New Brain Pathway That Controls Hand Movements Identified
Researchers report the posterior parietal cortex may be implicated in the movement of our hands.
Picking up a slice of pizza or sending a text message: Scientists long believed that the brain signals for those and related movements originated from motor areas in the frontal lobe of brain, which control voluntary movement.
But that may not always be true. A new brain pathway has been identified by neuroscientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute (UPBI) that could underlie our ability to make the coordinated hand movements needed to reach out and manipulate objects in our immediate surroundings. The discovery was made in a non-human primate model, but researchers believe that a similar pathway is likely to be present in humans as well.
The results, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the neural pathway originates not from the frontal lobe, but from the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), a brain region that scientists previously thought was involved only in associating sensory inputs and building a representation of extrapersonal space.
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Source: University of Pittsburgh.
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