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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		Studying the brain dynamics of goal-directed action
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:03
	Publish Date:		2016-02-25 00:00:00
	Description:		To get a better sense of how the brain is organized to allow us to make successful movements, cognitive neuroscientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Action Lab are using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. Graduate student Deborah Barany studies the brain dynamics of goal-directed action. "A goal-directed action is basically anything that involves the brain when you move. And so you can think of this in contrast to an involuntary movement or a reflex, where these can happen just with your spinal cord’s involvement." Using fMRI, Barany says they can get a better sense of this whole network of brain regions and how they’re involved in movements. "If my goal is to try to see how the brain differentially represents say, a right movement from a left movement. I can’t answer that question with a standard analysis because you would see the same amount of brain activation in both cases. So we can use these more advanced techniques to try and parse that out and figure out exactly what’s going on in these underlying patterns of brain activity."
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