Solving The Mystery Of Motion With AI

AI (Artificial Intelligence) concept. 3D rendering.

getty

On a very basic level, many of us understand that artificial intelligence is helping scientists to better understand the workings of the human brain itself – but how?

An interesting insight comes from a presentation by Allison Hamilos called: The Neuroscience of Spontaneity & Decision-Making. Hamilos has a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biology from right here at MIT, and a PhD from Harvard. She’s also a member of the Harvard-MIT Health Science and Technology Program.

In her presentation, which she gave at a recent Science Dinner here in Boston, Hamilos presents some striking findings about human movement and how it happens: how the brain gives us the impulses that make us move around.

The Landscape

Hamilos starts by explaining the workings of “motor neurons” and how many of these, working together, help to generate movement triggers.

“Thousands of motor neurons suddenly start firing together in concert, and this avalanche of neural activity sends signals down through the spinal cord to cause muscle fibers to contract,” she said. “This is why we move.”

But the work going on now is to figure out how those little avalanches get spawned.

In search of this answer, Hamilos makes a very critical distinction, between movement that is immediately reactive, sometimes almost involuntary, and movement that is elective, which can seem so capricious that it’s hard to analyze exactly why it happens at a particular instant.

“Not all movements result from abrupt sensory events,” Hamilos notes, and it’s those movements that really incite the most curiosity.

By way of at least partial explanation, Hamilos talks about Parkinson’s disease, where science has found that the underlying “motivators” are impaired or inhibited in some way. Movement, she notes, is slower, on the whole. There’s also the concept of “paradoxical kinesia,” where a subject might display a discrepancy that looks like this: he…

Source