Neuro article review

Movement Intention After Parietal Cortex Stimulation in Humans

Main Points – The point of the experiment was to determine the intention vs action parts of the brain. There are different parts of the brain that when stimulated, make the patient feel a strong will to move a certain region. The regions in the right inferior parietal regions made patients want to move their hand or feet, whereas stimulating the left inferior partial made them want to move their mouths. They also did further stimulation and found patients believed they had moved or talked.

Methods – The method used for this experiment was using electrical stimulation to trigger certain parts of the brain while the patient was undergoing brain surgery for which they were awake. These were all tumor patients.

Shortcomings – This experiment is limited by the amount of people that undergo this type of procedure and it is all based on their responses. There isn’t physical data; the results are based on how the patient describes these sensations.

Figures – The figures are used to demonstrate where the brain was stimulated and makes the experiment easier to visualize.

Questions – It seems that a major question posed was whether the intention or the action came first. The article touches on this briefly, but its hard to tell if they came up with a solution. And how much of this experiment was based off educated guesses or was some of this information known? What is the new information?

Keywords – inferior parietal, intention, cortex, stimulating, SMA