Microstimulation Activates a Handful of Muscle Synergies
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Bizzi_Microstimulation actives.pdf
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2 MB
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6ae815cdbb1c4af32341bb4dbc6f693c
Author(s)
Overduin, Simon A.
d’Avella, Andrea
Carmena, Jose M.
Bizzi, Emilio
Date Issued
December 2012
Journal
Neuron
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
Overduin, Simon A., Andrea d’ Avella, Jose M. Carmena, and Emilio Bizzi. “Microstimulation Activates a Handful of Muscle Synergies.” Neuron 76, no. 6 (December 2012): 1071–1077.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Muscle synergies have been proposed as a mechanism to simplify movement control. Whether these coactivation patterns have any physiological reality within the nervous system remains unknown. Here we applied electrical microstimulation to motor cortical areas of rhesus macaques to evoke hand movements. Movements tended to converge toward particular postures, driven by synchronous bursts of muscle activity. Across stimulation sites, the muscle activations were reducible to linear sums of a few basic patterns—each corresponding to a muscle synergy evident in voluntary reach, grasp, and transport movements made by the animal. These synergies were represented nonuniformly over the cortical surface. We argue that the brain exploits these properties of synergies—postural equivalence, low dimensionality, and topographical representation—to simplify motor planning, even for complex hand movements.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2012.10.018
