Neuroscientists Talk Shop

Thursday, November 15, 2012 Simon Giszter (Drexel School of Medicine) discusses spinal cord modularity based on the idea of motor primitives as optimization learning constraints that can be flexibly modulated by cortical inputs.  He discusses ideas about the origins of motor primitives (are they built by evolution at the level of the species or online at the level of the task for individuals), and describes possible neural mechanisms for how spinal primitives may be orchestrated. Duration: 34 minutes Discussants:(in alphabetical order) Salma Quraishi (Res Asst Prof, UTSA) Todd Troyer (Asst Prof, UTSA) Charles Wilson (Prof, UTSA) acknowledgement: JM Tepper for original music.