Elsa Rodarte

Movement disorders • neuromodulation • mast cells

Médica especializada en movimientos anormales y neuroestimulación

@ UT, Harris Health, & MH

[Elsa Rodarte @ElsaRodarteMD]

@AANmember Thank you!

[World Cup 2026 @ofootball__]

This Monterrey World Cup stadium view is unreal. 🤩🇲🇽

[Elsa Rodarte @ElsaRodarteMD]

World Cup banana bread. It had a round ball until the one-year old modified it.

[All Fútbol MX 🇲🇽 @AllFutbolMX]

Mexicans and South Koreans playing a pick up game in the streets of Guadalajara. 😂🏆

There’s nothing like the World Cup. ❤️🇰🇷🤝🏼

[Marc Johnson @SolidEvidence]

I’m so excited. My secret (not so secret) observational experiment is about to begin.

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for wastewater surveillance.

FIFA World cup.
1/
@SecureBio
https://t.co/3Yi9LFwNz2

[Stephan A Mayer @stephanamayer]

The HOPE Trial

Does personalized BP control after EVR (<160 for TICI 2B and <140 for TICI-2C/3) improve outcome compared to standard of care (SBP <180)?

Yes -- a 13% absolute increase in favorable outcome (mRS 0-2) and a 9% absolute decrease in hemorrhagic transformation.

Is this a new standard of care? Let us know what you think!

Personalized Blood Pressure Targeting After Endovascular Therapy for Acute Ischemic Stroke https://t.co/4GpqbfJ4hQ

[Elsa Rodarte @ElsaRodarteMD]

I love the limbic system. It’s often the invisible elephant in the neurology consult…

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A neuroscientist at UC Irvine spent 60 years proving that your brain has a separate memory system for emotional events, and you can hack it to remember almost anything you want.

His name is James McGaugh.

He founded the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine, and he has been running experiments on how the brain decides what to keep and what to throw away since 1959. The finding he spent his entire career building, refining, and defending should change how every person on Earth thinks about learning.

The discovery started with a question almost nobody else was asking in the early 1960s. Why is it that you can read an entire textbook chapter and remember almost nothing three days later, but you can recall in vivid detail what you were doing the moment you heard a piece of devastating news from years ago.

The two memories were stored by the same brain in the same skull, and yet one was almost completely erased while the other was preserved frame by frame. McGaugh was convinced that something specific had to be happening in the brain to explain the gap, and he spent the next six decades chasing it.

The first major piece of evidence came from a simple animal experiment that almost ended his career when he proposed it. He trained rats to perform a task, and then immediately after the training he injected them with a stimulant drug. The rats who received the injection remembered the task far better than the rats who did not, even though both groups had performed identically during the actual learning.

The drug had not made the rats smarter or faster. It had been administered after the learning was over. Something about the chemical state of the brain in the minutes following a learning event was determining whether the memory survived or vanished.

This was the moment the entire field of memory consolidation was born. McGaugh had proven, against decades of consensus, that memories are not formed at the moment of the experience. They are formed in the hours that follow, and the chemical environment of the brain during that consolidation window decides what gets kept.

The next 50 years of his lab's work mapped out exactly which chemicals were doing the work. The answer turned out to be the stress hormones your body releases when something emotionally significant happens. Epinephrine. Cortisol. And most importantly, a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine, which floods a specific part of your brain called the basolateral amygdala the moment you feel anything strongly.

The amygdala is the small almond-shaped structure deep inside your brain that processes emotion.

McGaugh and his colleagues proved that when this region is activated by emotion, it sends a signal to the hippocampus, which is the brain region responsible for forming new memories, and that signal physically strengthens the consolidation of whatever you were experiencing in that moment.

Emotionally charged events get stamped into the brain with a flood of hormones that say keep this. Neutral events get filed without the stamp and are quietly thrown away over the next few days.

The experiment that made the mechanism unmistakable was published in 1994 by McGaugh's collaborator Larry Cahill, who had trained at the same lab. He showed participants a series of slides that told a story. Half of them saw a neutral version of the story where a boy and his mother visited a hospital.

Half of them saw an emotional version where the boy was hit by a car and rushed to the same hospital. The slides were almost identical. The narration was different.

Two weeks later, the participants were brought back and tested on how much they remembered. The emotional group recalled the middle of the story, where the trauma happened, with significantly higher accuracy than the neutral group recalled the same middle slides. The story was the same. The images were the same. The only thing that had changed was whether the brain was emotionally activated while encoding the information.

Then Cahill ran the experiment again. This time he gave half the emotional group a drug called propranolol, which blocks the action of norepinephrine in the amygdala. The drug did not interfere with their thinking. It did not make them sleepy. It just shut down the chemical pathway McGaugh had spent decades mapping. And the emotional memory advantage disappeared completely.

The group on propranolol remembered the emotional story no better than they remembered the neutral one. The hormone was the difference. Block the hormone, and the brain stopped stamping the memory.

This is the framework McGaugh built over 60 years. The brain has a two-track memory system. The default track is for neutral information, and it is leaky on purpose because most of what your brain processes in a given day is not worth keeping.

The emotional track is for information that arrives with a chemical signal that says this matters, and it preserves the experience with stunning detail because evolution decided that anything emotionally significant was probably important for survival.

The implication is the part almost nobody talks about, and it is the reason this research should be on the wall of every classroom and study room.

If you want to remember something, you have to give your brain a reason to flip the emotional switch on while you are learning it. Information delivered in a flat, neutral, low-stakes environment will be processed through the leaky default system regardless of how many times you re-read it. Information delivered with curiosity, surprise, stakes, embarrassment, awe, or even mild stress will be processed through the emotional system, and the same brain will hold onto it for years.

This is why the lecture you were forced to sit through evaporated by the end of the week, while the question you got humiliated by in front of the class is still perfectly preserved 15 years later. The humiliation was the chemical stamp. The lecture had none.

People who remember enormous amounts of what they read are not gifted. They are emotionally engaged with the material in a way most learners never become. They argue with the author in the margins. They feel actual frustration when something does not make sense. They get genuinely excited when a concept clicks. The frustration and the excitement are not side effects of learning.

They are the mechanism of learning. Every emotion you feel while reading is a small dose of norepinephrine being released into the amygdala, telling the hippocampus to stamp this page into long-term storage.

The fix is almost embarrassing in its simplicity.

Stop trying to absorb information neutrally. Pick a question you actually care about answering before you open the book. Argue with the material as you read it. Get angry at the parts that feel wrong. Get curious about the parts that surprise you. Try to explain what you learned to someone who would push back on it. Care about the outcome.

Your brain was never designed to remember neutral information. It was designed to remember anything that made you feel something. McGaugh spent 60 years proving that the rest is almost a rounding error.

The voice in your head that tells you to study harder is wrong.

The one that tells you to study warmer is the one your brain actually listens to.

[FBI Houston @FBIHouston]

⚠️ Scammers are enrolling Medicare patients in hospice care for services they do not need or without the patient's knowledge, allowing the scammers to fraudulently bill Medicare.
Learn more about this scam, and check in on the older adults in your life: https://t.co/aFin8F1y8F

[Elsa Rodarte @ElsaRodarteMD]

@houmayor Hi,
I just read that Spain cancelled the Congo vs Chile match due to Ebola risks. Is there an available document to read the safety protocols regarding the Congo vs. Portugal match in #Houston ?
Thank you!

[Copa Mundial FIFA 🏆 @fifaworldcup_es]

Japón se prepara con la Sierra Madre Oriental como testigo. ⛰️

#CopaMundialFIFA

[Elsa Rodarte @ElsaRodarteMD]

@mamadopedus @volcaholic1 Gracias! No sabía el origen de Parangaricutirimícuaro!

[Papa León XIV @Pontifex_es]

Las inteligencias artificiales no viven una experiencia, no poseen un cuerpo, no pasan por la alegría y el dolor, no maduran en las relaciones ni conocen desde dentro lo que significan el amor, el trabajo, la amistad y la responsabilidad. Tampoco tienen una conciencia moral: no juzgan el bien y el mal, no captan el sentido último de las situaciones ni asumen el peso de las consecuencias. Pueden imitar, pueden simular pero no conocen lo que producen, porque no residen en el horizonte afectivo, relacional y espiritual en el que el ser humano se hace sabio. #MagnificaHumanitas

[Elsa Rodarte @ElsaRodarteMD]

@drpiyushENT That’s very funny. I wish I hadn’t read the lyrics.

It seems to be an endocrine issue but there is a seasonal variation to it. I haven’t heard any more complaints of it since I posted. Studies mention the peak is December to March. Do you see the variability too?

[Elsa Rodarte @ElsaRodarteMD]

Why is there so much vestibular dysfunction in the clinic lately?

[nature @Nature]

“It absolutely defied all of our expectations. This was so surprising that my whole project changed.”

This phenomenon could have far-reaching implications, and is leaving neuroscientists baffled.

https://t.co/0pXW6Dtjoz

[Elsa Rodarte @ElsaRodarteMD]

A branch of PT to study this would be fun: abdominal and thoracic exercises in different positions to stimulate glymphatic drainage in all vectors.

[Elsa Rodarte @ElsaRodarteMD]

Yes, one way to increase your intracranial pressure is obesity but the preferable and more dynamic way is building and moving those abdominal muscles!

[Atanas G. Atanasov @_atanas_]

Your abdomen helps move your brain.

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

Don’t let anyone talk you out of that thirty minute before bed read. Those two hours will be the most relaxing five hours you ever spend.

[Brain @Brain1878]

Laurini et al. review genes that can give rise to both neuropathic and myopathic phenotypes, challenging the traditional divide between nerve and muscle disorders. https://t.co/UrS48MOAeH