When you shoot some hoops or kick a ball, the areas in your brain responsible for planning, coordinating, and performing movements are active. These are the so-called motor areas. But the motor areas are not only involved when you actually perform a movement, they are also activated when you imagine performing movements. The fact that actual movement and imaginary movement activate similar brai...

Slow axonal transport depends on an active mechanism that conveys cytosolic proteins. To investigate its molecular mechanism, we now constructed an in vitro experimental system for observation of tubulin transport, using squid giant axons. After injecting fluorescence-labeled tubulin into the axons, we monitored the movement of fluorescence by confocal laser scanning microscopy and fluorescence...

The activity of motor cortical cells and proximal arm muscles during the initiation of planar reaching movements were analyzed to identify whether features of coordinated motor patterns of muscles spanning the elbow and shoulder were evident in the discharge patterns of motor cortical cells. Shoulder and elbow muscles were divided into four groups, flexors and extensors at each joint. Features ...

Brain signals recorded from the primary motor cortex (M1) are known to serve a significant role in coding the information brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) need to perform real and imagined movements, and also to form several functional networks with motor association areas. However, whether functional networks between M1 and other brain regions, such as these motor association areas, are related...

Lack of complexity in general movements in early infancy is an important marker of potential motor disorders of neurological origin, such as cerebral palsy. Quantitative approaches to characterising this complexity are hampered by experimental difficulties in recording from infants in their first few months of life. The aim of this study was to design and validate bespoke surface-marker cluster...

The mu rhythm is an 8-13 Hz oscillation which can be detected over human sensorimotor cortex in brain signals such as the electroencephalogram (EEG). This rhythm is desynchronized by movement, observing the movement of others, and imagined self movement [3]. In this study we combine motor imagery and movement observation. We show that the majority of subjects tested produce an enhanced mu desyn...

Dynamic perturbations of reaching movements are an important technique for studying motor learning and adaptation. Adaptation to non-contacting, velocity-dependent inertial Coriolis forces generated by arm movements during passive body rotation is very rapid, and when complete the Coriolis forces are no longer sensed. Adaptation to velocity-dependent forces delivered by a robotic manipulandum t...

The present study shows evidence for conscious motor intention in motor preparation prior to movement execution. We demonstrate that conscious motor intention of directed movement, combined with minimally supra-threshold transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the motor cortex, determines the direction and the force of resulting movements, whilst a lack of intention results in weak and omni-...