I am including excerpts from the article by Richard Anderson, Tyson Aflalo and Spencer Kellis entitled, “From Thought to action: The Brain-Machine Interface in Posterior Parietal Cortex,” published in PNAS, December 26, 2019, Vol. 116, No. 52, 26274-26279. This is a very recent work that builds on previous studies by Aflalo and coworkers.
The authors identified the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) as “a high-level cortical area in . . . humans . . . that represents intentions to move. . . . [It is] an area where the initial intentions to act are made [italics added] and then transferred to the motor cortex. . . . We find that the human PPC encodes many action-related variables, and we can decode intended movements of most of the body from a small population of neurons. . . . Intention activity is simply defined as the neural correlate of the planned action.”
This is a sophisticated and important study, and I commend its reading to you. However, I still must point out the absence of reference to the cognitive mind per se. Upon reading this article one could conclude that thoughts are formulated and based in the PPC and its encoded synaptic networks. Indeed, neuronal networks are encoded with structure, meaning and purpose so that specified information can be transmitted through the brain and peripheral nervous system to bring about intended movements, or actions. I have offered in my writings that it is the thoughts of the cognitive mind that generate the initial framework for the instantiation of neural synaptic network codes. I have proposed that it requires an interaction between the immaterial mind and the material components of the brain, in this case the PPC, that could involve wave forms that emanate from the mind, its will and intent - its thoughts. The wave forms become instantiated as codes within spike trains of action potentials in neural networks.