Smooth movements require coordinated control of muscles. Even a simple reaching movement involves coordinated movements of his/her shoulder, arm, wrist and fingers, which are controlled by temporally ...

Okazaki, Japan - It is common that neurons transmit information to another group of neurons by increasing or decreasing their activity, i.e. "firing rate changes". In addition to firing rate changes, ...

Located in the midbrain below the cerebral cortex, the basal ganglia are involved in reward, emotion, and motor control. This region is also the site of some of our most infamous movement disorders: ...

New experiments help explain how the brain speeds up or slows down movement. What if you couldn’t move faster even when you wanted to? Researchers thought that the part of the brain that determines ...

Neurons deep in the brain not only help to initiate movement -- they also actively suppress it, and with astonishing precision. The findings are especially relevant for better understanding ...

The basal ganglia are a group of interconnected structures, located in the midbrain below the cerebral cortex, that play a crucial role in motor control, reward processing, and cognition. This region ...

Lack of dopamine transmission through D1 receptors disturbs information flow through the 'direct pathway' in the basal ganglia, and ends up in difficulty in initiating voluntary movements, researchers ...

It has been discovered that the basal ganglia, which acts as a 'hub in the brain,' encodes learned movements and innate movements in entirely different ways. This is expected to be a crucial clue for ...

The cerebellum ("little brain") is tucked underneath the basal ganglia; it sits in the back of the skull below the cerebrum. Source: CLIPAREA l Custom media/Shutterstock Neuroscientists have unearthed ...