Quotes About Motor cortex

Whatever damage Mark Schluter suffered, his thumbs and their wiring were still intact. Recent studies by a colleague of Weber's suggested that enormous areas of the motor cortex of game-cartridge children were devoted to thumbs, and that many in the emerging species Homo ludens now favored their thumbs over their index fingers. The game controller had at last consummated one of the three great leaps of primate evolution.

But the scientists had the other half of their group of volunteers only imagine playing the notes; they did not actually touch the ivories. Then the researchers measured whether the motor cortex had noticed. It had. The region that controls the fingers of the right hand had expanded in the virtual pianists just as it had in the volunteers who had actually played the piano. Thinking, and thinking alone, had increased the amount of space the motor cortex devoted to a specific function.

Actual physical practice produced changes in each volunteer's motor cortex, as expected. But so did mere mental rehearsal, and to the same degree as that brought about by physical practice. Motor circuits become active during pure mental imagery. Like actual, physical movements, imagined movements trigger synaptic change at the cortical level. Merely thinking about moving produced brain changes comparable to those triggered by actually moving.