Motor Primitives and Rehabilitation

To generate movements the CNS must handle the large number of degrees of freedom of the musculo-skeletal apparatus. Our results show the CNS solves this problem with an architecture based on the utilization of discrete building blocks to construct a variety of movements. The experimental evidence indicates that a small number of building blocks can explain a large fraction of the variation in the muscle pattern. The results represent a remarkable simplification in view of the high dimensionality of the space of all possible muscle pattern.