The human brain encodes coordinated patterns of joint movements – synergies – to increase the efficiency with which it can control complex hand movements.

The neuronal activity in primary motor cortex does not exhibit smooth low-dimensional dynamics during grasp as it does during reach.

Task changes, like increased force production or altered posture, decrease the accuracy of brain-machine interfaces predicting intended finger movements, however, understanding how neural activity changes with the altered biomechanics of the task may provide insights for generalizable decoder development.

An illusion in which individuals feel that their own hand no longer belongs to them may reflect a temporary reduction in the brain’s ability to control the movement of the hand.

Hand somatotopy can be preserved in the primary somatosensory cortex of tetraplegic patients, despite the absence of sensorimotor function and periphery-brain communication, but deteriorates over years after injury.

The brain continues to represent individual fingers in primary somatosensory cortex decades after the amputation of a hand, indicating that cortical maps do not require ongoing sensory input from the body.

In individuals with a missing hand, the area of the brain that would otherwise control that hand is recruited by either the remaining hand or the residual limb, depending on the usage preference of the individual.

fMRI results show that despite arm amputation, and varying degrees of phantom sensations, canonical hand representation in primary somatosensory cortex is largely maintained.

Both hand and face representations remain relatively stable after arm amputation in adulthood, with no link to phantom limb pain, whereas pre-natal limb loss triggers complex patterns of remapping that do not relate to cortical topography.

Delivering specific patterns of electrical activity to the median nerve of the arm triggers reliable sensations of texture, suggesting that it may ultimately be possible to restore complex tactile information to users of prosthetic limbs.