Well, the neural instructions for such actions originate in the brain’s primary motor cortex, and the puzzle has been whether the neurons in this region encode the details of individual muscle activities or high-level commands which govern the direction and velocity of desired movements.

Now, Robert Ajemian and his colleagues, analysing muscle function in monkeys, have created a mathematical model that captures the control characteristics of the motor cortex, the Neuron reported in its latest edition.
In fact, the model enabled the researchers to better sort out the “muscles-or-movement” question.

Researchers have been thwarted in their efforts to measure and model the neural control of complex motions as muscle forces and positions constantly change during such motions.

Also, the position sensors, called proprioceptors, in joints and muscles feed back constantly changing signals to the neurons of the motor cortex.

The researchers overcame these complexities by simplifying the experimental design. Rather than asking monkeys to carry out complex movements, they trained the animals to push on a joystick in different, specified ways to move a cursor on a screen to a desired target.

This use of isometric force greatly simplified the measurements the researchers needed to make to define muscle and joint action.
As the monkeys carried out the isometric tasks, the researchers analysed the patterns of muscle activations that corresponded with the isometric forces in different directions and at different postures.

They then developed a model that enabled them to test hypotheses about the relationship between neuronal activity that they measured in the animals’ motor cortex and the resulting actions.

They said that their “joint torque model can be tested at the resolution of single cells, a level of resolution that, to our knowledge, has not been attained previously”.

They concluded that their model “suggests that neurons in the motor cortex do encode kinetics of motor behaviour”.

“This model represents a significant advance, because it is strikingly successful in accounting for the way that the responses of individual neurons vary with posture and force direction,” commented Bijan Pesaran and Anthony Movshon in a preview of the article in the same Neuron journal.

“The results of Ajemian et al’s analysis provide strong evidence that it is useful to think of the output of (primary motor cortex) neurons in terms of their influence on muscles. Their model, in effect, defines a ‘projection field’ for each (primary motor cortex) neuron that maps its output into a particular pattern of muscle actions,” they wrote.
PTI