Moving the meat puppet

In the world of neuroscience there are few dichotomies left to argue, and another one has now bitten the dust.

One of the major scientific questions about the brain is how it can translate the simple intent to perform an action -- say, reach for a glass -- into the dynamic, coordinated symphony of muscle movements required for that action. The neural instructions for such actions originate in the brains primary motor cortex, and the puzzle has been whether the neurons in this region encode the details of individual muscle activities or the high-level commands that govern kinetics -- the direction and velocity of desired movements.

Obviously the materialistic view would favor a direct 1-to-1 mapping of neural action to muscle action, making the brain the direct control center for all intent and movement, and this now appears to be the case. The brain maps both individual muscle firing instructions as well as the overall movement patterns for every action, which seems obvious when you think about it. How did they figure it out? By watching monkeys playing videogames. Yay!