Every action has a beginning and an end (and it's all in you brain)
Wednesday, July 21, 2010 - 12:21
in Biology & Nature
Rui Costa, Principal Investigator of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia (Portugal), and Xin Jin, of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health (USA), describe in the latest issue of the journal Nature, that the activity of certain neurons in the brain can signal the initiation and termination of behavioural sequences we learn anew. Furthermore, they found that this brain activity is essential for learning and executing novel action sequences, many times compromised in patients suffering from disorders such as Parkinson's or Huntington's.