Principal Investigator Emilio Bizzi
Everyday actions such as walking, speaking or reaching for an object seem natural to us, but this apparent simplicity is deceptive. The human body has more than 600 muscles, so the number of possible combinations of muscle contractions that we could produce is unimaginably vast. How does the brain select from the myriad possibilities in order to produce patterns of movement that are biologically useful? The answer, according to Bizzi, is to break the task into more manageable components. One of his key discoveries is that not every muscle needs to be controlled individually. Instead, groups of muscles are activated synergistically by circuits of neurons in the spinal cord, and Bizzi proposes that these synergies represent the fundamental building blocks for assembling a repertoire of complex movements.