Professor: Welcome to this Blog and a look at topics for June 2013 thru September 2013. Overall, the goal is to get deeply involved with Perception and Regulation of Endurance Performance. Student: How deep is deeply involved? Professor: How deep in physiology? Or how deep in psychology? Student: Proske & Gandevia (2012) are physiologically deep. Professor: […]
Student: So you have found a lot of gold nuggets in all these posts. Professor:. So I’ve grouped these 14 posts in the following: Basic movement mechanisms Motor synergies and patterns Coordinated adaptation to ‘limping’ The sense of effort In this post I’ll dig into the first three groups and save The Sense of Effort […]
Student: How many blog posted this year? Professor: This is the 14th. Student: Can you remember the topics for the first couple of posts? Hey, I know you’re retired, and I am not suggesting you getting senile. Professor: Well, I’m guessing they were about locomotion. Maybe the next post could be a review of these […]
Student: Figure 11 in Proske & Gandevia (2012) is fixed. I used plurals and changed Motor Command to Motor Commands and Efference Copy to Efference Copy Signals! Professor: Attaway. Nice quick thinking. Student: And where do the Efference Copies go? Professor: Actually, as many as four copies with one coming: 1) from the spinal cord […]
Student: What a pile of articles! And what did you find on commanding movement? Professor: It depends upon: What are the types of movements? What is the nature of the network(s) for motor command? Student: Well, one way of looking at movements is to consider the muscle mass involved: Fine motor movements, like tapping on […]
Student: Proske and Gandevia in 2012 described an exafferent component as the “afferent signals generated by stimuli of an external origin”. Professor: Well said; almost an exact quote. Student: For me, running is mostly automatic, overlearned, rhythmic movement. How come I have no Sense of Effort during long periods of slow, easy running? Professor: The […]
Student: Your post for October 15th, 2012 had the title, “What is meant by Effort or Exertion?” Have you gotten any clues? Professor: Well, as a matter of fact I reread that Post, and I found a review article by Prostke and Gandevia (2012) that have provided some much needed insight. Here is some of […]
Student: Wow, was I ever slipping and sliding, just trying to walk outside. It was a street with patches of ice: step, step, slide, step, sliiiide, …. Professor: My walking was off today, too. I was limping from sore knee like walking in a wooden leg: step, thump, step, thump, …. Student: I noticed I […]
Student: Ough, I hurt my left knee running this week. And it’s hard not to be limping. It’s sorta like walking on a split-belt treadmill! Professor: Well, another recent study from Bastian and colleagues gives us more information on limping. Specifically, Malone and Bastian (2010) studied the effects of “conscious correction versus distraction” upon ‘limping’ […]
Student: How young can a child be…. Well, how well coordinated can a child be so it can adapt to walking on a split-belt treadmill? Ahh, with a minimum of assistance? Professor: Musselman et al. (2011) determined that children, older than 8.5 months, were the successful participant in thein study. Below is their Fig. 1 […]
Eh! What? Motor programs operated by the brainstem? Okay, my brainstem is the extension of my spinal cord. And I’m guessing this means just my brainstem selects each motor program I use? Well, the short answer is Yes and No. Let’s allow the experts to explain! First, in their paper entitled, ” Is there a brainstem substrate […]
Before I was retired, I used to take the bus to work. One day, when I am walking toward the bus stop, I saw my bus already pulling up to my bus stop, and I noticed, in a moment later, that I was off and running toward it. Later on, I realized in that brief […]
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, […]
A familiar voice said, “Today’s workout is 10 quarters at 62 [seconds]; jog a half lap [in between].” So onto the black cinder track at the U of Washington, we went. Off on the first interval I ran smoothly straight at the first curve, just before got ready, and then felt the lurch to the […]
For me, running these days, is a form of meditation. Essentially, I am running on automatic. To run faster, I have to think, “Run harder.” How do we actually run harder? What kind of a neural network helps to run faster? This post is largely borrowed from a Scientific American blog written by Scicurious and […]
These runners are the Same at what. When taking steps, or running strides, they are the same. How come? By counting their steps! Yup! In early February 1972, John ‘Jack’ Falkner, PhD, and I were counting steps at the Las Vegas Marathon. We like many others have found this to be the ‘facts.’ Jack was […]
One day last week, I put Perceived Effort to another test. As I walked along a hallway, and since I am “an anticipation machine,” (Freyd, 1987, cited by Siegel, 1999), I noticed a stairway at its end. Aha. What if I just kept up this momentum and start up the stairs two steps at a […]