Principal Investigator Emilio Bizzi
How does the brain put these building blocks together to produce purposeful actions? To accomplish even a simple task -- for example, picking up a glass of water – the overall goal must be translated into instructions that specify the angles of joints and the position of the hand as it moves in a trajectory toward the glass. These in turn must be translated into details of how much force the various muscles should exert to achieve the desired trajectory. Moreover, no two instances of picking up a glass are identical, so in order to drink from an unfamiliar glass we must learn from previous experience and generalize that learning to a new situation. To understand how the brain accomplishes this, Bizzi is studying how movement commands are represented by electrical activity in the motor cortex, and how this representation changes as new skills are acquired through practice. His work has implications both for normal learning and also for rehabilitation after brain injuries. Patients who lose motor control after a stroke or other injury often show some recovery over time, and Bizzi is exploring ways in which this recovery might be enhanced, for instance through virtual reality training or magnetic stimulation of the brain.