Deconstructing motor skills
Hitting the perfect tennis serve requires hours and hours of practice, but for scientists who study complex motor behaviors, there always has been a large unanswered question — what is the brain learning from those hours spent on the court? Is it simply the timing required to hit the perfect serve, or is it the precise path along which to move the hand? The answer, Harvard researchers say, is both — but in separate circuits. Bence Ölveczky, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences, has found that the brain uses two largely independent neural circuits to learn the temporal and spatial aspects of a motor skill. The study is described in a Sept. 26 paper in Neuron. “What we’re studying is the structure of motor-skill learning,” Ölveczky said. “What we were able to show is that the brain divides something that’s complex into modules — in this case for timing...