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The motor cortex is the region of the cerebral cortex involved in the planning, control, and execution of voluntary movements. The motor cortex is an area of the frontal lobe located in the posterior precentral gyrus immediately anterior to the central sulcus. Motor cortex controls different muscle groups
The motor system is responsible for initiating voluntary or planned movements (reflexes are mediated at the spinal cord level, so movements that associated with a reflex are not initiated by the motor cortex). The activation from the motor cortex travels through Betz cells down the corticospinal tract through upper motor neurons, terminating at ...
Cortical stimulation mapping led to the development of a homunculus for the motor and sensory cortices, which is a diagram showing the brain's connections to different areas of the body. An example is the cortical homunculus of the primary motor cortex and the somatosensory cortex , which are separated by the central sulcus .
A 2-D model of cortical sensory homunculus. A cortical homunculus (from Latin homunculus 'little man, miniature human' [1] [2]) is a distorted representation of the human body, based on a neurological "map" of the areas and portions of the human brain dedicated to processing motor functions, and/ or sensory functions, for different parts of the body.
A sensory map is an area of the brain which responds to sensory stimulation, and are spatially organized according to some feature of the sensory stimulation. In some cases the sensory map is simply a topographic representation of a sensory surface such as the skin , cochlea , or retina .
For example, sensory information from the foot projects to one cortical site and the projections from the hand target in another site. As the result of this somatotopic organization of sensory inputs to the cortex, cortical representation of the body resembles a map (or homunculus ).
The sensory cortex is found just near the motor cortex, and, like the motor cortex, has areas related to sensation from different body parts. Sensation collected by a sensory receptor on the skin is changed to a nerve signal, that is passed up a series of neurons through tracts in the spinal cord.
In physiology, motor coordination is the orchestrated movement of multiple body parts as required to accomplish intended actions, like walking. This coordination is achieved by adjusting kinematic and kinetic parameters associated with each body part involved in the intended movement.