“What is surprising is that the brain separates these skills into their constituent features rather than encoding them as an integrated muscle memory, even after extensive training.

Perhaps this unzipping mechanism helps us to stay flexible for adjustments, even in the final hundreds of milliseconds before we start the movement, e.g. if we need to change the speed or timing of an upcoming action.”

A series of almost 1000 trials saw right-handed participants – excluding professional musicians – learn and memorise four keyboard sequences which they prepared and subsequently produced after a visual cue.

Researchers believe that the brain separates sequence order and timing as ‘what’ elements representing higher-level control, which are combined to define ‘how’ exactly the task should be performed.

Performing sequences of movements from memory and adapting them to changing task demands is a hallmark of skilled human behaviour, from handwriting to playing a musical instrument.

In contrast, patterns reflecting the unique integration of sequence features emerged in these regions during execution only, alongside timing-specific tuning in the ventral premotor, supplementary motor, and superior parietal areas.