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Motor control refers to the process by which the nervous system coordinates the muscle and limbs to achieve a desired movement or set of actions. This includes the ability to anticipate, adjust and respond to deviations from the desired action.
Different motor symptoms respond variably to deep brain stimulation in Parkinson’s Disease. Rajamani et al. suggest that this variability may be due to tremor, bradykinesia, rigidity, and axial symptoms being associated with a gradient of brain circuits.
Vassiliadis et al. use transcranial temporal interference stimulation—a non-invasive deep brain stimulation technique—to show that stimulation of the striatum applied at 80 Hz disrupts the ability to learn from reinforcement feedback.
A brain imaging study shows that humans with more complex cortical folds in a premotor brain region have a higher capacity to learn a challenging new motor skill during six weeks of practice.
Prosthetic embodiment, or the incorporation of a prosthesis into one’s sensory and functional body schema, may be achieved by engineering bionic limbs that leverage a closed-loop mechanoneural–machine interface. However, the subjective experience of embodiment remains difficult to define and assess.
The main direction of motor skill-specific information between rat primary motor cortex and dorsolateral striatum is shown to switch from cortex-predominant before learning to striatum-predominant after learning.