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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		Research that may one day lead to advanced neural prosthetics
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:02
	Publish Date:		2016-01-12 00:00:00
	Description:		When you simply reach for glass of water, it’s actually not so ‘simple’ – there’s a lot of coordination going on between your visual cortex, brain and motor skills. But it all happens so fast, it seems like an involuntary movement that doesn’t involve actual planning by the brain. Understanding how the brain plans for such ‘goal-directed’ action is what interests graduate student Deborah Barany of the University of California, Santa Barbara. "What are the brain maps that are involved during planning reaches or different complex skills? We use both functional imaging and structural imaging to really be able to understand the brain dynamics and structural changes that underlie both normal actions, as well as neurological disorders of movements or concussions, things like that – what’s going on in the brain." Barany hopes their research may someday advance neural prosthetics. "By looking at human behavior and human movement with an FMRI and these other techniques, we’re able to parse out the information that might be useful to use in this neural decoding."
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