Grant: Operating Grant

Multiple brain regions are implicated in organizing the complex activity, which regulates posture and initiates coordinated and precise voluntary movements. Our knowledge of these systems is still very limited. In the clinical environment this implies that the fundamental causes of movement disorders are not well understood. Coordinated eye and head movements, which are used to orient the visual axis towards a target of interest, represent an elegant example of how the nervous system controls simultaneously two mobile body segments. To assure accuracy in orienting to, and fixating a target, three major brain motor systems must interact: the saccadic eye movement system, the vestibular system, and the head movement system. The neural networks in the first two systems are among the brain's best understood neural systems. This knowledge is a major advantage when studying how eye and head movements are coordinated. The general objective of my research program is to understand how the brain creates the nervous signals that guide together the eyes and the head. The technique used will be to record the electrical activity of individual neurons and with these results to develop theoretical models of the neural networks that control head and eye movement trajectories. These models in turn can lead to a formal understanding of disorders of the vestibular and motor systems.