Primitives. Hey! What do you mean by “Primitives”?! According to Giszter et al. (2010), the “term ‘primitive’ may best indicate the idea of a set of building blocks or developmental bootstrap elements that is used in a constructive or compositional fashion” from which “larger modules can be made.” Thus, these primitive building blocks can be hypothesized to […]

Are the motoneurons like those involved in swimming, for example, by a zebra fish, recruited in a graded manner? Yup Then, are the active set of spinal interneurons graded during increases in swimming speed? NOPE!!!! A fascinating study by Fetcho, McLean, and colleagues (2008), entitled “Continuous Shifts in the Active Set of Spinal Interneurons during […]

ooh! OOH! ESCAPE! There is no doubt that escaping capture was critical to survival. So, what starts escape and also other forms of movement? Let’s start by looking at a primitive animal: the leech. Escape for the leech is swimming, as long as it is in relatively deep water. A tap on its tail will […]

Here is what is planned for this website for the beginning of 2013: First, this is the list of next blog Posts: What is/are the Primal locomotor initiator(s)? And where is it/are they located? Does the recruitment of spinal interneurons increase according to the motorneuron cell size principle? How are the recruitment of muscle patterns, […]