Principal Investigator Emilio Bizzi
Co-investigators H Horvitz , Michale Fee
Project Website http://mcgovern.mit.edu/research/action
Actions represent the final output of the brain and the means by which we exert our influence in the world. We do this through the control of muscles, and the understanding of how muscle movements are controlled is one of the most profound challenges for modern neuroscience.
Researchers study the entire spectrum of actions, from the simplest to the most complex. H. Robert Horvitz studies the genetic control of behavior in nematode worms, and also collaborates with clinical geneticists to identify genes that contribute to the human movement disorder Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). Emilio Bizzi studies the control of muscle movements in humans and animals, using a range of experimental and computational methods to understand how we learn new motor skills. And Michale Fee studies birdsong -- a complex sequence of actions that, like human speech, is learned through trial and error, and whose neural circuits closely resemble those that are damaged in Parkinson's disease.