Inside An Olympian's Brain

While swimming and gymnastics are battles against yourself and previously rehearsed movements, sports like beach volleyball and badminton require reactionary moves directly based on your opponents' movements.  Rather than being "locked-in" to a stroke or practised routine, athletes in direct competition with their opponents must either anticipate or react to be successful.

So, what is the brain's role in learning each of these varied sets of skills and what commands do our individual neurons control?  Whether we are doing a strictly repetitive movement like a swim stroke or a unique, "on the fly" move like a return of a serve, what instructions are sent from our brain to our muscles?  Do the neurons of the primary motor cortex (where movement is controlled in the brain) send out signals of both what to do and how to do it?

Researchers at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT led by Robert Ajemian designed an experiment to solve this "muscles or movement" question.  They trained adult monkeys to move a video game joystick so that a cursor on a screen would move towards a target.  While the monkeys learned the task, they measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare the actual movements of the joystick with the firing patterns of neurons.  The researchers then developed a model that allowed them to test hypotheses about the relationship between neuronal activity that they measured in the monkey's motor cortex and the resulting actions.  They concluded that neurons do send both the specific signals to the muscles to make the movement and a goal-oriented instruction set to monitor the success of the movement towards the goal.  Here is a video synopsis of a very similar experiment by Miguel Nicolelis, Professor of Neurobiology at Duke University.

To back this up, Andrew Schwartz, professor of neurobiology at the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and his team of researchers wanted to isolate the brain signals from the actual muscles and see if the neuron impulses on their own could produce both intent to move and the movement itself.  They taught adult monkeys to feed themselves using a robotic arm while the monkey's own arms were restrained.  Instead, tiny probes the width of a human hair were placed in the monkey's motor cortex to pick up the electrical impulses created by the monkey's neurons.  These signals were then evaluated by software controlling the robotic arm and the resulting movement instructions were carried out.  The monkeys were able to control the arm with their "thoughts" and feed themselves food.  Here's a video of this experiment in action "In our research, we've demonstrated a higher level of precision, skill and learning," explained Dr. Schwartz. "The monkey learns by first observing the movement, which activ

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