Introducing the brain: handwriting controls (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, April 18, 2025, 19:59 (14 days ago) @ David Turell

Using Chinese characters:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-04-insight-human-motor-cortex-encodes.html

"Compared to other animal species, humans can plan and execute highly sophisticated motor tasks, including the ability to write complex characters using their hands. While many past studies have tried to better understand the neural underpinnings of handwriting and other complex human motor capabilities, these have not yet been fully elucidated.

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"Researchers at Zhejiang University in China recently carried out a study aimed at further exploring the role of the human motor cortex in the encoding of intricate handwriting, such as Chinese characters. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behavior, suggest that this encoding unfolds via a sequence of stable neural states.

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"'The experiment task was simple," explained Qi. "We asked our participant to write Chinese characters one by one, with the guidance of a video, just like a karaoke game for writing. We recorded single-unit MC neural activity from his motor cortex (MC) with two microelectrode arrays as he performed the handwriting task."

"The brain activity recordings gathered by the researchers provided new interesting insights into the underpinnings of handwriting, suggesting that the motor cortex encodes complex handwriting by breaking it into a series of small movement segments or states. In their paper, Qi and her colleagues hypothesize that these states are the primitive units of movement encoding.

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"This recent work by Qi and her colleagues enriches the present understanding of how the human brain executes more advanced motor tasks that require high levels of precision. In the future, their findings could inform the development of new BCIs that allow users to write on a computer via their brain signals."

Comment: more evidence of how special we are