First citation in a Science Vs podcast @sciencevs.bsky.social The topic was telepathy - our paper showed how people can hold a pendulum and "think" it to start moving. We showed using motion capture that small movements at the right frequency cause the movement www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
A new conference proceedings paper is out with colleagues from Australia using neural networks to simulate motor tasks using networks trained to have hemispheric specialization. The model comparisons suggest that this strategy can take advantage of each hemisphere's strengths doi.org/10.1007/978-...
This graph shows that across different frequencies, people with Parkinson's disease produce more submovements than both older and younger controls
We published a new paper showing that people with Parkinson's disease produce more submovements than controls. In contrast to previous experiments, we used a tracking task so all participants would move at the same speed and for the same duration. jneuroengrehab.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....
People got better at the movements over 10 days, but were still bad at making slow movements. Tai chi practitioners were not better than a control group (karate experts) or novices. The conclusion: we are bad at slow movements for other reasons, likely a mix of neural and biomechanical limitations.
Why is it hard for us to make slow and smooth movements? One possibility is that we don't make them very often in day-to-day life. We tested this by training people over 10 days (did not help much) and also tested slow-movement experts (Tai Chi practitioners) journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1...