Upcoming body movement can be predicted by high-frequency brain wave patterns in motor cortex, says study

Researcher hopes the work will help inform how researchers and engineers decode motor information to build better brain-machine interfaces

Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago, Nicholas G. Hatsopoulos, PhD, has long been fascinated by space. Specifically, the physical space occupied by the brain.

“Inside our heads, the brain is all crumpled up. If you flattened out the human cortex into a single 2D sheet, it would cover two and a half square feet of space—roughly the size of four pieces of paper. You would think that the brain would take advantage of all that space when organizing activity patterns, but aside from knowing that one patch of the brain controls the arm and another controls the leg, we’ve mostly ignored how the brain might use that spatial organization,” he says.

Now, in a new study published on January 16 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hatsopoulos and his team have found evidence that the brain does indeed use the spatial organisation of high frequency propagating waves of neuronal activity during movement.

The presence of propagating waves of neuronal activity has been well-established, but they are traditionally associated with the general behavioral state of an animal (such as awake or asleep).

This study is the first evidence that spatially organized recruitment of neuronal activity across the motor cortex can inform details of a planned movement.

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/health/upcoming-body-movement-can-be-predicted-by-high-frequency-brain-wave-patterns-in-motor-cortex-says-study-472416