The motor cortex is one of the better-understood parts of the brain.
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He has been experimenting with the idea of collecting signals straight from the brain's motor cortex and using them to direct mechanical devices such as artificial arms and even wheelchairs.
Harvard Medical School may unwittingly assist with solving our (rather misguided) plight, as it just experimented with a system that lets a human mind trigger actions in a rat's motor cortex.
In one experiment that Deisseroth shows to lab visitors, a pulse of light to the right side of a mouse's motor cortex makes the animal run in circles to the left.
It consisted of a 100-electrode panel about the size of a baby aspirin that was placed on the surface of the brain at a fold in the motor cortex where hand movement is controlled.
He discovered that if a person who has long been paralyzed thinks "move my arm to the left, " the region in the brain responsible for moving arms--the motor cortex--fires away as if everything were connected.
It has been long thought that this ability was innate, rather than learned, but the Duke researchers observed the mouse song system and were surprised to see that it included a motor cortex region active during singing.
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Those kinds of studies are more rare than straight correlative studies, but they exist and show strong evidence that learning a new motor skill (such as juggling, for example) leads to changes in the white matter of the motor cortex.
These include the frontal cortex (where decisions are made), the motor cortex (which controls muscle activity), the somatosensory cortex (where the sense of touch is located) and the part of the parietal cortex that regulates kinaesthesia (the sense of bodily motion, which is built up from signals from the muscles and the vestibular systems of the ears).
D2 is found in the frontal cortex (used in thinking), the temporal cortex (speech and motor functions) and the basal ganglia, which smooths out limb movements.
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