Brain and muscles

[aravindmoh]

Hi,

I've been through many articles about how muscles work (mostly through Google), and I've mostly come across statements like this one :

"...Muscles contract with the message sent from the brain by motor nerves...."

So, basically, muscles respond to signals from the brain, but no one has written any articles about what causes those signals to be generated in the brain (apart from saying that they are generated because we *want* to move the parts of our body that those muscles move).

Does anyone have a clue about what causes the generation of those signals?

Or even better, does anyone know about what happens in our brain when we *want* to do something?

[Darby]

There are patterns of brain neurons firing in particular places - different clusters are involved in different aspects of decision-making and coordinating a response. We're a long way from truly understanding it all, but basically many cells affect each other in producing complex patterns that amount to "thinking."

One comparison that is sometimes used is how ants interact with other ants - individually, the reactions are fairly simple, from a limited menu of possible responses, but from those interactions can come very complex group behaviors.

[aravindmoh]

Thanks for the reply Darby.

[MichaelXY]

That's a good question. Thoughts to bio chemical/electrical signals. Hmm, I dunno, but it is interesting to think about.