David Ostry

Human motor learning is accompanied by changes to somatosensory function and to somatic areas of the brain. I will present some ongoing work on this topic involving both speech and upper limb movement in which I try to unravel the directionality. I will go over studies which show that the learning-related changes to somatosensory cortex precede those in motor cortex. I will also describe studies using continuous theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation which show that somatosensory cortex contributes to both learning and motor memory stabilization, and that disruption of somatosensory cortex following learning blocks consolidation. These studies as a whole suggest that the encoding of learned movements is in part somatic in nature.