Computations in the Motor Cortex: Cortical Microcircuits, Functional Columns, and Motor Control Signals Cortical processing is mediated through the short-range (local microcircuits) and the long-range (interaction involving distinct microcircuits) connections between excitatory and inhibitory neurons distributed across distinct cortical layers. My current research interests are focused on two problems. i. Whether do these spatially structured intrinsic connections induce functional modularization of the motor cortex (e.g., segregation of neurons with coherent properties into columns), and how do they shape the computation of neural motor control signals? ii. How does one translate neural signals extracted from the motor cortex into signals appropriate for "intelligent" motor control of prosthetic devices (e.g., multijoint robotic arm)? To investigate these problems we use the methods of neural network modeling, and carry out very large-scale simulations on high-performance massively parallel supercomputers.
