'The Fragile Art of Skill: From Neural Mechanisms to Disorder and Repair’

Dr Anna Sadnicka, Clinical Academic Neurologist and Lead of the Computational Movement Disorders Lab, UCL 

Task-specific dystonia is a striking movement disorder in which a painless, selective loss of motor control emerges only during the performance of a highly practised skill. It affects writers, musicians, dancers, and athletes, individuals whose livelihoods depend on precision, and can abruptly end careers. Yet conventional disease models of dystonia struggle to explain why this failure appears only in the context of expertise.

In this talk, I will outline a new perspective: that task-specific dystonia may arise from the maladaptive engagement of compensatory mechanisms within an otherwise healthy motor system. Drawing on emerging behavioural, computational, and clinical evidence, I will show how risk factors can be stratified and mapped onto disruptions in the representation and reproduction of skilled movement.

Finally, I will discuss how this framework opens new therapeutic possibilities, with a particular focus on principled motor-retraining paradigms designed to restore the stability and flexibility of skilled action.