To make a movement, the brain takes the electrical activity of many neurons and combines them to make muscle contractions. But the movements aren't always perfect. So we asked, what gets in the way?

By studying how the brain reduces noise, we can learn more about how it processes sensory inputs, makes decisions and executes them. Understanding how noise is reduced to very precise commands helps us understand how those commands are created.

The tail has spastic muscle contractions that distracts the predator.

We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain.

As we increased the riskiness of a target, the neurons' activity would go up in the same way the monkey's frequency of choosing that target would go up. It was amazing the degree to which the activity of these neurons paralleled the behavior of the monkeys. They looked like they were signaling, in fact, the monkeys' subjective valuation of that target.

We are woefully ignorant about how genes build brains, and how the electrical activity of the brain builds thoughts and emotions.