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New Pages in the Biography of Nikolai Alexandrovich Bernstein

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Book cover Anticipation: Learning from the Past

Part of the book series: Cognitive Systems Monographs ((COSMOS,volume 25))

Abstract

Nikolai Alexandrovich Bernstein (1896–1966) is well known today primarily for formulating the problem of redundant degrees of freedom and their elimination in motor control, as well as his hierarchical theory of movement coordination. This paper aims to uncover new pages in the biography of N.A. Bernstein, based on materials from the archive of his nephew Alexander Sergeevich Bernstein, as well as recent interviews with the former pupils of N.A. Bernstein. Concentrated around several interdisciplinary seminars, they grew into a young generation of physiologists in the late sixties and made remarkable contributions inspired by Bernstein’s new principles of neuroscience. These include the discovery of the spinal automatism of stepping in the cat, the “equilibrium point” hypothesis, the hindlimb wiping reflex of the frog as an example of a targeted trajectory organized at the spinal level, and the probabilistic prognosis in human activity.

It seems… that the fundamental questions raised by Bernstein in 1962 remain equally fundamental and equally unanswered 20 years later. We may optimistically suggest that they will provide many individuals with a way to pass the time for the next 20 years (Agarwail and Gottlieb [1])

At present, theoretical neuroscience may be considered an independent branch of brain science. The importance of the studies by N.A. Bernstein in this respect may be compared to the importance of Maimonides’ reform of Judaism, Luther’s reform of Christianity, or Maxwell’s revolution in physics (Latash [2])

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Lahy, Jean-Maurice (1872–1943)—French psychologist and sociologist.

  2. 2.

    Laugier, Henri (1888–1973)—French physiologist, the first director of CNRS (1939–1942).

  3. 3.

    Langevin, Paul (1872–1946)—prominent French physicist.

  4. 4.

    Igumnov, Кonstantin Nikolaevich (1873–1948)—famous Russian pianist.

  5. 5.

    “Atlas des Ganges und Laufes des Menschen”—unpublished, now in Dortmund.

  6. 6.

    Let us note here that Bernstein himself named this book in English “On the Structure of Movements” (List of publications of N.A. Bernstein, Archives of Russian Academy of Medicine).

  7. 7.

    In September 1941, Bernstein’s family was evacuated to the city of Ulan Ude in Siberia, the capital of Buryat Mongolian Autonomous Republic of USSR. It was impossible to continue research there. Bernstein became the head of the Department of Biology at the Pedagogical Institute, and gave lectures on human anatomy, histology, and general physiology. In his free time, he put together the “Five-place decimal logarithm tables for numbers from 1 up to 1010” based on his own calculations, which was the sole work indexed in his bibliography of 1942. At the same time, his brother Sergei moved to Tashkent where his Academy of Armed Forces was housed at the time. The living conditions were better there, and he arranged for Nikolai’s family to move to Tashkent in September 1942. While there, Bernstein worked at the Republican Sanitary Institute of the Ministry of Health of the Uzbek Republic. In June 1943, after the course of the war had shifted, Bernstein was able to return to Moscow.

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Acknowledgments

The preparation of this article was supported in part by the grant RFBR #14-04-00950.

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  1. Institute for Information Transmission Problems (Kharkevich Institute), Russian Academy of Science, Moscow, Russia

    Vera L. Talis

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  1. Vera L. Talis
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Correspondence to Vera L. Talis .

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  1. antÉ—Institute for Research in Anticipatory Systems, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas, USA

    Mihai Nadin

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Talis, V.L. (2015). New Pages in the Biography of Nikolai Alexandrovich Bernstein. In: Nadin, M. (eds) Anticipation: Learning from the Past. Cognitive Systems Monographs, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19446-2_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19446-2_18

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