Motion Learning and Performance will attend 6 subjects, all related to Motion and Performance. You may not be interested in all 6 subjects, so you can navigate yourself through the 6 chapters I created to give you a chance to skip what you’re not interested in and jump straight to the area that you want to learn more about. Or you might aswell be interested to know it all!! It’s up to you 🙂

The point with this information is to be able to easily over-view how humans move, how we learn how to move and when, our motion functions and some key principles to performance.

1. Brains
2. Vision
3. Decision making
4. Reflex and Reaction
5. Control Panel
6. Short term- and long term memory

So let’s start then, and see if we get the right side of this

1. BRAINS
The Central Nerv System (CNS) consists of different fibers that provide and send signals to and from the brain. There might be more than those that I suggest now, but these are the ones I know:

– Afferent nerv fibers
  (incoming and sensory: i.e. they provide you with information and sense them)

– Efferent nerv fibers
(outgoing and motoric: i.e. they make the brain send out signals to act upon the nerves’ sensations)

– Somatic
(In the skeleton)

– Autonomic
– (In the glands, heart, in smooth muscles such as vital organs like the heart and the diafragma and in vessles)

The brain and the spinal marrow has billions of neurons that communicate through electric stimulation (google action potential if you’re interested to learn more, or wait until i deal with that in my blog, but that won’t be until further on.) Or check this out if you want to: youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCasruJT-DU )

The neurons allow in- and output of ions in the cells, such as natrium, calium, calcium etc and associate that to the body and the extremites (i.e. different exterior body parts, like arms and legs).

There are 3 main systems here (and this is repitition from the different fiber types):

1. Sensory
Measures and treats sensory information from the body. Like when you burn your hand on the stove: right before you react !!

2. Motoric
Sends information to the muscles and the glands. Imagine that hand on the hot stove. It’s a good thing if it hurts, that shows you got well developed motoric functions

3. Motivating
Starts the processes based on intellectual- and emotional choices. Like right now, I feel soooo motivated to become a personal trainer and a sport’s massage therapist!! Just gotta make this course…

1.2 The brain, the cerebellum and other vital parts of the brain
The cerebral competence allows you to see, speak and hear: Just to mention a few !! The brain is divided into two hemispheres by a deep groove right between the left- and the right side of the brain.

The left side of the brain= the concious, analytical and verbal part. The left side of the brain activates the right side of the body.

The right side of the brain= the unconcious, totality registering and spatial part. The right side of the brain activates the left side of the body.

Amygala  Now this is interesting, as this is the part of the brain that’s mostly conected to  certain emotions such as fear, anger and horror. It also sends alarms to the body when it needs to protect itself. It also adjusts blood pressure, heart beat and breathing if we get scared or angry. Extreme sport athletes challenge this part of the brain more than people that don’t dedicate to extreme sports, and they therefor learn to handle fear differently than others.

Hypotalamus This part of the brain gears bloodpressure, sleep, body temperature, metabolism etc. It tells us what to do and what goals we’re gonna achieve and it’s kindof ”the brain of the brain”. It motivates us to do something (or not to do something)

Hippocampus is the memory. (Think hippo= horse, horse’s memory !!) It kindof works like a tape recorder. It orientates us through space, time and location (sense of orientation, and mine is baaaaaad !! Maybe my hippocampus isn’t very well developed !! or maybe my Hypotalamus doesn’t motivate me enough to give a damn about time and space)

The cerebellum is also the visionary part of the brain, or as it’s also called ”Primary Visionary Cortex”. It measures the information starting from the visiual association (have a look at Broadmann area 17 to get a view of the brain) and it identifies and estimates sizes, directions and speed. Which is a good thing if you want to be any good at for instance soccer !! 🙂
Have a look at Brodmann area 17 to give you a stock-taking picture of the different parts and lobes of the brain:

1.3 The cortex’
So this part is a bit complex, but I’ll keep it simple, as this isn’t even part of my compendium.

1. Dorsolateral prefrontal associative cortex

serves as the highest cortical area responsible for motor planning, organization, and regulation. It plays an important role in the integration of sensory and mnemonic information and the regulation of intellectual function and action. It is also involved in working memory. However, it’s not exclusively responsible for the executive functions. All complex mental activity require the additional cortical and subcortical circuits that this part of the brain  is connected with.

Damage to the DL-PFC (Dorsolateral Prefrontal associative Cortex) can result in the dysexecutive syndrome, which leads to problems with affect, social judgement, executive memory, abstract thinking and intentionality

2. Premotor cortex

This part of the brain is the executive of movement and control of the core and the muscles that are close to the core. The functions you’ll exercise when using the premotor cortex are as follows:
– Grabbing objects
– Throwing
– Jumping
– Bowling

3. Supplementary motor area

The Supplementary Motor Area (SMA) is implicated in the planning of motor actions and bimanual control. In contrast to the premotor cortex, the SMA has been implicated in actions that are under internal control, such as the performance of a sequence of movements from memory (as opposed to movements guided by a visual cue).

4. Primary motor cortex

There are two representational areas of the Primary Motor Cortex (PMC). In primates, the primary motor cortex is unusual in having in its anterior and posterior areas two representations of the digits and wrist. The posterior areas can be activated by attention without any sensory feedback and has been suggested to be important for initiation of movements, while the anterior areas is dependent on sensory feedback. It can also be activated by imaginary finger movements and listening to speech done without actual movements. This anterior representation area has been suggested to be important executing movements involving complex sensoriomotor interactions.

5. Somatosensory cortex

The somatosensory cortex is an area of the brain which processes input from the various systems in the body which are sensitive to touch. People often think of touch as a single sense, but in fact several different sensory experiences are involved in touch, including specific sensitivity to pain, sensitivity to temperature, and the body’s proprioception system which monitors the body’s place in space. The somatosensory system as a whole is extremely refined and highly sensitive, allowing people to detect and interpret a wide variety of sensations.

6. Posterior parietal cortex

The parietal cortex is located roughly ‘after’ vision and ‘before’ motor control in the cortical information processing hierarchy. Nobody knows exactly what this does, but one cares about what it does when strokes blow holes in the right-side PPC. Patients to this get bizarre syndromes and they might become unaware of the left side of space. Sometimes patients don’t acknowledge their surroundings on that side, sometimes their own bodies seem alien to them. So it’s been suggested that the PPC may have something to do with spatial processing. Other ideas include motor command generation, visuomotor transformation, multimodal integration, attention, consciousness … interesting indeed !!