natural environment, and keep track of things like objects' "floatability" or do we assemble this on the fly? (Related ideas include Gibson's affordances, divergent thinking, and design patterns)

This is more a personal question than one related directly to my research (although i am interested in sensorimotor rehabilitation in general). I have a family member who has hemiplegia because of a stroke, and they are considering stem cell treatment offered by a private clinic in Asia. Can autologous stem cells (harvested from one's own fat cells and blood) injected intramuscularly find its way to the brain to repair damaged cortical areas? The doctors who have performed the stem cell therapy (and who claim to have seen significant improvements in some of their patients) tell me three things:

1) Stem cells are automatically attracted to cytokines that signal areas in the body that need repair;

2) These stem cells can be effective even when injected intramuscularly and not intravenously or directly at the site of damage, because cytokines guide the stem cells where they need to go;

3) These stem cells can penetrate the blood-brain barrier.

How true are these claims? I've been looking up research and opinion pieces online already, but I'm expanding my search strategy to include RG. This is what I'm looking at:

Aleynik, A., Gernavage, K. M., Mourad, Y. S., Sherman, L. S., Liu, K., Gubenko, Y. A., & Rameshwar, P. (2014). Stem cell delivery of therapies for brain disorders. Clinical and Translational Medicine, 3, 24. https://doi.org/10.1186/2001-1326-3-24 Bai, L., Lennon, D. P., Caplan, A. I., DeChant, A., Hecker, J., Kranso, J., … Miller, R. H. (2012). Hepatocyte growth factor mediates MSCs stimulated functional recovery in animal models of MS. Nature Neuroscience, 15(6), 862–870. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3109 Banerjee, S., Bentley, P., Hamady, M., Marley, S., Davis, J., Shlebak, A., … Chataway, J. (2014). Intra-Arterial Immunoselected CD34+ Stem Cells for Acute Ischemic Stroke. STEM CELLS Translational Medicine, 3(11), 1322–1330. https://doi.org/10.5966/sctm.2013-0178 Berkowitz, A. L., Miller, M. B., Mir, S. A., Cagney, D., Chavakula, V., Guleria, I., … Chi, J. H. (2016). Glioproliferative Lesion of the Spinal Cord as a Complication of “Stem-Cell Tourism.” New England Journal of Medicine, 375(2), 196–198. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMc1600188 Gross, G., & Häupl, T. (Eds.). (2013). Stem cell-dependent therapies: mesenchymal stem cells in chronic inflammatory disorders. Berlin: De Gruyter. Harris, V. K., Yan, Q. J., Vyshkina, T., Sahabi, S., Liu, X., & Sadiq, S. A. (2012). Clinical and pathological effects of intrathecal injection of mesenchymal stem cell-derived neural progenitors in an experimental model of multiple sclerosis. Journal of the Neurological Sciences, 313(1–2), 167–177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jns.2011.08.036 Hess, D. C., Wechsler, L. R., Clark, W. M., Savitz, S. I., Ford, G. A., Chiu, D., … Mays, R. W. (2017). Safety and efficacy of multipotent adult progenitor cells in acute ischaemic stroke (MASTERS): a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase 2 trial. The Lancet Neurology, 16(5), 360–368. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1474-4422(17)30046-7 Liu, L., Eckert, M. A., Riazifar, H., Kang, D.-K., Agalliu, D., & Zhao, W. (2013). From Blood to the Brain: Can Systemically Transplanted Mesenchymal Stem Cells Cross the Blood-Brain Barrier? Stem Cells International, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1155/2013/435093 Steinberg, G. K., Kondziolka, D., Wechsler, L. R., Lunsford, L. D., Coburn, M. L., Billigen, J. B., … Schwartz, N. E. (2016). Clinical Outcomes of Transplanted Modified Bone Marrow–Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells in Stroke: A Phase 1/2a Study. Stroke, STROKEAHA.116.012995. https://doi.org/10.1161/STROKEAHA.116.012995 Turner, L., & Knoepfler, P. (2016). Selling Stem Cells in the USA: Assessing the Direct-to-Consumer Industry. Cell Stem Cell, 19(2), 154–157. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stem.2016.06.007 Webb, R. L., Kaiser, E. E., Scoville, S. L., Thompson, T. A., Fatima, S., Pandya, C., … Stice, S. L. (2017). Human Neural Stem Cell Extracellular Vesicles Improve Tissue and Functional Recovery in the Murine Thromboembolic Stroke Model. Translational Stroke Research, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12975-017-0599-2

I'm looking for explanations from the points of view of  neurophysiology, neuropsychology, and related fields on the question of why people experience a sensation that is colloquially described as being “tense”. (My background is in computing science, dance, and somatic practice.) It seems to be such a simple question but I haven't really found an answer that satisfies me. The closest I've come to is Hanna's "sensory-motor amnesia" theory, which the rest of this post focuses on.

Here's what I understand so far: Anxiety is known to chronically activate muscles (Hazlett, McLeod, & Hoehn-Saric, 1994), and the feeling of tension is likely to be the phenomenological equivalent of this activation of the muscle tonus (though this needs a bit of elaboration). But what causes increased muscle activity? Why do our muscles “get tense” when we are stressed?

In his books Somatics, Thomas Hanna asserts that “our sensory-motor systems continually respond to daily stresses and traumas with specific muscular reflexes” that when “repeatedly triggered create habitual muscular contractions which we cannot—voluntarily—relax” (1988, pp. xii–xiii). He calls this “habituated state of forgetfulness” sensory-motor amnesia (SMA).

He suggests three types of sensory motor responses that, when continuously triggered, lead to SMA: a “red light” reflex, a “green light” reflex, and the trauma reflex. The red light reflex is basically the mammalian startle response a withdrawal response that activates the a series of muscular reflexes. These include jaw contraction, eye blinking, brow contractions. activation of trapezius muscles to raise shoulders and bring head forward, flexion of the elbow, pronation of the lower arms, and abduction of the upper arms (Davis, 1984)The green light reflex is the Landau reflex (which primarily activates the extensor muscles) in babies. It is an assertive reflex that is “essential for the erect carriage of the body in standing and walking” (Hanna, 1988, p. 65). But, Hanna suggests, it can be triggered past the point when the reflex has served its purpose in babies and children, and instead is triggered all the way through adulthood: “Adults must make a living and be able to take care of themselves—whether they want to or not… The muscles of the back, [though] now totally mastered, are [still] being activated increasingly towards the responsibilities of life. The more responsible one is, the more often the back muscles are triggered.” (Hanna, 1988, p. 65)

Hanna only names three reflexes, although perhaps there are others that contribute to Hanna's theory of sensory-motor amnesia. For example, Bracha et al (2004) summarise human reactions to acute stress as “freeze, flight, fight, or fright”. Freezing is the state of hypervigilance, flight is characterised by an attempt to flee, fighting needs little elaboration, and fright is the state of tonic immobility. A fifth state, “faint” (flaccid immobility), can accompany acute fear or stress (Bracha, 2004; Gellhorn, 1965).

In general, the SMA theory seems to rest on two assumptions:

Sorry for the length of the post. Thanks a bunch!