Going beyond primary motor cortex to improve brain-computer interfaces

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) for movement restoration typically decode the user's intent from neural activity in their primary motor cortex (M1) and use this information to enable 'mental control' of an external device. Here, we argue that activity in M1 has both too little and too much information for optimal decoding: too little, in that many regions beyond it contribute unique motor outputs and have movement-related information that is absent or otherwise difficult to resolve from M1 activity; and too much, in that motor commands are tangled up with nonmotor processes such as attention and feedback processing, potentially hindering decoding. Both challenges might be circumvented, we argue, by integrating additional information from multiple brain regions to develop BCIs that will better interpret the user's intent.