Abstract: From serving a volleyball to playing the piano - one of our brain’s most remarkable feats is the ability to learn a sheer endless number of motor skills. Despite their importance, how our brain learns and generates such skills is poorly understood. While many nodes of the brain’s distributed motor network have been identified, their functions and interactions remain often unclear. We probe this network through the lens of complex, highly stereotyped and spatiotemporally precise movement patterns trained in rats. We have found that the basal ganglia play critical, unexpected roles in both skill learning and execution, and regulate the transition from variable to stereotyped movement patterns throughout learning. Furthermore, we are exploring how the brain solves the challenge to form, store and recall the memories for our countless skills, using the same neural substrates. Together, our results shine new light on the mechanisms and circuits underlying our motor skills.