You’re learning a new dance move. At first, it’s awkward, your feet go left when they should go right. But after a few tries… boom! You nailed it. Or maybe you’re practicing a piano tune. The first time? Clumsy fingers. But after some repetition, your hands glide like magic. Even tying your shoes was once a mystery. Now? You do it without thinking.
So what’s happening inside your brain?
Let’s meet your brain’s “practice coach”: The Basal Ganglia, an exceptional team of brain areas that help you learn and repeat movements until they become automatic. The basal ganglia are all about movement mastery, especially things you learn through practice.
Deep in the midbrain, tucked below the cerebral cortex, the basal ganglia is your brain’s backstage crew for motor control, reward, and emotion. It is also where some famous movement disorders, such as Parkinson’s Disease, Huntington’s Disease, and Tourette Syndrome, begin.
The big question is: Does the basal ganglia control all movements or just the ones we learn through practice?
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Some researchers propose it as a learning hub, particularly effective for mastering dance steps and piano tunes. In contrast, others argue it’s involved in every movement, including routine ones such as walking or blinking.
To shed light on this mystery, Harvard scientists zoomed in on a tiny part of the brain called the dorsolateral striatum (DLS), a key player in learning movements.
They found that this so-called “learning machine” speaks in two different languages: One for newly learned movements and another for natural behaviors.
These findings in rats could help us understand human movement disorders like Parkinson’s Disease, where this brain region doesn’t work properly.
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Researchers studied rats to understand how DLS helps with movement. They observed the rats during two activities: free exploration, where the animals walked and groomed naturally, and a learned task, where they were trained to press a lever twice within a set time to earn a reward.
To track their behavior, the team used six cameras and specialized software that categorized each movement.
In earlier experiments, they removed the DLS from some rats. Interestingly, these rats showed no change in their natural behaviors like walking or grooming, suggesting the DLS isn’t needed for instinctive actions. However, when it came to the learned lever task, the same rats struggled significantly.
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This revealed that the DLS plays a crucial role in mastering new skills acquired through practice, but not in everyday, automatic behaviors.
“There was a massive change, like night and day,” Kiah Hardcastle, a postdoctoral fellow in the Ölveczky lab and lead author of the new study, said of the prior work. “The animal could do a task super well, performing a stereotyped movement repeatedly, like 30,000 times. Then you lesion the DLS and they never do that movement again.”
In a recent study, Harvard researchers aimed to understand the brain’s activity during various types of movement. So, they implanted tiny electrodes into the brains of rats and recorded the electrical activity of neurons while the animals engaged in two behaviors: free exploration and a learned task involving lever pressing.
To their surprise, they discovered that the basal ganglia, the brain’s “learning machine”, used two distinct patterns of electrical signals, known as kinematic codes, depending on the type of movement.
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“It’s as if the basal ganglia ‘speak’ different languages when the animal performs learned versus innate movements,” said Ölveczky. “Brain areas downstream that control movement only know one of these languages—the one spoken during learned behaviors.”
The researchers concluded in the paper that the basal ganglia switch back and forth “between being an essential actor and a mere observer.”
Hardcastle speculated that the basal ganglia may be unable to turn off electrical signaling when not directing behavior completely, so it shifts to a harmless “null code.”
Ölveczky said the findings may well be informative about humans because the structures below the cerebral cortex are believed to have remained conserved mainly through evolutionary time. The study demonstrates that the basal ganglia play essential roles in learned movements, but not necessarily in routine motor control. The findings offer hints about what may go wrong in some human movement disorders.
“Our research suggests that the pathology associated with Parkinson’s can be understood as the diseased basal ganglia speaking gibberish, but in a very loud and forceful way,” said Ölveczky. “Thus, it inserts itself, in a nonsensical way, into behaviors it would otherwise not control.”
Journal Reference:
- Hardcastle, K., Marshall, J.D., Gellis, A. et al. Differential kinematic coding in sensorimotor striatum across behavioral domains reflects different contributions to movement. Nat Neurosci (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41593-025-02026-w
