How we learn to play tennis revealed

Researchers have said that motor cortex plays an active part in learning movement patterns.

Skilled motor movements of the sort tennis players employ while serving a tennis ball or pianists use in playing a concerto, require precise interactions between the motor cortex and the rest of the brain. Neuroscientists had long assumed that the motor cortex functioned something like a piano keyboard.

But Andrew Peters, a neurobiologist at UC San Diego's Center for Neural Circuits and Behavior, the first author of the paper, and his colleagues found that the motor cortex itself plays an active role in learning new motor movements. In a series of experiments using mice, the researchers showed in detail how those movements are learned over time.

Takaki Komiyama, an assistant professor of biology at UC San Diego who headed the research team, said their finding that the relationship between body movements and the activity of the part of the cortex closest to the muscles is profoundly plastic and shaped by learning provides a better picture of this process.

Komiyama said that's important, because elucidating brain plasticity during learning could lead to new avenues for treating learning and movement disorders, including Parkinson's disease.

With Simon Chen, another UC San Diego neurobiologist, the researchers monitored the activity of neurons in the motor cortex over a period of two weeks while mice learned to press a lever in a specific way with their front limbs to receive a reward.

The study has been published online in the journal Nature.