Direct electrical stimulation of the premotor cortex shuts down awareness of voluntary actions

Luca Fornia, Guglielmo Puglisi, Antonella Leonetti, Lorenzo Bello, Anna Berti, Gabriella Cerri and Francesca Garbarini ()
Additional contact information
Luca Fornia: IRCCS
Guglielmo Puglisi: University of Turin
Antonella Leonetti: IRCCS
Lorenzo Bello: IRCCS
Anna Berti: University of Turin
Gabriella Cerri: IRCCS
Francesca Garbarini: University of Turin

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract A challenge for neuroscience is to understand the conscious and unconscious processes underlying construction of willed actions. We investigated the neural substrate of human motor awareness during awake brain surgery. In a first experiment, awake patients performed a voluntary hand motor task and verbally monitored their real-time performance, while different brain areas were transiently impaired by direct electrical stimulation (DES). In a second experiment, awake patients retrospectively reported their motor performance after DES. Based on anatomo-clinical evidence from motor awareness disorders following brain damage, the premotor cortex (PMC) was selected as a target area and the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) as a control area. In both experiments, DES on both PMC and S1 interrupted movement execution, but only DES on PMC dramatically altered the patients’ motor awareness, making them unconscious of the motor arrest. These findings endorse PMC as a crucial hub in the anatomo-functional network of human motor awareness.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14517-4 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-14517-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-14517-4

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().