by Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa
Graphical representation of the study. Credit: University of Parma
A study published in Science reveals new mechanisms through which the brain controls natural actions. The results challenge some of the classical views about how the motor system works and open up possible new applications in neurorehabilitation and robotics.
Using new telemetric devices, researchers recorded the activity of hundreds of neurons from the motor regions of the brains of monkeys that were completely free to express spontaneous behavior, such as walking, climbing, or yawning. This represented a huge step forward compared to previous studies, because the available technologies forced researchers to study immobile brains during learned and stereotyped actions.
The novel approach, instead, opens the possibility to understand how the brain orchestrates spontaneous movements in natural situations.
“Our brains are constantly moving,” explains Luca Bonini, head of the research project, “and this new approach has changed the classical idea that specific brain regions, or even single neuronal cells, control specific actions—such as biting, drinking, or grasping.
“According to our results, just as the individual keys of a piano can compose many different melodies, the neurons in the motor areas of our brain create complex synergies, allowing us to organize the variety of spontaneous actions that we are capable of performing, some of which until now were even impossible to study in the laboratory.”
Collaboration with bioengineers from the Sant’Anna School in Pisa made it possible to decode the complexity of this neural activity and predict the spontaneous actions the animals were about to perform using only the signals generated by neurons.
“Our results,” says researcher Alberto Mazzoni, “indicate that the neuronal activity recorded during spontaneous behavior is much more informative than that obtained in classical laboratory contexts. This information allows us to understand how the brain controls the production of voluntary actions differently depending on the context.”
The high neurological and behavioral similarity with humans suggests that this result could have relevant clinical applications.
“The results obtained through this interdisciplinary collaboration open up new and important translational perspectives for neurotechnology and neurorehabilitation,” adds Silvestro Micera.
“We hope that our approach can contribute to the transition from classical neurophysiology to neuroethology in many studies on the relationship between brain and behavior, improving the quality of life of animals even during experiments, and consequently, the validity of the results of neuroscientific research on non-human primates, which, as this work shows, are still fundamental and irreplaceable,” conclude Francesca Lanzarini, Monica Maranesi, Elena Hilary Rondoni and Davide Albertini, co-first authors of the paper.
More information: Francesca Lanzarini et al, Neuroethology of natural actions in freely moving monkeys, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adq6510
Provided by Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa
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