Carnegie Mellon's Department of Biomedical Engineering

_Presents:_

_ _

  EMILIO BIZZI, M.D.

Professor

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

McGovern Institute for Brain Research

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2015

4:30 P.M. – 5:30 P.M.

DOHERTY HALL A302

*Snacks and coffee will be served in Doherty Hall 2100 at 4:00 p.m.

MUSCLE SYNERGIES, CONCEPT, PRINCIPLES, AND POTENTIAL USE IN NEUROREHABILITATION

Abstract: When the central nervous system (CNS) generates voluntary movement, many muscles, each comprising thousands of motor units, are simultaneously activated and coordinated. Computationally, this is a daunting task, and investigators have strived to understand whether and how the CNS's burden is reduced to a much smaller set of variables. In the last few years we and our collaborators have searched for physiological evidence of simplifying strategies by exploring whether the motor system makes use of motor modules, to construct a large set of movement.

The core argument for the neural origin of motor modules rests on studies of the spinal cord in several vertebral species, conducted using a variety of techniques. With these approaches, we and others were able to provide the experimental basis for a modular organization of the spinal cord circuitry in vertebrates. A spinal module is a functional unit of spinal interneurons that generates a specific motor output by imposing a specific pattern of muscle activated with a muscle synergy.

Muscle synergies are neural coordinative structures that function to alleviate the computational burden associated with the control of movement and posture. In my presentation, I will address two critical

questions: 1) are muscle synergies explicitly encoded in the nervous system? And, 2) how do muscle synergies simplify movement production? I will argue that shared and task-specific muscle synergies are neurophysiological entities whose combination, orchestrated by the motor cortical areas and the afferent systems, facilitates motor control and motor learning.

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