The real reason for brains

“We have a brain for one reason and for one reason only…and that’s to produce adaptable and complex movement. There is no other reason to have a brain.”

That’s how neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert, who calls himself a movement chauvinist, begins his beautiful TED talk: The real reason for brains. He updates classic movement science themes, such as muscles being the final common pathway of the brain’s activity and the idea of corollary discharge, bringing them to life with vivid, understandable examples.

What’s particularly wonderful is how Dr. Wolpert touches on some of the basic concepts in Feldenkrais pedagogy. Let me tell you how the concept of self-image and the strategy of decreasing effort find new scientific foundations:

Wolpert introduces the sea squirt, a creature distinguished by its ability to eat its own nervous system. Then he’s off and running, illustrating how to reverse engineer the way humans move, taking examples from control in tennis, tickling, and children’s fights. Along the way Wolpert points out that the sensory signal the mover receives is noisy and, therefore unreliable.

Considering how the brain deals with noise and with unpredictability—or variability—in the world leads him to a presenting of the role of memory in perception. By doing so, Wolpert offers another way of understanding the importance of self-image in the coordination action. Here self-image isn’t a static picture in the brain, instead it’s what dynamically arises as the brain compares a prediction of the action with the sensory consequences of that same action.

Where does this lead? Wolpert shows how the nervous system acts to minimize the negative effect of the noise stating:

“…the fundamental idea is you want to plan your movements so as to minimize the negative consequence of the noise. One intuition to get is that actually the amount of noise or variability, as I show here, gets bigger as the force gets bigger. So you want to avoid big forces as one principle.”

A beautiful explanation why doing less makes learning easier, isn’t it?

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