| Abstract | [Introduction]
Nashner & McCollum (N & M) suggest that: (1) perturbations of the body relative to the gravitational field and the surface of support parse into a small number of circumscribed kinetic states (regions of disequilibrium), and (2) a functional muscular organization, to restore upright posture, corresponds to each state. Though the authors talk about the sensing of these states, they give no indication of the relevant information. In a related way, we think, their references to neural signals that require interpretation, their appeals to memory (presumably of previous trajectories, previous initial conditions, previous sensory consequences, and previous postural achievements), and their supposition of anatomically defined senses uniquely tied to distinct frames of reference seem to run counter to the gnarl Bernsteinian (1967) strategy that they are pursuing, that is, compressing in a principled fashion a movement problem of potentially very many degrees of freedom into a movement problem of very few degrees of freedom. |
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