440.600 Core Course on Neuroscience

Overview: This course introduces the human central nervous system to first year medical students at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. The lectures that are linked here introduce the motor system and focus on the spinal structures, the posterior parietal structures, and the motor structures of the frontal lobe.

Lectures on the Motor System

• The spinal motor system
  This lecture introduces the segmental structures of the spinal cord; paralysis due to spinal injury; recovery of function via prosthetics; muscles and muscle fibers; change to muscles due to plasticity and exercise; polio; afferent system of the muscles; short-latency and long-latency reflexes; time delays in the reflexes and their voluntary control; effect of brain lesions on voluntary control of reflexes; and sensory neuropathy. 
  Lecture notes, slides.  Updated 02/14/2008
• The descending tracts of the motor system
  This lecture introduces the corticospinal, rubrospinal, pontine and medullary reticulospinal, and vestibulospinal tracts.  We will also review motor control of split-brain patients; concept of alien hand; narcolepsy; and effects of lesions at various levels of the descending tracts.
  Lecture notes, slides.  Updated 02/14/2008
• The visuomotor system of the posterior parietal cortex
  This lecture and the next focus on control of reaching movements.  In the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), position of our hand and objects that we are attending are represented in retinocentric coordinates.  This information is updated when the eyes move.  The lecture introduces neural coding of object and hand position; gain fields; movement planning during a delay period; memory of movement plans; insensitivity to movement forces; computing of a hand displacement vector; alignment of proprioception with vision; PPC lesions and spatial neglect including new methods of rehabilitation of neglect, apraxia, the mirror neuron system and understanding action of others.
  Lecture notes, slides.  Updated 02/14/2008
• The motor system of the frontal lobe
  This lecture introduces motor system of the frontal lobe by focusing on control of reaching movements.  We introduce the premotor cortex and neural coding of movements with respect to the hand; the motor cortex and sensitivity to movement forces; stimulation and motor maps; reorganization of the motor maps due to peripheral nerve damage; mechanisms of neural reorganization; phantom limb pain; effect of stroke on the motor maps; effect of rehabilitation; motor learning and its effect on the cortical maps; function of the premotor and supplementary motor areas.
  Lecture notes, slides Updated 02/14/2008