That Neuroscience Guy - Neursocience bites - The Supplementary Motor Area

Episode Date: December 11, 2022

Next in our series of Neuroscience Bites, we discuss the Supplementary Area: a brain area important for movement planning. 

Hi, my name is Ola Krigolson and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria and in my spare time I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to another Neuroscience Bite. Well today I'm going to talk about the supplementary motor area because it seems very pertinent to the last podcast episode. Basically this supplementary motor area is a movement planning region of the brain. And if you check out the website and the blog, I'll put up a picture of where it is. And it's responsible for quite a number of things. But at

the same time, it's not fully understood because there's all these studies that show that sensitive to all these things, but what it's specifically doing is not totally known. It's definitely responsible for planning movement. That's a hundred percent true. It seems to be more responsible for planning what are called internally generated movements. So movements that come from within and an intent to do something within as opposed to a response to an outside stimulus. The supplementary motor area also seems to play a role on bilateral coordination or coordinating the interaction of the hands, specifically the hands. It seems really involved in the external limbs to the feet as well, but definitely the hands.

And it also seems to play a key role in movement sequencing. So gluing together the steps in a motor command or a motor program, which we talked about on the previous episode of the podcast. So a motor program is that motor memory that you use. So the skill, if you will. And you have to do parts of that skill first and second and third and that's where the supplementary motor seems to play a role and we know this because people with damage to the SMA have trouble sequencing actions so they they start moving and doing things in the wrong order if you will so that's a little bite on the supplementary motor

area key take-home message a planning region in the brain. A motor command is generated there. It's sent to the primary motor cortex. And once that happens, you begin to move. My name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm That Neuroscience Guy. Remember, check out the website, thatneuroscienceguy.com. And thank you so much for listening to all these bites and to the podcast. Please subscribe if you can, and I'll see you soon for another episode of the podcast.