A new understanding of how the human brain controls our hands – new research

By Stephanie Rossit, Lecturer in Psychology, University of East Anglia

Understanding how the brain controls certain actions – such picking up a knife in the correct way – is important for many reasons. One of these is working towards the development of brain-computer interfaces that may help people with artificial limbs control them, using their minds.

Yet how the human brain controls our hands to correctly grasp 3D objects, such as tools, is not well understood. In a recent study, my colleagues and I wanted to find out whether we could use signals from specific parts of the brain to distinguish whether people were handling tools correctly – for example…

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