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Concept
Motor control
Summary
Motor control is the regulation of movement in organisms that possess a nervous system. Motor control includes reflexes as well as directed movement.
To control movement, the nervous system must integrate multimodal sensory information (both from the external world as well as proprioception) and elicit the necessary signals to recruit muscles to carry out a goal. This pathway spans many disciplines, including multisensory integration, signal processing, coordination, biomechanics, and cognition, and the computational challenges are often discussed under the term sensorimotor control. Successful motor control is crucial to interacting with the world to carry out goals as well as for posture, balance, and stability.
Some researchers (mostly neuroscientists studying movement, such as Daniel Wolpert and Randy Flanagan) argue that motor control is the reason brains exist at all.
All movements, e.g. touching your nose, require motor neurons to fire action potentials that results in contraction of muscles. In humans, ~150,000 motor neurons control the contraction of ~600 muscles. To produce movements, a subset of 600 muscles must contract in a temporally precise pattern to produce the right force at the right time.
A single motor neuron and the muscle fibers it innervates are called a motor unit. For example, the rectus femoris contains approximately 1 million muscle fibers, which are controlled by around 1000 motor neurons. Activity in the motor neuron causes contraction in all of the innervated muscle fibers so that they function as a unit. Increasing action potential frequency (spike rate) in the motor neuron increases the muscle fiber contraction force, up to the maximal force. The maximal force depends on the contractile properties of the muscle fibers. Within a motor unit, all the muscle fibers are of the same type (e.g. type I (slow twitch) or Type II fibers (fast twitch)), and motor units of multiple types make up a given muscle. Motor units of a given muscle are collectively referred to as a motor pool.
Official source
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