Summary Primate motor cortex projects to spinal interneurons and motor neurons, suggesting that motor cortex activity may be dominated by muscle-like commands. Extensive observations during reaching lend support to this view, but evidence remains ambiguous and much-debated. To provide a different perspective, we employed a novel behavioral paradigm that affords extensive comparison between time-evolving neural and muscle activity. We found that single motor cortex neurons displayed many muscle-like properties, but the structure of population activity was not muscle-like. Unlike muscle activity, neural activity was structured to avoid ‘tangling’: moments where similar activity patterns led to dissimilar future patterns. Avoidance of tangling was present across tasks and species. Network models revealed a potential reason for this consistent feature: low tangling confers noise robustness. Finally, we were able to predict motor cortex activity from muscle activity alone, by leveraging the hypothesis that muscle-like commands are embedded in additional structure that yields low tangling.

Some recovery can be expected in a significant number of patients who experience smell loss. The amount of recovery depends on the degree of initial loss, age, and the duration of loss. Etiology, per se, is not a significant determinant of prognosis, in contrast with what is commonly believed.

London BM, Miller LE. Responses of somatosensory area 2 neurons to actively and passively generated limb movements.

A growing number of brain-machine interfaces have now been developed that allow movements of an external device to be controlled using recordings from the brain. This work has been undertaken with a number of different animal models, as well as several human patients with quadriplegia. The resulting movements, whether of computer cursors or robotic limbs, remain quite slow and unstable compared to normal limb movements. It is an open question, how much of this instability is the result of the limited forward control path, and how much has to do with the total lack of normal proprioceptive feedback. We have begun preliminary studies of the effectiveness of electrical stimulation in the proprioceptive area of the primary somatosensory cortex (area 3a) as a potential means to deliver an artificial sense of proprioception to a monkey. We have demonstrated that it is possible for the monkey to detect brief stimulus trains at relatively low current levels, and to discriminate between trains of different frequencies. These observations need to be expanded to include more complex, time-varying waveforms that could potentially convey information about the state of the limb.