Brain News
A team of researchers at the University of Birmingham provided interesting insights into how the human brain prepares skilled movements. The study is published in The Journal of Neuroscience.
The Study
The researchers conducted nearly 1000 trials with right-handed participants. The latter was asked to learn, memorize, prepare, and produce four keyboard sequences with the help of visual cues.
After training, the participants produced the keyboard sequence and an MRI scan measured activity patterns across the brain during the task. Sometimes the visual cues were eliminated so that the researchers can separate preparation from the movement itself in the task performance.
The Findings
The results revealed the inner mechanisms that go into how brain stores and controls skilled actions. It is found that the human brain prepares skilled movement by separating the order and timing of movements in complex sequences.
It creates and stores specific movement commands in its “muscle memory” that gets “zipped” and “unzipped” as the person begins the action. This includes playing the piano, dancing, or playing a sport.
The authors elaborated: “Information is retrieved from memory unzipped when we prepare it for execution, before being zipped together to start the task. Perhaps this unzipping mechanism helps us to stay flexible for adjustments, even in the final hundreds of milliseconds before we start the movement, e.g. if we need to change the speed or timing of an upcoming action.”
To Know More You May Refer To
Yewbrey, R., Mantziara, M., & Kornysheva, K. (2023). Cortical patterns shift from sequence feature separation during planning to integration during motor execution. Journal of Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1628-22.2023
