   
|
 | | Neuroscience
Homepage > Faculty List
> Soechting | John F.
Soechting, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Neuroscience
soech001@umn.edu |
|
 Motor control neurophysiology
Interim Director of Undergraduate Studies
The grace of a basketball player or of a modern dancer has
always fascinated me. How does the brain act to produce such skilled
coordinated movements? We are far from answering these questions but my
colleagues and I are working toward that goal by studying simpler
movements which, I think, still capture the essentials of the problem
of movements and coordination. We have been studying arm movements
which require coordination of motion at the shoulder, elbow and wrist.
Most of the work is done on human subjects and involves measuring
motion in three dimensions and recording the activity of muscles which
produce this motion. The nature of the problem has made this work
highly interdisciplinary; we use techniques from psychology
(psychophysics) and physiology to robotics and computer simulations. My
approach has been to begin by studying behavior and to use a
description of behavior to develop hypotheses concerning what the brain
is doing to produce that behavior. The next step then is to test
hypotheses by means of electrophysiological recording from behaving
animals. |
|
