Working in Movement

Common wisdom has it that you can't always believe everything you see. Movement education wisdom takes it a bit further with the idea that what you're doing and what you think you're doing aren't always the same. When the actual movement is in fact harmful, but unrecognized as such, there's trouble brewing.

It turns out that you really can't believe everything you see, or even everything you do. At least if you're a monkey playing virtual reality games in a university laboratory. Researchers Pinpoint Brain Areas That Process Reality, Illusion sketches research that demonstrated specifically different areas of the brain involved in actual and perceived movement. In the experiment, researchers used virtual reality games to trick monkeys into thinking they were tracing an elliptical shape with they hands, when in fact those little monkey paws were making circles. (The article didn't detail exactly how this trickery worked.) The important finding here was the neural processing of the actual and perceived movements occurred in different parts of the monkeys' brains. The primary motor cortex represented the actual movement while the signals from cells in a neighboring area, called the ventral premotor cortex, generated the elliptical shapes.

The implications of all this. According to the article:

Knowing how the brain works to distinguish between action and perception will enhance efforts to build biomedical devices that can control artificial limbs, some day enabling the disabled to move a prosthetic arm or leg by thinking about it.

For a different view of this sort of this, this post on a book by Andy Clark might be useful. At any rate, the next step for these researchers is to see what happens in the monkey's brains when they correct their errors. Could be interesting.