Dr Richard Scott and Andy B look at 'brains and forks'

We've talked a bit in the past about brains and neuroplasticity, but there's been a super article came up this week and I couldn't resist it.

So I thought I must bring it to Andy and the listeners.

So just as a sort of prelude, I'm sure if anyone, any of the listeners have lived long enough, they will have family or friends who've suffered from some type of brain injury.

In my own existence, I can think over the last few years of a friend who had a stroke Following a long bike ride, he did the bike ride London to Brighton, got there and 10 minutes later had a stroke, sadly, from which he's not quite fully recovered.

Another one who was, again, not quite fully recovered, having been knocked off his bike by a car and left for dead in an adjacent field.

That was shocking, my goodness, but doing well now, I might say.

Another good friend of mine who died in Kenya from a motorbike accident hit on a zebra crossing.

And that's even before years ago.

I can think of a medical student just in the year ahead of me, the most lively chap in the year ahead, who someone opened a car door when he was cycling, went over the top and never regained consciousness.

You know, accidents happen and strokes happen.

Of course, meningitis and infections, meningitis, encephalitis can affect our brains catastrophically.

to the extent that when we were medical students, we were always advised that very specialised brain tissue wouldn't heal.

So you have much less specialised tissue, say muscle tissue.

Yeah, you've got a good chance of healing, but brain tissue, no, no chance.

It would just scar and little that could be done in those days.

Now, I might say over the last 40 years, things have changed a lot, not least for thrombosis in strokes, where you can get there with clot busters early enough, you can make a full recovery, as, again, another friend of mine has done.

So things have been improving, but the picture still can be pretty bleak until recently.

And that's where we're up to tonight.

Here's the good news.

I know I start off with a bit of bad news, but here's the good news.

There was an article in The Times this week entitled A Quiet Revolution in Brain Treatment.

And it was celebrating that outcomes for stroke patients have leapt ahead following the discovery that damaged brain tissue can repair itself.