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A balanced view of motor control

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Maintaining balance requires the translation of a high-level command—“Keep the body's center of mass over the feet”—to low-level adjustments in individual muscles and joints. A new paper finds that a simple translation between these two levels of control provides a robust explanation for responses to several types of perturbations.

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Figure 1: A hierarchical controller for balance.

Kim Caesar

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Matthew C. Tresch is in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and Physiology, 303 E. Chicago Ave., Chicago, Illinois 60611, USA. m-tresch@northwestern.edu,

    Matthew C Tresch

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  1. Matthew C Tresch
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Tresch, M. A balanced view of motor control. Nat Neurosci 10, 1227–1228 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1007-1227

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1007-1227

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