Timestamp Speaker Transcript
00:00:01.56 Tony Fowler And we're rolling.
00:00:03.83 Taylor Kruse Welcome back to the Cruise Elite Podcast. What's up Tony?
00:00:07.06 Tony Fowler Good morning Taylor.
00:00:08.90 Taylor Kruse What's happening?
00:00:10.62 Tony Fowler So I got some scarves to juggle with.
00:00:13.21 Taylor Kruse Oh nice. Oh good. You're ahead of me. I haven't haven't done that yet.
00:00:18.01 Tony Fowler You know Amazon's fast.
00:00:19.70 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:00:19.89 Tony Fowler And I finally got my green my green glasses.
00:00:20.70 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:00:23.56 Tony Fowler Because I think I told you last time they sent me the wrong color.
00:00:23.83 Taylor Kruse Oh cool.
00:00:28.72 Taylor Kruse Mm-hmm.
00:00:29.58 Tony Fowler Um I'm excited to try green out. That's it's on my list.
00:00:34.49 Taylor Kruse Nice.
00:00:35.83 Tony Fowler But yeah the scarves are cool. Um I can actually do like two rounds of juggling before I lose track of which hand is supposed to do what and whatnot.
00:00:45.56 Taylor Kruse Sure.
00:00:47.23 Tony Fowler Um so learning curves.
00:00:49.91 Taylor Kruse Yeah that's awesome.
00:00:51.32 Tony Fowler I also imagine could you like tape a coin or something to them to make them a little more uh because at some point they're just like all in the way.
00:00:59.71 Taylor Kruse Right.
00:01:00.28 Tony Fowler And it's hard.
00:01:00.34 Taylor Kruse Yeah. Cause they open up and they get kind of big. Yeah.
00:01:02.49 Tony Fowler Yeah yeah.
00:01:03.51 Taylor Kruse That you know what? I've never thought of that. Taping a coin in there would be great. You can also what what I did with when I was using them a lot with clients is I would tie a knot in them.
00:01:14.62 Tony Fowler Smart.
00:01:14.94 Taylor Kruse Like just like one overhand knot usually makes them a little more they just like almost denser so that they they fall a little faster and things don't get so messy and tangled in the air.
00:01:15.22 Tony Fowler OK.
00:01:27.74 Tony Fowler Yeah yeah that's what i'm that's what I'm running into now.
00:01:28.41 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:01:31.08 Tony Fowler So
00:01:31.70 Taylor Kruse yeah play around with that because that can work pretty good.
00:01:34.87 Tony Fowler yeah super fun super fun.
00:01:36.12 Taylor Kruse You can do a lot with those just like throwing them up spinning around catching them. Like i used to do fun fun athletic games where you would like you know the athlete would have their back turned to you.
00:01:47.70 Taylor Kruse And you know you'd be in like a typically I would do what we call like a a athletic ready position. And then I'd have them hip turn on my command which is kind of in that universal athletic ready position. And then when I say you They hip turn 180 degrees so now they're facing me.
00:02:05.75 Taylor Kruse And I throw two scarves in the air. One is let's say red and one is blue. And I say red or blue and that's the one they have to grab.
00:02:14.46 Tony Fowler a
00:02:15.00 Taylor Kruse And so there's kind of like it's kind of like a reaction-based game.
00:02:15.38 Tony Fowler Cool.
00:02:17.68 Taylor Kruse And I might say okay I want you to grab... you know only with your left hand or only with your right hand. And you can do really cool like inhibition style games where you know you throw them maybe you're using red and green and you know you have them ah you have them do something ah almost like assign movement to a color. And then they let's say grab green but they have to do a movement or you I do a single scarf and it's either green or red. And if it's red they don't do anything.
00:02:53.83 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:02:54.10 Taylor Kruse And if it's green they do.
00:02:54.38 Tony Fowler Inhibition yeah.
00:02:55.42 Taylor Kruse Yeah there's so much you can do there. there That was a really fun tool.
00:03:00.50 Tony Fowler I'm so excited for the Cruise Elite summer camp. that's Every time we talk about this stuff I'm like this needs to happen.
00:03:05.40 Taylor Kruse ha
00:03:06.53 Tony Fowler When is this going to happen?
00:03:06.87 Taylor Kruse That's fun. Yeah that would be fun.
00:03:11.77 Tony Fowler Awesome man. Awesome. Anything new in your world?
00:03:16.06 Taylor Kruse Um not necessarily new just enjoying summer trying to trying to dial it back a little bit in terms of the work intensity. And you know we we've been you know still still chipping away but you know trying to get outside more and
00:03:24.69 Tony Fowler Yeah.
00:03:32.73 Taylor Kruse not working as much as we were before which is nice. We've got another camping trip coming up beginning of August. So I'm looking forward to that.
00:03:38.07 Tony Fowler yeah
00:03:38.89 Taylor Kruse And I've been getting some fishing in when I can and it's actually been kind of a kind of an up and down rough at times fishing season but it's nice to be out there. we Just had weird weather to start the whole season.
00:03:51.41 Taylor Kruse Lots of lots of rain lots of high water. And it it kind of it kind of threw weird curve balls at me in terms of the conditions.
00:04:03.10 Taylor Kruse So it hasn't been as good as it can be but hey it's ah it's still been fun to get out there.
00:04:09.78 Tony Fowler So when the water is high is is is that harder for fishing or does it just change where they go or
00:04:14.62 Taylor Kruse So I think my whole theory really is just that so the type of fishing that I'm doing you know i'm um I'm targeting trout and in the summertime a lot of it is about bugs right? So you got to kind of know we call it hatch season. So insects that live in the river they hatch and the trout will become very keyed in on specific bugs at specific times. And you have to have the right flies to match those hatches.
00:04:41.98 Taylor Kruse And the hatches happen based on like water temperature and time of year.
00:04:46.47 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:04:46.77 Taylor Kruse And we had a bunch of basically flooding happen during the prime hatches. And so the water was so high I couldn't fish. during prime time which was heartbreaking.
00:04:59.64 Taylor Kruse and And then after that the water temperatures changed pretty drastically so the best hatches were gone. And so now there's just not as much going on.
00:05:12.21 Taylor Kruse There's not as much activity. So you kind of got to luck into some good conditions. And so I just get out there and go when I can. And I did have one good evening not too long ago. And but then I went out a couple nights ago and um got beat up.
00:05:26.08 Taylor Kruse Nothing nothing was going on. And and it was.
00:05:27.93 Tony Fowler Yeah.
00:05:28.52 Taylor Kruse Yeah. So it's just up and down.
00:05:31.03 Tony Fowler Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. I never would have known that about hatches. That's so cool.
00:05:35.86 Taylor Kruse Yeah it's all like it's all water temp and conditions. and like Right now the water temperature is kind of balancing on the on the side of things where it's getting it's getting closer to too warm. you know Because when the water gets too warm you lose your bug activity but then you also you don't want to fish for trout in really warm water. When it when it gets to about 68 degrees it's time to kind of call it quits because...
00:06:01.02 Taylor Kruse you know I catch and release it and its you'll kill the fish if you if you hook them and stress them out and in warmer water temps.
00:06:09.18 Tony Fowler Interesting.
00:06:10.04 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:06:10.76 Tony Fowler Elevated sympathetic responses in the fish.
00:06:13.94 Taylor Kruse Exactly. Exactly. like They'll swim away and you'll be like okay they're good but it doesn't mean that they survive. Yeah.
00:06:20.44 Tony Fowler Interesting. I imagine especially if you're in the same region that like year after year the more seasons you experience the more just like in tune you are. with the ecosystem at large.
00:06:32.83 Taylor Kruse 100% 100%.
00:06:33.50 Tony Fowler Yeah that's pretty cool.
00:06:34.86 Taylor Kruse It's cool. like I'm walking out there and hiking. This a place I fish is real hard to get into. and you start like There's like little markers that nature shows you to that you sort of end up matching with like certain conditions.
00:06:46.80 Taylor Kruse like There's like different plant life and different things that you'll notice. like Oh yeah when these berries are out Like these conditions are usually happening and those conditions usually mean you know this insect and the fishing is good you know and you get you get like familiar with these little markers and as the ches the seasons change and it's kind of cool like that.
00:06:55.05 Tony Fowler Mm.
00:07:11.00 Tony Fowler Yeah yeah that feels healthy in and of itself somehow. I don't know why but just being in tune with nature you know.
00:07:16.57 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:07:19.78 Taylor Kruse Yep.
00:07:21.18 Tony Fowler Very cool very cool. Well yesterday i was brushing my teeth and I had a big glass of water on the sink and finished brushing my teeth. I don't know if I was distracted or what and I just kind of like dropped my hand and it just hits the glass glass knocks over breaks everywhere on my bathroom floor.
00:07:41.26 Taylor Kruse Oh no.
00:07:42.68 Tony Fowler um So speaking of sympathetic levels being raised um and it occurred to me that that was very clumsy of me.
00:07:45.72 Taylor Kruse yeah
00:07:51.61 Tony Fowler um And you said something in an episode i don't know like two months ago or or a while back and you were like oh yeah the parietal lobe ah we we associate actually with clumsiness.
00:08:08.70 Tony Fowler And i think maybe I don't want to put her on on the spot but I think you maybe said something like ah Alicia actually jokes about this about her parietal lobe because she can...
00:08:08.71 Taylor Kruse Right.
00:08:18.51 Tony Fowler she cannot find herself being clumsy at times. And I think that was her. But ah that just that just a light bulb went up in my head.
00:08:25.82 Taylor Kruse Yeah it was.
00:08:29.84 Tony Fowler And i was like well i I don't know anything about the parietal lobe. I can be clumsy at times. I stub my toes. And it's just something I think we can all relate to. Or there's someone we know close to us that's that is that person in the house right?
00:08:45.08 Taylor Kruse right. right
00:08:45.78 Tony Fowler And so I'm just very curious about parietal lobe its connection to clumsiness which in my mind says something about awareness and coordination or both.
00:08:56.18 Taylor Kruse Sure.
00:08:57.24 Tony Fowler And then um you know from an applied neurology perspective you know can we can we train it? Can we do something about it?
00:09:05.56 Taylor Kruse Right. Yes we can. We can. Yeah. So I yeah I remember talking about this a little bit and that the whole thing with Alicia that we sort of bring up and joke about it's it's um
00:09:19.15 Taylor Kruse It's a certain kind of clumsiness I guess you would say when we when we're talking about the parietal lobe because one of the one of the history findings with per the parietal lobe is actually bumping into things a lot.
00:09:30.88 Tony Fowler Hmm.
00:09:31.22 Taylor Kruse And so the thing that we joke about with Alicia is that she always has random bruises on her. and
00:09:36.74 Tony Fowler Hmm.
00:09:37.21 Taylor Kruse Like like on the on the outsides of her hips she'll get bruises and she'll be like there's those bruises again.
00:09:37.31 Tony Fowler That's right.
00:09:42.82 Taylor Kruse Like what the heck did I do? I don't remember doing anything. And other times she'll be like oh there's me bumping the side of the table again with my hip.
00:09:54.08 Tony Fowler Hmm. Hmm.
00:09:54.65 Taylor Kruse You know and that's kind of the... That's kind of the type of clumsiness that we're talking about um versus like a clumsiness that would be more maybe related to the cerebellum where there are accuracy in rhythm issues with movement.
00:10:12.47 Taylor Kruse you know obviously these things do overlap with one another because you can't completely separate any of these functions and findings of different brain areas because everything's always working together.
00:10:23.22 Taylor Kruse But yeah with the cerebellum we're typically thinking more accuracy rhythm-related errors being that type of clumsiness. But with the parietal lobe
00:10:32.73 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:10:34.52 Taylor Kruse it's all about spatial awareness. So it's it's unique in that respect because the parietal lobe is it's the home of your spatial awareness. So basically
00:10:46.62 Taylor Kruse you know where understanding where you are in the environment and at the same time understanding where other objects are.
00:10:58.10 Taylor Kruse you know that's That's the type of spatial awareness we're talking about.
00:11:03.83 Tony Fowler Fascinating. Yeah that was on my list of questions was like how what's the difference between cerebellar deficit with coordination and this?
00:11:12.41 Taylor Kruse Yeah right.
00:11:13.92 Tony Fowler And you answered it quite succinctly. um So yeah the parietal lobe is related to spatial awareness. Is that its primary function? Is it one of its functions? Is there more going on with it?
00:11:27.29 Taylor Kruse yeah Yeah there's definitely more going on than just spatial awareness but but that's really especially for the work that I do it's actually one of the easier lobes to understand as far as you know our assessments of it and and the drills that we can we can do for it. But it's also one of the most important ones because as a movement person all movement is a parietal lobe stimulus.
00:11:51.00 Taylor Kruse So um one of the one of the things to know about it is that this is where your somatosensory map is. So essentially your brain's map of the body.
00:12:04.76 Taylor Kruse at least one of them. okay There's lots of different forms of maps yeah you know at the brain level but the somatosensory map um lives here. So this is also an area where um sensory processing happens.
00:12:20.12 Taylor Kruse So like we did our episode on the spinal cord and and spinal mobility and we talked a lot about sensory stimulus. We talked about receptors at the skin level.
00:12:32.66 Taylor Kruse We talked about peripheral nerves that information coming in from the outside world making its way to the spinal cord and then ascending eventually getting to the brain. And when that sensory input gets to the brain a large part of it is processed in the contralateral cortex.
00:12:52.02 Taylor Kruse And the parietal lobe is that area that we're thinking about as far as that sensory processing. So all movement is a parietal lobe stimulus in all sensory input.
00:13:06.14 Taylor Kruse either the sensory input coming from movement or sensory input that we um we might use in testing like if we're using vibration if we're using light touch if we're using sharp sensation warm cool sensation
00:13:26.23 Taylor Kruse When you put your clothing on and you feel that against your skin right? When you put your shoes on and you tie them too tight and you feel that as too tight. When you go outside and you walk barefoot through the grass and how that's different from feeling you know gravel underneath your feet maybe in the driveway right? All things.
00:13:51.20 Taylor Kruse sensations that we feel from different things that information coming in from the outside world is eventually processed in this area called the parietal lobe.
00:14:02.52 Taylor Kruse So it's highly important for the work that we do because I spend a lot of time sensory testing people because sensory the ah the person's ability to sense things accurately
00:14:10.06 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:14:18.42 Taylor Kruse is super important when you are rehabilitating injury let's say or you just want to improve the quality of movement right? We wanna be able to run tests to understand a person's ability to sense is it accurate?
00:14:34.81 Taylor Kruse is Are they sensing something that's are they hypersensitive? Is there a loss of sensation when there's a loss of sensation or even hypersensitivity that can and probably will affect their quality of movement?
00:14:50.84 Taylor Kruse So there's this is a really important area for anybody that is. using movement as a tool for training for rehabilitation and if you're using any kind of sensory type of tool like maybe your own hands as a manual therapist or anything else that you are applying to the body that is felt well guess what? This parietal lobe is a massive target. Whether you know it's a target yet or not you are training the parietal lobe.
00:15:28.66 Tony Fowler So I want to bring in an example from last episode. You had talked about a client that had broken his neck not once but twice.
00:15:37.94 Taylor Kruse Yeah. Yeah.
00:15:40.50 Tony Fowler And one of the things you were testing was sensation on the feet. And you were telling me that you he was feeling...
00:15:45.43 Taylor Kruse Great.
00:15:49.56 Tony Fowler ah He was feeling certain sensations sharp. He was feeling dull. He was feeling cold. But he wasn't feeling vibration or light touch.
00:15:59.67 Taylor Kruse Mm-hmm.
00:16:00.25 Tony Fowler um Now this could be a problem as we discuss this in the context of the spine this could be a problem
00:16:07.77 Taylor Kruse Right?
00:16:09.43 Tony Fowler at you know down down the levels right?
00:16:12.98 Taylor Kruse Exactly yep.
00:16:14.46 Tony Fowler But it occurred to me that then the parietal lobe based on what you're describing is missing inputs. So I guess my question is in a situation like that would you want to stimulate the parietal lobe perhaps anyways even if the problem is way down in the foot or in the spine um to try to give it that missing input?
00:16:33.40 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:16:37.53 Taylor Kruse Yes that's a great great question great insight. That is exactly how you have to think. And this this idea right here this is why so many of the sensory training attempts don't go anywhere for people.
00:16:54.58 Taylor Kruse you know I hear this all the time talking to our students and our clients and just people even DMing me saying I tried this therapy I tried that therapy it feels good I might get a temporary you know type of result from it but I'm not really getting anything beyond that.
00:17:14.33 Taylor Kruse And in this is often wise because the different levels are not addressed. And not only are they not addressed but the the person is not assessed in a way that you can figure out where the primary issues might be.
00:17:31.70 Taylor Kruse So you know when you have a large deficit like the the guy that I was talking about and he wasn't able to feel um like let's say vibration on several parts of his body
00:17:46.68 Taylor Kruse that absolutely is now an input problem for the parietal lobe. So as we go through the levels looking at how that information passes through the nervous system to the spinal cord and eventually gets to the brain we we have to understand the pathways and where the pathway begins as far as the receptor level goes. So like what what nerve receptors are responsive to vibration?
00:18:14.84 Taylor Kruse Because maybe that's where the problem is. but there also could be a peripheral nerve issue right? Where that information now has to travel a peripheral nerve to get to the spinal cord.
00:18:26.10 Taylor Kruse And maybe there's peripheral nerve issues. Maybe there's a spinal cord issue. I think we said like if there's a problem at the spine it's gonna interrupt that super highway we called it of traveling information kind of like a kink in the garden hose.
00:18:36.95 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:18:40.98 Taylor Kruse And eventually as that information makes its way up towards the brainstem Eventually it crosses over. Knowing where it crosses over is super important because that's another structure that we have to be thinking about.
00:18:55.96 Taylor Kruse So if it's vibration it crosses in the medulla which is the lower aspect of the brainstem. And perhaps there's an issue there. And as we keep following the pathway we're going to arrive at where it ends as far as processing goes and that will be the parietal lobe.
00:19:15.16 Taylor Kruse So technically somebody who let's say has a deficit a large sensory deficit let's say in their left foot and they can't feel vibration that automatically means they have a right parietal lobe input issue.
00:19:25.05 Tony Fowler Yeah.
00:19:33.94 Taylor Kruse So if that problem is longstanding right you you kind of see this happen in different ways for different people. They have a loss of sensation in their left foot therefore that might manifest eventually into reduced brain activation in the right parietal lobe because ah most of that sensory input is gonna go contralaterally.
00:19:57.68 Taylor Kruse Reduced brain activation in the right parietal lobe can contribute to that loss of sensation but it can also cause other issues. So this is this is why we have to understand our our levels and think about this when we're considering like history and what we know about the person.
00:20:17.46 Taylor Kruse A lack of cortical activation contralaterally is going to impact... coordination especially on that left side of the body. It's gonna interrupt sensory processing and it could even start to kind of have a downstream effect on the right side of the brainstem which now you might be seeing other reflexive stability problems on the right side of the body even different autonomic yeah yeah autonomic issues muscle tone exactly.
00:20:47.57 Tony Fowler Poor muscle tone perhaps.
00:20:52.98 Taylor Kruse So this is why it's so important to know those levels because as you learn about a person through your testing you can start to go okay I'm starting to kind of see the whole picture here. i This person that's had you know very widespread left side sensory deficits has coordination issues on the left side of their body also has maybe decreased activation in the right cortex.
00:21:17.02 Taylor Kruse And that's going to also maybe manifest in those right-sided issues more related to let's say the brainstem. So yes um it's when you have a sensory deficit you're going to automatically have a contralateral effect right There's going to be something going on contralaterally. And kind of going back to your original question you know should you train the parietal lobe even if maybe the parietal lobe is not the primary issue?
00:21:52.34 Taylor Kruse And the answer is yes it can be extremely valuable to target these areas along the entire pathway to restore sensation somewhere else.
00:22:07.03 Taylor Kruse So and this is where neurology just gets so cool because um for example I'm thinking of a different client but... and actually I've used this many times over the years but speaking of like vibbra vibration deficits and knowing that the pathway that's transmitting that input or that information crosses in the medulla one of the ways that I've had a lot of success helping people to restore sensation is by having them do other drills and inputs for the medulla.
00:22:44.70 Taylor Kruse So for example finding a vibration deficit let's just use that left foot again.
00:22:50.50 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:22:51.06 Taylor Kruse Perhaps we apply vibration to the left foot and that assesses well but the results don't stick. Maybe we have to do then some neuromechanic drills for the nerve the peripheral nerve that's involved with that part of the body.
00:23:08.44 Taylor Kruse So let's let's just say it's the bottom of the foot. And we wanna be thinking about a branch of the sciatic nerve called called the tibial nerve.
00:23:19.67 Taylor Kruse So maybe we're doing some neuromechanic drills for the tibial nerve while applying vibration to the bottom of the foot. Now we have a stronger stimulus. We can keep working up through the levels.
00:23:33.88 Taylor Kruse And for example maybe apply brainstem inputs something simple like humming. Humming while you're doing all this can actually then help and maybe going to even the next level and thinking about the parietal lobe and doing something to activate the parietal lobe at the same time.
00:23:54.74 Taylor Kruse This is where we start getting into some of those really clever stacks of multiple inputs together to make the whole thing stronger and work better if which hopefully will provide better results in the moment but also long-term.
00:24:11.00 Taylor Kruse So that's that's kind of the neat kind of a neat way to to look at sensory testing and training is to just go through those levels. And I've i've had many many experiences where I'm testing vibration on a person and they're like yeah I don't really feel that very strong compared to the other side.
00:24:30.67 Taylor Kruse I've even had some people say I don't feel that at all. And then I have them start like humming or gargling water. And like after a minute of gargling water they're like no way.
00:24:44.25 Taylor Kruse I feel that now. From activating the medulla through gargling. It's really cool to experience something like that.
00:24:54.52 Tony Fowler Yeah it's just like waking up that part of the brain almost.
00:24:58.29 Taylor Kruse Definitely.
00:25:00.12 Tony Fowler So a bit on on anatomy um you mentioned the paratolobes in the cortex.
00:25:03.42 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:25:06.98 Taylor Kruse Yep.
00:25:07.80 Tony Fowler Yeah. Where exactly or roughly maybe is it just for our our mental model of of the brain here?
00:25:15.54 Taylor Kruse Yeah so yeah just think you know the the common picture that people can kind of visualize of the brain and and the lobes that you can see. and we talked We've talked on the podcast now a lot about the frontal lobe where it's going to be towards the front of the of the head.
00:25:32.41 Taylor Kruse your Your parietal lobe is going to be more towards the back middle part.
00:25:37.73 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:25:37.78 Taylor Kruse so So not totally like as far back as you can go because then we start getting into like the occipital lobe which is more of like the home of visual processing. But near there so kind of middle back is going to be where the parietal lobe is.
00:25:54.14 Tony Fowler Cool. Cool. and And it's it's connected to the medulla. And I mean everything's connected right? But but there's there's kind of a more direct pathway between
00:26:01.88 Taylor Kruse Yeah. Yeah.
00:26:05.56 Taylor Kruse Yeah as far as our sensory pathways go you know we we break them apart into two different main distinct pathways when we're testing sensation with different sensations that we're using. So for example like light touch and vibration are what we call dorsal column sensations.
00:26:26.26 Taylor Kruse And the dorsal column is the one I was describing that decusates in the medulla whereas another pathway that we're commonly testing more of the spinal thalamic system is different sensations.
00:26:32.41 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:26:40.10 Taylor Kruse It's more about temperature and crude touch sensations things that become a little bit uncomfortable which is like testing sharp for us.
00:26:50.46 Tony Fowler here
00:26:50.58 Taylor Kruse And that is a different pathway that takes a different road. And that one does not cross in the medulla. That one crosses more at the level of the spinal cord.
00:27:01.59 Taylor Kruse So for example humming when you're trying to restore um temperature sensation somewhere might not be the right drill. because it does not cross in the medulla but it does go to the parietal lobe.
00:27:16.98 Taylor Kruse So I've had experience helping people restore things like temperature sensation with vision exercises.
00:27:26.23 Tony Fowler Hmm. Right.
00:27:26.81 Taylor Kruse Okay this is like woo-woo neurology that actually isn't woo-woo. um I've many times more than I can remember helped people restore sensation by doing smooth pursuits.
00:27:41.03 Taylor Kruse And smooth pursuits is a visual tracking exercise where you follow the target. So a basic smooth pursuit you would follow your target from let's say middle to your right where it's only your eyes tracking the target. It's not your head moving with your eyes. It's purely eye motion.
00:27:58.74 Taylor Kruse That smooth motion of tracking an object that's what we call a smooth pursuit. And the neurology of eye movements is is quite complex but but very simply speaking
00:28:11.86 Taylor Kruse Whatever side I track my target to that's the side of the parietal lobe it's going to activate. So if I wanted to activate my right parietal lobe I would follow my visual target to the to my right.
00:28:25.86 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:28:26.55 Taylor Kruse So having someone do right smooth pursuits while you are applying a sensation on the left side of their body like warm or cool or sharp you might be able to help them improve being able to feel that sensation by using a vision exercise because you are lighting up the parietal lobe.
00:28:47.35 Taylor Kruse It's so cool to see. That's one of the cooler things that I feel like I've experienced where you do something that seems completely unrelated Yet it is very related when you know the pathways.
00:29:03.70 Tony Fowler I don't know why the the mental image I'm getting with this um is you know you've got a pathway let's say from your left foot up to your right parietal lobe.
00:29:14.81 Tony Fowler and And it's more complicated than that right? But I'm imagining it's like that light in this image in my head is is where the signal is strong and like darkness is where it kind of gets lost.
00:29:27.70 Tony Fowler And so there's these dark patches
00:29:28.06 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:29:30.36 Tony Fowler along the way. And so all you're doing is you're using some other stimulus to light that part of the passage up and it like connects connects the pathway.
00:29:37.24 Taylor Kruse Well said.
00:29:38.31 Tony Fowler that that's I don't know why that that felt so powerful to me to to visualize it that way but yeah.
00:29:41.72 Taylor Kruse I love that.
00:29:45.01 Taylor Kruse That's exactly right. That's exactly right. and And that's kind of the way I think about it as well.
00:29:54.01 Tony Fowler um you mentioned so You mentioned that an input problem in the parietal lobe could cause problems elsewhere. And one of the places that you mentioned specifically was like the brainstem.
00:30:07.86 Taylor Kruse Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:30:08.22 Tony Fowler And that makes me think of ah and then you also said the cerebellum. um Reason I bring that up is to bring it back to clumsiness.
00:30:19.77 Tony Fowler you You were kind of making the distinction between the parietal lobe's function with spatial awareness and coordination problems.
00:30:32.34 Tony Fowler But it sounds like these two things can go hand in hand at times.
00:30:38.04 Taylor Kruse right
00:30:39.26 Tony Fowler So I guess my question is can can we talk a little bit more about that kind of connection and then also how you might be able to distinguish between the two? 100%.
00:30:53.05 Taylor Kruse Yeah do you mean kind of like our two-way street idea where yeah yeah.
00:30:56.28 Tony Fowler kind of one hundred percent
00:30:58.13 Taylor Kruse So yeah that's great. so let's say let's say you let's say a person has had a concussion and their parietal lobe was affected. that problem beginning at the parietal lobe could cause sensory and motor issues and so you know and very specific sensory issues.
00:31:19.32 Taylor Kruse So So we can look at it that way versus just a sensory issue let's say developing in the periphery because of an injury or a surgery or a scar right? Because when you're sliced open for surgery the receptor bed is damaged right? And it has to heal. And oftentimes you're left with...
00:31:42.74 Taylor Kruse weird little sensory deficits when you have a scar on your body. That becomes an input problem eventually as we go upstream to the parietal lobe. So the parietal lobe there's consequences to that let's say if the sensory loss is big enough.
00:32:00.02 Taylor Kruse And that can impact loss of motor control too. So we can think about it that way and then thinking about it coming from the other direction you've had a head trauma your parietal lobe was affected.
00:32:12.28 Taylor Kruse um there you know There's so many reasons. It goes outside of my scope but a different disease process different degenerative diseases that can affect the brain that may affect the parietal lobe can then manifest downstream into motor and sensory problems.
00:32:32.15 Taylor Kruse So i'm actually thinking about Alicia again the parietal lobe is a big target for her so we think through testing. And she she did so she tells a story sometimes of playing softball when she was um quite young.
00:32:40.84 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:32:47.98 Taylor Kruse I think this was like eighth grade. And she was really quite good at softball and she felt like it was a good sport for her. And she was very coordinated with what she was doing there. But then she had a concussion and she said after that concussion all of a sudden she just could not throw a softball.
00:33:11.67 Taylor Kruse Like it got so weird for her. She just ended up gravitating away from the sport altogether like just made the decision to not pursue softball because it got so strange for her when initially she was really strong with that sport throwing catching hitting everything.
00:33:29.85 Taylor Kruse And you know we find through her history we talked about her like randomly bumping into things. That's a big history finding for the parietal lobe. And through some other neuro assessments that are kind of pointing at the parietal lobe this is a target for her. And this all may have started with that concussion that she had at a young age.
00:33:52.44 Taylor Kruse And actually Tony if um if you think it's a good idea I do have some history findings I can i can go through here.
00:33:58.33 Tony Fowler Yeah absolutely. i love a good case study.
00:34:00.95 Taylor Kruse Yeah we we mentioned a a couple of them. These aren't specific to Alicia but these are just general history findings that people you know they're worth mentioning for the things that help us think about the parietal lobe.
00:34:13.78 Taylor Kruse I mentioned a few of them already. So someone who bumps into things a lot that would be kind of a classic one bumping into things and not really it's almost becomes a part of your life.
00:34:25.45 Taylor Kruse Like you don't even really notice it anymore but you do see the bruises on your body.
00:34:25.97 Tony Fowler hmm.
00:34:30.20 Taylor Kruse So lack of spatial awareness altogether. um you know Lack of spatial awareness can show up a lot of different ways For the coaches out there you know you've probably worked with a client that just seems to have less spatial awareness than your other clients.
00:34:48.60 Taylor Kruse I experienced this once in a while with a client now working virtually. And Alicia was saying she has ah a client that reminds her of this too. But sometimes when we do sessions like on Zoom virtually
00:35:05.14 Taylor Kruse it's very apparent that the person does not know necessarily where to be in the room or how to set up the camera so that the camera is viewing them appropriately for us for the coaches.
00:35:19.73 Taylor Kruse And it's a struggle every single time. And it's one of those things that you take for granted but knowing where you belong in the room relative to everything else and then figuring out where your camera needs to be to actually view you
00:35:34.03 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:35:34.74 Taylor Kruse but People would hear that and go that's that's easy right? But people with parietal lobe issue issues don't know how to do this. And in there we have to constantly say like move your camera.
00:35:47.36 Taylor Kruse I need you to take a few steps to the you know to the right. And they just never seem to be able to do it. And experientially what I've figured out because I've experienced this in person too is some people with parietal lobe issues are very sensitive to where they're where they are in the environment relative to shapes and lines.
00:36:06.97 Taylor Kruse So I'm thinking of a client I work with online sometimes and And because of where the camera needs to be and it not being kind of symmetric to the lines in her room she's standing on like a big oriental rug that is like a rectangle.
00:36:27.10 Taylor Kruse But where the camera goes is not is not really lined up with that rectangle. It's off to the side. And the lines on the floor really throw her off comparatively to where the camera belongs.
00:36:37.90 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:36:40.76 Taylor Kruse And I've had experiences like that in person when we had our our old studio was shaped very strange. We were at the top floor and the roof was very sloped on one side and it was a long slope on one side.
00:36:54.14 Taylor Kruse And then it was sloped on the other side but it was a short slope. So it sloped down and then it actually became vertical. And the room was a strange shape with lots of strange lines because of that.
00:37:06.42 Taylor Kruse And we had a difference in there was a a middle line horizontal that separated what was kind of a kind of a studio room with um with mirrors and a like a wood floor. And then on the other half was more gym style rubber floor.
00:37:25.82 Taylor Kruse And so you got all these differences in shapes and colors and lines. And sometimes people with parietal lobe issues have a hard time navigating that. And we can be talking about very healthy individuals.
00:37:37.64 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:37:37.68 Taylor Kruse It's not yeah it's it's an interesting thing to pick up on. And typically those same people have a hard time with movement. They just don't learn it as easily. They're more uncoordinated. they They have a hard time navigating movement sessions and using tools like kettlebells and dumbbells. And you got to spend a lot of time teaching them ah basics of movement.
00:38:02.46 Taylor Kruse it's ah It's just parietal lobe issues create large deficits in motor control. So you can also see this in someone who has like ah no sense of personal boundary.
00:38:18.71 Taylor Kruse So as we get into like some of the You know people that have probably are less healthy and are dealing with some more some some more complicated brain things they they might have a hard time knowing where they belong boundary-wise. They might get really close to you to talk to you and not really realize it.
00:38:42.30 Taylor Kruse You know there's probably going to be some cultural factors that you know um are involved in this too depending. But... Most of the time people kind of know where they belong when they're talking to you.
00:38:55.39 Taylor Kruse And if you've ever talked to somebody who doesn't know where they belong and kind of violates that personal boundary it's kind of weird.
00:38:59.42 Tony Fowler ah Yeah.
00:39:01.59 Taylor Kruse It's like whoa why are you standing there? Yeah.
00:39:04.46 Tony Fowler He's a close talker Jerry.
00:39:04.60 Taylor Kruse You know yeah yeah and that's a thing.
00:39:06.05 Tony Fowler Yeah.
00:39:08.11 Taylor Kruse That's a thing. So doesn't know where to put themselves in the environment. um That could be relative to another person they're talking to or um just kind of having a hard time with objects. You know i I have people walk backwards a lot run backwards do different exercises backwards.
00:39:25.17 Taylor Kruse And it's very clear to me that some people have no idea where things are in the room when I start doing that. And other people are super dialed. And it's it's just ah it's an interesting thing to to observe.
00:39:39.32 Taylor Kruse Other things we talked about sensory loss. So any sensory loss would be a history finding for parietal lobe. Hypersensitive to touch and pain.
00:39:50.36 Taylor Kruse So sometimes when there's parietal lobe issues it's more of a survival response neurologically but your brain will try to turn up different areas receiving input.
00:40:04.69 Taylor Kruse And this is a survival strategy so that neurons can stay alive. because when there's decreased activation that means decreased activation of neurons.
00:40:16.95 Taylor Kruse What you don't use you lose. And this is the thing we don't want which is degeneration or death of nerve cells. That's not good. And so the body so tries to counter these input issues by turning up the volume of sensory input.
00:40:38.23 Taylor Kruse So when a person has a sensory problem you can become hypersensitive as a way to help keep those neurons alive.
00:40:49.08 Taylor Kruse So we can see hypersensitivity to touch and um pain as well.
00:40:55.75 Taylor Kruse Localize yeah go ahead.
00:40:55.86 Tony Fowler and and cold. so So that hypersensitivity would that also apply to
00:40:57.69 Taylor Kruse i Yeah could be any sensation.
00:41:00.87 Tony Fowler OK.
00:41:01.66 Taylor Kruse Yeah it could be any sensation. And you can also see like localized um periodic sensations that you experience like ah like tingly sensations or crawling sensations in a certain area of the body.
00:41:15.67 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:41:16.09 Taylor Kruse This is thought to be kind of that concept happening where the brain is turning up the the volume and trying to receive as much input as possible. It's kind of interesting because Alicia has an area on the right side of her back like near her shoulder blade where she always asks me if there's a bug crawling there.
00:41:39.40 Taylor Kruse She's like is there something on my back right there? You know and it's you can see this at kind of a more intense level to clinical level where the you know people are dealing with the this kind of a thing that's much more intense.
00:41:55.67 Taylor Kruse We want to be thinking about the parietal lobe because that's ah it could be that the parietal lobe is is going through some possible degenerative changes and the volume is being turned up to try to get all sensory input to get somewhere right?
00:42:14.86 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:42:15.54 Taylor Kruse It's an interesting survival strategy. There are some right side and left side of the hemisphere differences that we we discuss like in our courses with the parietal lobe.
00:42:30.82 Taylor Kruse Typically for the work that we do um we don't have to get into these too deeply but... but we might like depending on the goal but just real quick cause people may find it interesting.
00:42:42.81 Taylor Kruse So there's there's an area of the parietal lobe called the inferior parietal lobule which is just a ah structure that we we look at sometimes and
00:42:51.48 Tony Fowler Sounds like an insult.
00:42:52.73 Taylor Kruse Yeah Tony. And left side so just think left side of the parietal lobe is going to be more associated with right and left confusion.
00:43:05.34 Taylor Kruse So just not not knowing your right and your left um you know as well as you should. Reading writing issues would be thinking about the left side. Difficulty with calculations right?
00:43:17.37 Taylor Kruse um People who have been diagnosed with like the dyslexia or some kind of learning challenge when they you know when they have these things is pretty common.
00:43:28.25 Taylor Kruse Also like hard to find the word for something. So I guess like word retrieval when you're trying to describe something. All of these findings make us think more about the left side.
00:43:39.99 Taylor Kruse For the right side it's more that drawings can become difficult. difficulty interpreting shapes or certain shapes and difficulty interpreting maps.
00:43:52.12 Taylor Kruse If you've ever known that person that just can't seem to figure out how do I position this map relative to me so that I can understand it you know That's kind of one that some people might be able to to you know think they think about themselves or or somebody else that they can relate to.
00:44:12.54 Taylor Kruse so other additional you know findings that are interesting.
00:44:20.79 Tony Fowler Awesome. Awesome. Super fascinating. um Parietal lobe seems incredibly important.
00:44:27.65 Taylor Kruse It's incredibly important. And it's one of those things where you know we're like okay home of spatial awareness and sensory processing and movement matters but then there's like so much more.
00:44:37.69 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:44:37.69 Taylor Kruse you know and And that's typically how the lobes are.
00:44:37.87 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:44:40.63 Taylor Kruse the The lobes is like kind of funny. we we We narrow it down in education to well it does this thing. you know The frontal lobe is for executive processing.
00:44:52.60 Taylor Kruse And the parietal lobe is for spatial awareness. And the occipital lobe is for visual processing. And the temporal lobe is for auditory processing. And and it's way bigger than that. There's overlap. There's so many things. And there is also so much neurology I have i don't even know. That's like it goes and it goes and it goes which is cool.
00:45:20.76 Taylor Kruse But we... We understand these basic things because especially for the work that I do you know these are the most important ones.
00:45:30.94 Tony Fowler So one of the words I was expecting you to say as you were describing some of these um signs of of potential parietal love deficits was proprioception.
00:45:38.42 Taylor Kruse hmm.
00:45:42.97 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:45:43.74 Tony Fowler And I'm curious um because you talked about spatial awareness and where people are with their bodies um is is proprioception one of like the primary functions of this lobe would you say?
00:45:56.90 Taylor Kruse Definitely yeah yeah definitely.
00:45:56.93 Tony Fowler or Or is that a word you associate with a different brain area for some reason?
00:46:00.82 Taylor Kruse Yeah pro I mean proprioception is more than just a parietal lobe for sure.
00:46:06.89 Tony Fowler Yeah.
00:46:07.22 Taylor Kruse right but it it's But absolutely you you can think of the parietal lobe as a very important area for motor and sensory and proprioception which is the sense of understanding where you are in space.
00:46:21.83 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:46:21.85 Taylor Kruse right So that that feedback that your brain is getting from um receptors and kind of the mechanical force that is happening or not happening
00:46:21.97 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:46:35.74 Taylor Kruse That is proprioception being able to sense that. And it helps your brain understand where you are in space and how you're moving. And and all of that input is going to eventually go to the parietal lobe.
00:46:53.46 Tony Fowler So when I first started barbell training I probably put on like 30 pounds um over the course.
00:46:57.13 Taylor Kruse Mm-hmm.
00:47:01.90 Tony Fowler I don't know exactly how long it took but it was it was fairly it was a fairly marked difference. Like I never got big. No one ever confused me for like a bodybuilder or a powerlifter or something.
00:47:12.89 Tony Fowler But I went from being like pretty skinny to to be not as skinny. Right.
00:47:18.33 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:47:18.97 Tony Fowler And I remember I kept bumping into the doorframe as I was walking through doors for a while. And I was just like what the hell is this? And I just like kept hitting my shoulder.
00:47:30.24 Tony Fowler And I assumed you know it's like well you know it's probably like what like a half inch or something difference.
00:47:36.24 Taylor Kruse that's like That's like what I was pretending to do when I was 16 and i got into I got into lifting weights. I'd pretend to bump into things.
00:47:44.44 Tony Fowler No I was actually bumping into things.
00:47:44.52 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:47:46.00 Tony Fowler And like I said it's not that I was actually big. It was just I feel like it it was different.
00:47:48.26 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:47:50.58 Tony Fowler And so i you know that stopped happening at some point.
00:47:50.68 Taylor Kruse Right.
00:47:54.06 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:47:54.68 Tony Fowler And so rather than it being like a deficit I think that I needed ah like ah to recalibrate.
00:48:02.71 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
00:48:03.32 Tony Fowler And I'm just kind of curious like how would you think about that through an applied neurology lens? Like are you thinking about training the parietal lobe or doing anything to like help make that map change?
00:48:15.35 Taylor Kruse Yeah I mean in that scenario it's probably you know that kind of thing usually just resolves itself right?
00:48:22.34 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:48:22.87 Taylor Kruse But you experience so there is a map there you can experience these deficits or the the your experience can be that your maps have changed and so you have a very different awareness right?
00:48:40.54 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:48:40.89 Taylor Kruse and And I absolutely get that. So like as a I remember what it was like like seriously and in high school like the honeymoon effect that came from weight training was ridiculous.
00:48:51.70 Taylor Kruse I mean myself and I had friends who were able to put on weight pretty fast. Like all we were doing was lifting weights and eating as much as we could.
00:48:59.06 Tony Fowler the
00:48:59.26 Taylor Kruse And you can actually you can change your body type in a reasonably fast you know amount of time and feel different and it feels not like you for a little while.
00:49:17.18 Taylor Kruse and and And you can also experience this with weight loss. And I actually have experienced this very recently. um i have I've shed a lot of weight and I've been i've been that working on this now since February.
00:49:36.15 Taylor Kruse and tracking my food dialing in what I need um to make my diet healthier for me with you know where I am. and And then I got to a point where i was feeling good enough where i was like okay I'm gonna start reducing calories because I feel like I can and I wanna lose body fat.
00:49:51.42 Taylor Kruse And so I've been going through that process. And there was there was like two instances and they they were they were very they they didn't this didn't last long but I remember for like a week I was putting on certain clothes and feeling very different in those clothes because i had actually i was actually i had less body fat than before.
00:50:16.70 Taylor Kruse And it was like my maps had changed. It was really odd. And so it can kind of work both ways like gaining weight you can experience this dropping weight you can experience this. So in my experience it just sort of works itself out.
00:50:32.82 Taylor Kruse You know what I mean? It's just one of those things but it's interesting. um i I think that for you you know gaining muscle and and um you know through that process and feeling that i I feel like that probably happened to me when I was in high school but I didn't recognize it.
00:50:50.89 Tony Fowler Mm hmm. Sure.
00:50:54.68 Taylor Kruse I you know cause I would I would put on quite a bit of of a lean you know muscle at at certain points you know especially in the off season when I wasn't as focused on wrestling and stuff. So it's a interesting concept.
00:51:11.80 Tony Fowler Yeah part part of why i think i I remember it is at the time I had an office job so you'd have to wear button-down shirts and slacks and stuff. And at some point I was like well got to get new clothing because this isn't going to work.
00:51:21.00 Taylor Kruse Mm-hmm.
00:51:24.50 Taylor Kruse ha
00:51:26.12 Tony Fowler like With a T-shirt it can kind of stretch and you're okay but... um
00:51:30.83 Taylor Kruse It's funny.
00:51:31.37 Tony Fowler Anyways so we talked about history findings. I imagine you might have ah a list of assessments perhaps that that you could do.
00:51:40.57 Taylor Kruse I do. Yeah I got some stuff.
00:51:42.26 Tony Fowler Yeah let's talk about that.
00:51:42.42 Taylor Kruse Yeah. Okay so let's say i'm I'm working with somebody and I very quickly want to i want information on their parietal lobe. I can have them do smooth pursuits to the right.
00:51:53.45 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:51:53.43 Taylor Kruse I can have him do smooth pursuits to the left. If I see lousy smooth pursuits ipsilaterally I might think about that side of their parietal lobe. There's other things involved.
00:52:02.46 Tony Fowler But wait that's the occipital lobe because that's what the lobe involved with vision.
00:52:03.77 Taylor Kruse ye yeah Right right. Yeah. So there's going to be other stuff involved as far as the lobes. It's a visual stimulus. um There's going to be eye muscles and cranial nerves involved in the direction that you're actually pursuing to. So there's other levels there.
00:52:22.62 Taylor Kruse But generally speaking we can use that as a form of parietal lobe assessment. Some of these things might come through observation. like And if you wanted to test left-right discrimination you actually can.
00:52:37.59 Taylor Kruse they They have apps and things that um can give you some input on how you recognize um a right hand versus left hand. Somebody who really struggles with right-left discrimination they might just tell you.
00:52:54.87 Taylor Kruse right because it's actually a thing for them.
00:52:56.95 Tony Fowler hmm. Mm hmm.
00:52:57.32 Taylor Kruse I've had people mention that in history when we get to those kind of conversations. um You can use right-left discrimination as an assessment. you know and You can create different drills if if that was important to you.
00:53:11.51 Taylor Kruse You can use reading as an assessment. um there's Reading is gonna be it's gonna involve the parietal lobe a lot. So maybe that's important for anyone out there who's working with kids and trying to help them with you know reading comprehension and stuff.
00:53:26.90 Taylor Kruse It can be an assessment and a drill. And we can also use dual tasking typically with gait. So it's kind of an interesting one where you're adding like an easy way to do it is to add some form of cognitive load to walking.
00:53:45.43 Taylor Kruse So now people are doing two things.
00:53:45.50 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:53:47.90 Taylor Kruse This is pretty common for me especially when doing gait testing to have people walk but then at some point I'll add a cognitive load and and see you know is that more challenging less challenging? What does it do for the gait? In fact let me tell a quick story because this was yesterday.
00:54:06.49 Taylor Kruse So in our membership we've got courses but then we also have a top secret membership that I hardly ever talk about. And it's where people continue their education. um it's just that we do different things inside the membership.
00:54:19.77 Taylor Kruse We meet every single week on Thursdays. And one of the things that our students were were really nudging us to do was to work with people in the community who volunteer themselves to run through like mini sessions so that our students can actually see the process.
00:54:38.52 Taylor Kruse So we did our first one yesterday and it was really cool. We we had uh A lady in the community she shared history. We did a little history taking.
00:54:50.90 Taylor Kruse Then we got into some assessments. her Her main goal was to find strategies to help her with ongoing chronic neck tension. And so I had her test her neck and she showed me movements of her neck. Rotating was very stiff for her.
00:55:06.74 Taylor Kruse And we started doing some assessments. The first thing that I did was gait. that's typically one of the first things that I'll do with everybody. And in gate we saw several different patterns. So I kind of noted those and used it as an educational moment for the students watching.
00:55:22.94 Taylor Kruse And as I'm watching her walk I noticed decrease in or a loss of arm swing bilaterally. So her arms were not swinging as much as they probably should have been.
00:55:36.28 Taylor Kruse And the motion was not pendular-like coming from the shoulder.
00:55:40.67 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:55:40.95 Taylor Kruse When we see that it typically makes us think about the contralateral cortex at a very simplistic level. There's other stuff but That's typically what we think about.
00:55:51.13 Taylor Kruse And I saw it on both sides. So I was thinking about both sides of her cortex at that point. As she started or as she was doing this gait assessment I said okay this time i would like you to continue to walk but I would like you to say every other day of the week while you walk.
00:56:08.89 Taylor Kruse And she started doing this and I just let her walk and walk and walk. She's now concentrating on saying every other day of the week. And all of a sudden we start seeing changes in her gait.
00:56:20.18 Taylor Kruse people got excited about this because we typically at first what we saw was a lot of thoracic stiffness and she was complaining about tension in her thoracic spine that traveled all the way up to her neck.
00:56:32.66 Taylor Kruse And as she started multitasking during gait her thoracic spine started to move better. We then saw more movement in her pelvis and then all of a sudden she was she had increased bilateral arm swing.
00:56:46.49 Taylor Kruse And so it was a great educational moment where I said to our students I said do you see how we're getting a big clue here that multitasking or dual tasking with gait with this cognitive load is actually a very good drill for her.
00:57:02.47 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:57:03.06 Taylor Kruse as we're seeing her movement improve in the spot. So we did that to get our assessment. And then she came back to the camera and she kind of had a little smirk on her face.
00:57:13.46 Taylor Kruse And she was like this is crazy but um I already feel better. And I said test your neck. And she tested her neck rotations and she had like 20 degrees neck rotation restored on both sides.
00:57:25.21 Taylor Kruse And she said it feels a lot better. That was just from a cognitive load while walking. So that type of dual tasking can we we can kind of associate in part with with the parietal lobe.
00:57:38.94 Taylor Kruse And so we started learning a lot about her cortical needs um and which was really cool. We got a lot of information fast and were able to do some cool stuff with it. We went on to get even more results with some other movement drills but it was neat to see that.
00:57:52.95 Taylor Kruse And I think some of our students were like blown away because they had heard about doing that but maybe hadn't yet tried that.
00:57:55.74 Tony Fowler Yeah.
00:58:01.85 Taylor Kruse with ah with a client and you can see it go the other way too. Sometimes you add a cortical load or some sort of cognitive challenge to walking and you see people's gait get worse.
00:58:05.81 Tony Fowler Right.
00:58:12.73 Tony Fowler Well that's what I was expecting with the story.
00:58:14.14 Taylor Kruse Yeah yep yeah and it it went the other way which is great best case scenario and then it it gave me more clues on what types of drills to do and yeah it was quite successful for for you know ah kind of a mini session.
00:58:14.59 Tony Fowler Yeah.
00:58:27.10 Taylor Kruse So other things for assessments identifying shapes upside down. Personally I've never done that. Sometimes it's used at a clinical level and then this is a really neat one that I use like crazy.
00:58:40.73 Taylor Kruse a contralateral inferior visual field stimulation. Okay this is so cool. So
00:58:49.50 Taylor Kruse if you look at visual processing and the different pathways that are involved with visual processing different parts of the visual field relate more or less to certain areas of the cortex.
00:59:03.35 Taylor Kruse So when it comes to visual stimulus in the inferior part of the visual field so think about the lower part that information is going to route to the parietal lobe.
00:59:14.68 Taylor Kruse So that means i can use it in two ways. I can use it as an assessment and maybe I notice that people have worse visual skills in this inferior part of the visual field.
00:59:27.13 Taylor Kruse And that might make me think about their parietal lobe.
00:59:27.29 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
00:59:30.12 Taylor Kruse Typically for me I use it as a drill because I might want to stimulate the inferior visual field with let's say light or light plus some visual some vision exercise that we're doing in order to train the parietal lobe.
00:59:47.35 Taylor Kruse Super cool unbelievably applicable. um I use it all the time because if we do the upper field we're now thinking more temporal lobe. so And knowing this is so cool. So again this is you know the woo-woo of neurology that's not woo-woo.
01:00:04.34 Taylor Kruse If I want to possibly activate the temporal lobe to help people with auditory processing my visual targets are gonna be up high.
01:00:13.53 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:00:14.33 Taylor Kruse If I wanna help somebody with spatial awareness or improve sensation or improving reading or handwriting or left-right discrimination like we've been talking about with the pridolobe I want my visual targets down low.
01:00:31.70 Taylor Kruse Crazy to know that. I've done some fun stuff too where I purposely occlude different aspects of the visual field using glasses with like black electrical tape
01:00:43.43 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:00:44.06 Taylor Kruse and having people do movement drills but only letting light in through those certain aspects of the visual field to do this stuff. And and it's it's so fun like to to be able to like fine tune and like get precise like that.
01:00:59.19 Taylor Kruse Kind of neat. So that's one that I use maybe not as much as an actual assessment but that's ah very common for me to use the visual fields and even just like light stimulation to as a stack.
01:01:15.19 Taylor Kruse you know Because even if you don't want to be that specific about it just like creating light sensation in the on the opposite side is going to stimulate the contralateral cortex and the you know so the parietal lobe in part.
01:01:33.94 Tony Fowler Yeah it's interesting you said reading because I was thinking that could be ah great stimulus in the inferior field anyways right? since Since the parietal lobe's already involved with reading you're kind of getting a double a double stack there.
01:01:47.39 Taylor Kruse Yep.
01:01:49.04 Tony Fowler Yeah.
01:01:49.46 Taylor Kruse Yep.
01:01:53.14 Tony Fowler and And this brings up another good point is that you often sort of ah use assessments and drills interchangeably.
01:02:03.21 Taylor Kruse Mm-hmm.
01:02:03.90 Tony Fowler um And yeah yeah that's something that's something you talk about or I've noticed at least. And i think that's an important point is like the same thing that can help you determine where to look is is also probably the thing that's targeting that place you're looking right?
01:02:26.20 Taylor Kruse Yes it's almost like the it's like we always say to our students the assessment can become the drill in some cases and the drill is always an assessment.
01:02:26.84 Tony Fowler So...
01:02:38.16 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:02:38.30 Taylor Kruse right So when you get better and we get good with this material everything you have somebody do is actually an assessment. right And it will it'll tell you a lot so that it kind of works you know interchangeably there.
01:02:52.60 Taylor Kruse um As far as drills go I mean there's some cool things to to mention. First of all like if you're if you're trying to activate the parietal lobe
01:03:04.90 Taylor Kruse Passive stimulus actually becomes very valuable. So thinking about any kind of sensory stim like we talked about that could be vibration could be light touch.
01:03:16.47 Taylor Kruse um you can get You can even use electrical stimulation has been shown to be good. So like a TENS unit or something like putting those pads on the skin to create...
01:03:28.86 Taylor Kruse e-stim and kinesio tape can be used kind of through the lens of okay which parietal lobe are you trying to activate? So if I put K-tape on the left side of my body that's going to be a stronger stimulus for the right parietal lobe.
01:03:44.01 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:03:44.58 Taylor Kruse So you can think about it through kind of more of the brain-based lens with kinesio tape versus just taping a condition. right it's It's neat like that. And then something people never think to use gels and creams that produce sensation.
01:03:58.23 Taylor Kruse If you've ever seen like Tiger Balm or something like a Bengay that is like a chemoreceptive type thing where you you feel something from putting it on like the the back and forth of warm cool that's kind of like Tiger Balm.
01:04:13.09 Taylor Kruse I've used those as sensory training tools for people. All right so you can you can apply that to different areas of the body and create passive stimulus which can really help people move better and it can help results stick better can help you get long-term results by using passive stimulus as you do other things.
01:04:32.66 Taylor Kruse one of the reasons why i love kinesio tape. It's one of the reasons why i like the Tiger Balm because people can have those things on their skin and get ongoing stimulation of those receptors which will affect that contralateral parietal lobe.
01:04:48.44 Taylor Kruse And you could stack movement drills with those sensory inputs which is kind of the whole point right? to Maybe you're trying to improve quality of movement.
01:04:58.87 Taylor Kruse You add a passive sensory stimulus Very very useful tool. um And manual techniques right? people Practitioners that have good manual techniques as soon as you touch the skin you're training the parietal lobe.
01:05:13.53 Taylor Kruse So it really helps to know which parietal lobe are you training. If I'm doing manual work on the left side of someone's body well that is doing other things at the receptor level at the peripheral nerve level and
01:05:27.82 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:05:27.93 Taylor Kruse you know with different sensory pathways but eventually you gotta look at it as a contralateral parietal lobe stimulus.
01:05:27.99 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:05:34.97 Taylor Kruse And so knowing that as a manual therapist when you get good with brain-based work your manual therapy starts looking really creative but weird to people because someone's you know someone's right knee might be the painful area that they're hoping to improve.
01:05:57.30 Taylor Kruse And you're doing sent you're doing manual therapy on their left elbow.
01:06:01.07 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:06:02.26 Taylor Kruse And you might have brain-based reasons for doing that depending on why you think that right knee is bothering them. Because if that right knee is really let's say a reflexive stabilization problem it's gonna make you think about the opposite side of the brainstem.
01:06:18.49 Taylor Kruse It's gonna make you think about the opposite cortex. So your manual techniques on the left elbow eventually stimulate the right parietal lobe and um that downstream effect on the right side of the brainstem.
01:06:34.49 Taylor Kruse So things can start looking weird but then there's reason for it right?
01:06:34.61 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:06:39.83 Taylor Kruse Which is kind of cool. um And then I mentioned the the inferior visual field stimulus. And one other really neat thing about actual vision training is that when you're doing vision exercises yes there's other things going on than just stimulating the parietal lobe
01:06:58.74 Taylor Kruse But we can make a tweak to a lot of our vision training drills by um understanding that where like mapping where a visual target is in space or where you are in space makes a stronger parietal lobe stimulus.
01:07:19.10 Tony Fowler Right.
01:07:19.13 Taylor Kruse So yeah.
01:07:19.38 Tony Fowler like You talked about tracking to the to the opposite side or to the same side or the opposite side?
01:07:24.92 Taylor Kruse Yes it was ipsilateral as far as the parietal lobe.
01:07:26.81 Tony Fowler Okay. And then also like the region like the inferior a region.
01:07:28.66 Taylor Kruse So yep. eggs
01:07:34.11 Tony Fowler Yeah.
01:07:34.55 Taylor Kruse Exactly. And then also like the I guess ah a way to explain it is doing vision drills to different targets and understanding like where the target is relative to you.
01:07:51.93 Taylor Kruse so different from using vision training drills that are asking you to recognize something. So for example juggling like we talked about it's something you're working on with the scarves.
01:08:05.72 Tony Fowler Hmm.
01:08:08.04 Taylor Kruse Juggling is going to be a blend of both temporal lobe and parietal lobe. Okay and again those aren't the only things involved but it's a visual stimulus right?
01:08:20.22 Taylor Kruse and you are recognizing let's say the colors of the scarves and I might have you juggle and say hey I want you to call out the colors that you're catching right? Or the color that you see at kind of the top of the curve.
01:08:36.89 Taylor Kruse Now we're using a visual stimulus but we're adding recognition with color which gonna be more temporal lobe based on how the information
01:08:49.27 Taylor Kruse or where the information goes through these pathways. That's the what is it pathway simply put for vision work. And the where is it pathway is more related to the parietal lobe.
01:09:02.19 Taylor Kruse Now the where is it is interesting because to learn how to juggle you have to know how far does your body need to be away from the scarves.
01:09:10.08 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:09:10.58 Taylor Kruse You also have to target the scarves when you're you know plucking them out of the air. And you have to know where what targets are you actually trying to throw the scarves to as they cross your body.
01:09:22.68 Taylor Kruse That's more of the where is it. Someone who has a problem with the where is it pathway or the parietal lobe in general has a hard time placing themselves in the environment relative to what they have to do.
01:09:38.84 Taylor Kruse Maybe think about it as like a boxer has to always know their distance from the opponent And if there's a deficit there it's costly for several reasons.
01:09:52.32 Taylor Kruse They're gonna get hit when they don't wanna get hit and they're gonna have a hard time hitting the opponent because the distance is off. That's a very high-level proprioceptive skill that we take for granted that is very much mapped by the visual system and the parietal lobe helps us understand where we are in space as we do something like that.
01:10:16.79 Taylor Kruse So it's it's cool to know those little things about visual processing because you might have a reason for wanting to create vision training drills that are more about where is it in space versus what is it.
01:10:34.26 Tony Fowler Interesting.
01:10:39.86 Tony Fowler So any more drills?
01:10:42.36 Taylor Kruse That is that is my list of you know the most common stuff right? And just remember movement. I mean it can be anything. I'll you know I I've taken so any client that I've had in you know in the past that has had some pretty large parietal lobe deficits. One of the things that I didn't mention that I like to do is like ground-based movement drills.
01:11:08.28 Taylor Kruse And and the reason is we've got a lot of motor control and you know being able to handle your body and a lot of coordination that comes from different ground-based movement drills but you also have that tactile sense that's built into it because you're on the floor you know?
01:11:24.83 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:11:25.97 Taylor Kruse So rolling around on the ground Crawling it's ah it's a very different feeling than standing up right?
01:11:37.04 Taylor Kruse it's I've noticed over the years that when I take a person that seems to have some pretty strong like sensory motor deficits that ground-based movement very useful. And I think it's because it's almost like a a stronger blend of sensory and motor together
01:11:56.28 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:11:56.76 Taylor Kruse that can really help them. So usually start with an exercise called partial rolling where you kind of curl yourself up into a ball roll back onto your shoulder blades and come back up.
01:12:07.82 Taylor Kruse basically give your back a massage as you're sort of mapping what it is to roll backwards and forwards and keep your balance as you roll. Little things like that kind of evolving into more complex type ground-based movement if you want to take it that way starts resembling martial arts dance dance
01:12:28.63 Taylor Kruse All that kind of you know all those animal type flow movements that you know people enjoy doing on the ground.
01:12:32.85 Tony Fowler hu
01:12:35.77 Taylor Kruse a lot of it looks like jujitsu to me and wrestling. You know that's where I learned most of you know the ground-based stuff that I still teach to this day is through wrestling. Great parietal lobe stimulus.
01:12:48.60 Tony Fowler You know what's interesting about that is I feel like that's how we learn how to move as infants right?
01:12:53.78 Taylor Kruse Exactly. Built into the system. Yeah exactly.
01:12:56.38 Tony Fowler Yeah yeah.
01:12:57.14 Taylor Kruse Exactly.
01:12:57.35 Tony Fowler So it would make sense that if I would almost like consider it like a motor regression right? It's like okay if we get down on the ground like this is this is the foundation that we built everything else on and you can kind of re re-establish that perhaps.
01:13:10.57 Taylor Kruse right
01:13:14.01 Taylor Kruse yeah and if you've ever watched an infant learn how to move and eventually walk well it's all visually driven right it's all visually driven and and uh
01:13:22.33 Tony Fowler Hmm.
01:13:25.75 Taylor Kruse ah lot you know All the movement that you see take place on the floor and you know as a as a baby goes through different stages of sitting up and scooting and crawling and eventually rolling and then they get to half kneeling positions and climb on things a lot.
01:13:45.74 Taylor Kruse It's really interesting to see them eventually make their way up to you know two legs. And when they do that initially you can tell they were not built for it. They look like you know i remember my daughter when she was learning how to get up to two legs she looks like she was riding a horse.
01:14:03.22 Taylor Kruse You know and you know they they get up and they're like now what? Because I don't have i don't have the the body for this yet.
01:14:06.71 Tony Fowler Yeah.
01:14:11.03 Taylor Kruse And you just kind of see this evolve over time. It's really wild. But yeah it's like all built into the process which the natural process which is so interesting. And it's why you actually don't want to skip stages.
01:14:28.44 Tony Fowler Hmm.
01:14:28.54 Taylor Kruse Right now you don't want to skip stages of of infant development because there can be consequences for it later.
01:14:37.29 Tony Fowler Yeah. The last thing I'll mention about the ground-based um practice is the vestibular ah element.
01:14:47.26 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
01:14:49.43 Tony Fowler you know In the past when we've talked about kind of rolling and that kind of thing a lot of times we talked about it as a vestibular stimulus right?
01:14:57.37 Taylor Kruse Yes.
01:14:58.39 Tony Fowler That makes me wonder if there's a connection between the vest I mean there's a connection between everything but a more marked connection between the vestibular system and the parietal lobe perhaps.
01:15:07.26 Taylor Kruse Yeah.
01:15:15.70 Taylor Kruse Yeah. um i what What it would want me to do and I don't know the answer right now but it makes me curious about developmentally like when when of the brain is literally developing
01:15:24.53 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:15:35.80 Taylor Kruse what are there any connections there right in in terms of uh which which came first or what lived next to each other during the development yeah off the top of my head i i don't know but i'm i'm curious to look that up uh when we're done because that
01:15:50.87 Tony Fowler Yeah. So you just in in your practice you wouldn't think like oh I want to do a vestibular drill because I think they have a parietal deficit.
01:16:01.85 Taylor Kruse You can so really you can make anything mean anything. and
01:16:06.26 Tony Fowler Hmm.
01:16:06.74 Taylor Kruse You know so it's typically in the work that I'm doing if i if I see pretty large cortical deficits with the parietal lobe um I know that person probably doesn't move very well.
01:16:22.58 Tony Fowler he
01:16:23.19 Taylor Kruse Put it this way I've never had a client and its it seemed like arrows were pointing at the parietal lobe I've never had a client that moved well with those findings.
01:16:35.18 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:16:36.02 Taylor Kruse But I have had a client many that had temporal lobe maybe be temporal lobe issues or even frontal lobe issues which is highly involved in voluntary movement but they move great.
01:16:50.81 Taylor Kruse right um With the parietal lobe anytime I've seen pretty strong deficits there people usually don't move very good. You don't move very good.
01:17:02.21 Taylor Kruse You probably have a vestibular system that is yeah under let's say yes understimulated maybe um but you're not as competent.
01:17:09.82 Tony Fowler under under stimulated under.
01:17:20.34 Taylor Kruse right Because you can have a good vestibular system which is essentially like having the most expensive highest-tech compass. The most expensive highest-tech compass is going to give you all this detailed accurate information on how you're moving which way is up and which way you're going.
01:17:39.48 Taylor Kruse If you don't move well you probably don't have the highest-tech compass as far as your inner ear goes. or your inner ear might also be go you know working overtime to try to help you but based on those deficits.
01:17:53.66 Tony Fowler a
01:17:54.23 Taylor Kruse So it it would not be uncommon for somebody with larger parietal lobe deficits to also have deficits in their vestibular system. So looking at it that way
01:18:05.50 Taylor Kruse where maybe we're talking at this point about more functional connection versus like I can draw this line.
01:18:09.88 Tony Fowler Yeah. Pathway connection.
01:18:12.31 Taylor Kruse Yeah exactly.
01:18:12.49 Tony Fowler Yeah.
01:18:14.07 Taylor Kruse In that respect absolutely. And if you wanted to draw lines eventually like I said you can make anything mean anything any kind of cortical deficit is going to impact let's say the cerebellum.
01:18:27.19 Taylor Kruse The cerebellum and the vestibular system are talking back and forth constantly.
01:18:31.61 Tony Fowler Right.
01:18:31.99 Taylor Kruse yeah And so there's again there's going to be effects there for sure that impact just motor control coordination rhythm balance all that stuff.
01:18:43.42 Tony Fowler Yeah. And I guess what it would come back down to is let's say you you have some theory about how they're connected whether it's functional or not you could assess it and you could find out.
01:18:51.49 Taylor Kruse Right.
01:18:54.20 Taylor Kruse Absolutely.
01:18:54.36 Tony Fowler right
01:18:55.12 Taylor Kruse Yep. Yeah absolutely. That's literally the most important thing. I mean spend all this time in our community and our courses teaching people theory and. People they they get really good with it.
01:19:07.86 Taylor Kruse It's pretty cool. And then we always just have to. We have to just keep coming back to this idea that. what we know is just not even as useful as the functional outcome of what's actually happening. And you know it's it's definitely the most the most important thing to keep track of the work you're doing assess it and see and see what the functional outcome actually is.
01:19:34.87 Tony Fowler Yeah very cool. Any final thoughts?
01:19:40.25 Taylor Kruse um Let's see so... if any of the history findings kind of resonated with you or maybe a client you're thinking of start to think about how you might help them move better by bringing in more parietal lobe stimulus.
01:20:00.76 Taylor Kruse and And I'll kind of recap some of the easy ideas so that people can you know think about this and really solidify it in their mind. Adding feedback to any movement where the sensory experience is heightened is going to be a parietal lobe type of drill.
01:20:23.77 Taylor Kruse So that might mean adding vibration to movement. It could mean using bands and feeling the bands on your skin. It could mean passive stimulus like we talked about with kinesio tape compression clothing
01:20:39.80 Taylor Kruse any kind of wrapping the body in a band gels the tiger bomb idea those are all really simple things that can go a long way right? when you When you add sensory you typically see improvements in motor.
01:20:54.87 Taylor Kruse You do need to know more neurology to do this in a sophisticated precise way
01:21:00.96 Tony Fowler Mm-hmm.
01:21:02.26 Taylor Kruse And if you you know obviously we got you covered if you want to learn that because this is what we do deeply in our courses because you got to know what side of the body do I do this on? And I I told you all that and in the episode. So you can explore the contralateral relationship. If you're if you think you're trying to activate the right parietal lobe you're going to do your sensory and motor work on the left side of the body. That's at least a great way to begin.
01:21:27.26 Taylor Kruse so So start applying some of that stuff to yourself or or work some of these ideas into what you're doing with a client. um And maybe smooth pursuits would be a great sort of introductory vision exercise that you could that you could work into what you're doing too.
01:21:43.67 Taylor Kruse and And see if doing smooth pursuits helps improve spatial awareness and quality of movement. So there's I feel like there's some good low hanging fruit and some some tools here that are quite applicable to this parietal lobe conversation.
01:22:01.97 Tony Fowler Yeah. Awesome.
01:22:05.53 Taylor Kruse All right there it is. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode on the parietal lobe. Remember at this point if you haven't seen the free masterclass that I teach you can still watch that. Find the link in the show notes. I go deeply into the brainstem. It's a little bit different than what we talked about today which is which is good.
01:22:24.63 Taylor Kruse You learn about cranial nerves and some of the basic foundational education that we teach everybody that it just helps you understand the philosophy and you know what we're actually doing in terms of brain-based movement work.
01:22:38.10 Taylor Kruse So check make sure you check that out. And if you haven't done so already we would really appreciate it if you dropped us a review on the podcast. I know that many of you guys have and we really appreciate that.
01:22:49.02 Taylor Kruse And we really appreciate your support here on the podcast. That's it for today. We'll be back soon.
