Electroencephalography (EEG); Sensory-motor integration

1) The interplay between the sensory and the motor areas and the relative inhibitory/excitatory balances are fundamental in motor control both in healthy and in patients. Understanding of these processes are important for future treatments of motor dysfunctions.

2) Electroencephalography (EEG) is a powerful tool to monitor brain activity in real time (millisecond resolution). New methods are needed to have the full access to all the information that is still hidden to us.

I am studying the sensory-motor integration from different perspectives, investigating the motor control during voluntary contraction and the phases of brain activity related to it. These phases are composed by an interplay between the excitatory and inhibitory activations and can tell us how the brain communicates to the muscles about the action to perform. A bigger insight will be obtained by a contemporary stimulation of the motor brain area by transcranial magnetic stimulation and investigating with EEG how the brain reacts to it. Contemporary the visual and somatosensory perception are studied to unveil the relation between the sensory system and brain areas related to motor execution.

All the studies are performed by using EEG and therefore new methods to analyze EEG data are continuously developed.

None.