Scientific Calendar Event



Starts 17 Sep 2018 11:00
Ends 17 Sep 2018 12:00
Central European Time
ICTP
Central Area, 2nd floor, old SISSA building
Via Beirut 2
Living systems differ from inanimate objects in their ability to unite basic laws of nature into chains and clusters leading to new stable and pervasive relations among physical variables and involving new parameters. They produce actions by modifying these parameters. Some of such “biological laws of nature” have been described including those underlying the control of voluntary movements. This approach allows exploring stability of action and perception, which looks next to miraculous given the continuously changing intrinsic states of the body and the changing environment. Stability of action and perception is viewed as the formation of a stable low-dimensional manifold, uncontrolled manifold for action and iso-perceptual manifold for perception, in high-dimensional spaces of elements. Over the past years, we have developed a method of uncontrolled manifold-based analysis of action stability in spaces of elemental performance variables and control variables for the effectors. These studies have shown, in particular, that humans are able to modify stability of steady states in preparation to action and that control of action stability is grossly impaired in certain neurological disorders. I will also review a couple of recent experimental studies testing some of the predictions of the scheme for stable perception. One of them explored force illusions induced by muscle vibration. The other study explored perception of elemental variables during a multi-element action.