Question: With your work on the brain and specifically the section controlling movement how often are new discoveries made no matter how small

Luke Bryden answered on 11 Jun 2020:

I don’t specifically study movement in my research, but I know lots of people who do! When we do experiments, we set out with an idea of the questions we want to answer. For example, we may want to know: does this part of the brain become active during movement? To do this, we record the activity of the nerve cells in that brain region when an animal is moving and see if the changes in nerve cell activity coincide with the movement. We now also have the technology to manipulate those nerve cells to see if by artificially activating them we can produce movement. Each experiments gives us information but to be sure what we are seeing is ‘real’, we repeat it to make sure the results we see are reproducible.
So in one sense, we make discoveries each time we do an experiment, albeit small ones. Over time, we do more experiments to prove what we are observing and increase our confidence in the results we obtain. I hope that answers your question, please feel free to ask more!