Rodents use rhythmic vibrissae movements to sense the environment. It is currently unclear whether intrinsic activity in the vibrissa motor cortex (vMI) is capable of driving vibrissa movements on a cycle-by-cycle basis. Disinhibition of vMI results in the occurrence of spontaneous 5- to 15-Hz synchronized oscillations. In behaving rats, this synchronous resonance of vMI is shown here to drive ...

In 18 out of 164 consecutive patients with carpal tunnel syndrome ongoing spontaneous rhythmic motor unit potentials were found in the lateral thenar muscles. The frequency ranged from 3 to 9 Hz with an average of 6 Hz. The spontaneous rhythmic motor unit potentials appeared to be doublets in many cases. Ischaemia usually caused a marked increase of spontaneous activity within 1 to 2 minutes. D...

As long as we only focus on kinematics, rhythmic movement appears to be a concatenation of discrete movements or discrete movement appears to be a truncated rhythmic movement. However, whether or not the neural control processes of discrete and rhythmic movements are distinct has not yet been clearly understood. Here, we address this issue by examining the motor learning transfer between these ...

Title: Haptic Feedback Enhances Rhythmic Motor Control By Reducing Variability, Not Convergence Rate 1 Abbreviated Title for the Running Head: Haptic Feedback Reduces Rhythmic Variability 2 Authors: M. Mert Ankaralı1•, H. Tutkun Şen2, Avik De3, Allison M. Okamura4, Noah J. Cowan1. 3 1Dept. of Mechanical Eng., Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD, USA, 21218 4 2Dept. of Computer Science, Johns Hop...

In a spinal turtle, unilateral stimulation in the rostral scratch receptive field elicited rhythmic fictive rostral scratching in ipsilateral hindlimb motor neurons; contralateral hip motor activity was also rhythmic and out-of-phase with ipsilateral hip motor activity. When left and right rostral scratch receptive fields were stimulated simultaneously, bilateral rhythmic fictive rostral scratc...

Rhythmic abilities vary widely in the general population, but little is known about the factors that give rise to this variability. One factor may be musical training. Another may be differences in auditory short-term memory (STM) capacity (the amount of auditory information that can be remembered over a few seconds). Finally, as rhythms with temporal regularity (e.g., a beat) are more easily r...

Animals produce a variety of behaviors using a limited number of muscles and motor neurons. Rhythmic behaviors are often generated in basic form by networks of neurons within the central nervous system, or central pattern generators (CPGs). It is known from several invertebrates that different rhythmic behaviors involving the same muscles and motor neurons can be generated by a single CPG, mult...

The stomatogastric nervous system (STNS) of adult lobsters and crabs generates a number of different rhythmic motor patterns which control different regional movements of the foregut. Since these output patterns are generated by discrete neural networks that, in the adult, are well characterized in terms of synaptic and cellular properties, this system constitutes an ideal model for exploring t...

Timing abnormalities have been reported in many neurological disorders, including Parkinson's disease (PD). In PD, motor-timing impairments are especially debilitating in gait. Despite impaired audiomotor synchronization, PD patients' gait improves when they walk with an auditory metronome or with music. Building on that research, we make recommendations for optimizing sensory cues to improve t...