The motor skills of a human being are a terribly complicated process; however, for those of you who don't want to study neuroscience in pain in the ass detail, there's a simple chart that spells out the flow of motor information. It goes thus:

frontal and parietal lobes

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v

cerebellum, thalamus, corpus striatum

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v

Reticular formation, substantia nigra, spinal tracts

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v

muscles and receptors

This is, put simply, the command and feedback loop for human movement. What does it all mean?

The system not only commands downward, but also runs in a feedback loop. The loop exists because we need constant information from our envirnoment to utilize motor skills. Without that loop, we'd bust our ass every time we tried to walk up a hill.

Thanks to Dr. Ken Sufka for use of his diagram.

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