Oscillations in the primary motor cortex are transmitted through the corticospinal tract to the motoneuron pool. This pathway is believed to produce an effective and direct command from the motor cortex to the spinal motoneurons for the modulation of the force output. In this study, we used a computational model of a population of motoneurons to investigate the factors that can influence the tr...

The concept of a separate premotor cortical field involved in the cerebral control of movement went out of favor among neurophysiologists during the quarter century from 1952 to 1977, but recent studies have led to its rehabilitation. The premotor cortex appears to be one of at least three fields within the motor cortex, two others being the primary motor cortex and the supplementary motor cort...

conclusions when itbs was applied over the primary motor cortex, it significantly improved manual dexterity, but had no significant effect on the hand motor imagery ability in ms patients. results itbs group showed a reduction in the time required to complete the 9hpt (mean difference = -3.05, p = 0.002), and an increase in the number of blocks transferred in one minute in the bbt (mean differe...

Studies of motor control have almost universally examined firing rates to investigate how the brain shapes behavior. In principle, however, neurons could encode information through the precise temporal patterning of their spike trains as well as (or instead of) through their firing rates. Although the importance of spike timing has been demonstrated in sensory systems, it is largely unknown whe...

Stability limits modulate whole-body motor learning 1 2 Gregory C. Manista and Alaa A. Ahmed 3 4 Department of Integrative Physiology, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA 5 6 * To whom correspondence should be addressed 7 Alaa A. Ahmed 8 Department of Integrative Physiology 9 University of Colorado 10 Boulder, CO 80309-0354 11 office: +1.303.492.6063 12 email: [email protected] 13 14 15 Ru...

The functional equivalence of overt movements and dynamic imagery is of fundamental importance in neuroscience. Here, we investigated the participation of the neocortical motor areas in a classic task of dynamic imagery, Shepard and Metzler's mental rotation task, by time-resolved single-trial functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). The subjects performed the mental-rotation task 16 times...

The neuronal correlates of handedness are still poorly understood. Here we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the impact of handedness on neuronal activation of the primary sensorimotor cortex, supplementary motor area and dorsal premotor cortex during simple unilateral and bilateral finger movements. In 16 right-handed and 16 left-handed individuals, we map...

Classification of seizures arising from the cortical motor system classically distinguishes between primary motor seizures and supplementary motor area (SMA) seizures. With the aim of better characterizing the underlying networks of motor seizures, we quantitatively studied the "epileptogenicity" of brain structures in 28 patients investigated by intracerebral recordings (stereoelectroencephalo...

Many studies have attempted to correlate changes of motor cortex activity with progression of Parkinson's disease, although results have been controversial. In the present study we used intracortical microstimulation (ICMS) combined with behavioral testing in 6-hydroxydopamine hemilesioned rats to evaluate the impact of dopamine depletion on movement representations in primary motor cortex (M1)...