Neuromuscular Laboratory
Laboratory Head: Mike Nordstrom 

The ability to make precise voluntary movements of the fingers (e.g., to manipulate an object) or jaws (e.g., in chewing or speech) arises from the motor areas of cortex which descend to activate the appropriate combinations of muscles required for the task. Sensory information from the moving body parts is also used to fine-tune movements through reflex pathways.

My lab studies how these systems operate in normal human subjects and in patients with neurological disorders. We use neurophysiological techniques such as electromyography (EMG) and a functional brain imaging technique, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), to study the activity of motor cortex neurons in awake humans performing voluntary tasks with their fingers or jaws.  With TMS we obtain detailed information about the organisation of the corticospinal projection to the hand or the corticobulbar projection to the jaw muscles, changes in excitability of these neurons as subjects activate their muscles, the specificity of these changes, as well as information about cortical interneurons involved in the voluntary commands.  Much of this information cannot be obtained by any other means in human subjects.

Paul Sowman (L) and Stan Flavel (R) using transcranial magnetic stimulation to investigate the cortical control of jaw muscles.