In this issue of the Journal, we are publishing two papers, by Jhou and colleagues and by Kaufling and coworkers, describing a newly identified piece of brain circuitry that appears to be of great importance in inhibition of motor behaviors. The structure that is central to this circuitry is called the mesopontine rostromedial tegmental nucleus by Jhou et al., and the tail of the ventral tegmental area by Kaufling et al., but there is little doubt that they are referring to the same cell group, and that the connections of this cell group place it clearly in the framework of motivated behaviors and motor control.As recently as 35 years ago the common opinion in neurology was that voluntary motor control, especially in humans, was mainly imposed by fibers originating in the motor and premotor cerebral cortex descending through the internal capsule and cerebral peduncle to the brainstem and spinal cord. This notion was supported by clinical findings that complete interruption of this descending pathway led to contralateral hemiplegia in patients. Although a few neurologists had noticed that even hemiplegic patients would sometimes make emotional motor responses (such as smiling symmetrically when told a joke), the prevailing opinion was that emotional behaviors used the classic corticobulbar and corticospinal pathways, and that as a result most illnesses of emotional behavior did not have a basis in aberrant brain function, but had to be cured by careful personal attention. Since then neuroscience research has made it clear that those brain regions known to be involved in emotional functions have their own hardware, very similar to the projections from the motor and premotor cortex to the brainstem and spinal cord.One reason that these emotional motor systems were not recognized earlier was that they were not detected by classical degeneration-based retro-and anterograde fiber tracing techniques such as the lesion-degeneration methods of Nauta and Gygax (1951) and Fink and Heimer (1967). New retrograde tracing techniques employing axonal tracers such as horseradish peroxidase (HRP), wheat germ agglutinin-HRP, FluoroGold, and cholera toxin B subunit, and anterograde tracing techniques including the autoradiographic method, Phaseolus vulgaris lectin (PHA-L), and several other techniques showed that structures belonging to or strongly connected with the limbic system also had their own descending motor output systems. These newly discovered pathways were brought together in the concept of the emotional motor system (Holstege, 1992). In order to distinguish this emotional motor system from the earlier described voluntary motor systems, the latter descending pathways were called somatic motor system.Both the emotional and somatic motor systems consist of a medial and a lateral component (Fig. 1). In the somatic motor system the medial component consists of pathways controlling directly or indirectly motoneurons innervating axial and proximal body musculature as well as motoneurons of neck and external eye muscles. They ...