Internal Seminar: Computational Neuroscience Unit

Join us for this month's first Internal Seminars Series on February 12, from 17:30 to 18:00 in C700 (Lab3). This seminar features the Computational Neuroscience Unit (Erik De Schutter). Please note the changed time!

Computational Neuroscience Unit (Erik De Schutter)

Speaker : Sergio Verduzco Flores

Title : Understanding how the brain does motor control

Abstract : Roboticists may attest that the simple act of reaching is in fact quite hard to understand.
A reaching motion may require dozens of muscles, each one a nonlinear actuator whose effects depend on the current configuration of the arm. Despite this complexity, the central nervous system can reach and grasp without unnecessary stiffness of the muscles, even in the presence of perturbations. This feat of motor control involves several parts of the nervous system. For example, damage to the cerebellum causes uncontrolled oscillations when reaching. Understanding the role of the cerebellum and other brain structures in motor control can be greatly helped by computational simulations that incorporate both the musculoskeletal system being controlled, and a model of the controlling structure in the nervous system. In this talk I will describe previous and current efforts in this direction.