Research that examines how the body adapts to new movements is shedding new light on how the nervous system learns, and could help to inform a wide range of applications, from customized rehabilitation and athletic training to wearable systems for healthcare. The research is published this week in the journal Current Biology.
“How does our brain figure out how to best move our body? It turns out that this can be a challenging problem for the nervous system, considering we have hundreds of muscles that can be coordinated hundreds of times per second — with more possible coordination patterns to choose from than moves on a chessboard,” says study senior author and SFU professor Max Donelan, director of SFU’s Locomotion Lab.
