The Brain in Its Body: Motor Control and Sensing in a Biomechanical Context

Symposium

Hillel J. Chiel,1,2,3 Lena H. Ting,4O¨ rjan Ekeberg,5 and Mitra J. Z. Hartmann6,7 Departments of 1Biology, 2Neurosciences, and 3Biomedical Engineering, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio 44106-7080, 4Department of Biomedical Engineering, Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0535, 5Department of Computational Biology,School of Computer Science and Communication, Royal Institute of Technology S-10044 Stockholm, Sweden, and Departments of 6Biomedical and7Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208

Although it is widely recognized that adaptive behavior emerges from the ongoing interactions among the nervous system, the body, and the environment, it has only become possible in recent years to experimentally study and to simulate these interacting systems.Webriefly review work on molluscan feeding, maintenance of postural control in cats and humans, simulations of locomotion in lamprey, insect, cat and salamander, and active vibrissal sensing in rats to illustrate the insights that can be derived from studies of neural control and sensing within a biomechanical context. These studies illustrate that control may be shared between the nervous system and the periphery, that neural activity organizes degrees of freedom into biomechanically meaningful subsets, that mechanics alone may play crucial roles in enforcing gait patterns, and that mechanics of sensors is crucial for their function.