Why Motor System Variability Can Be a Good Thing

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/01/inconsistent-good/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=hu-twitter-general

Really intriguing study/article about how inconsistency/variability is actually teaching us a lot. Click link above for details. 🙂 Interesting to think about from the OT perspective.

"“The analogy I often use is evolution,” Ölveczky said. “In evolution, genes change, and that’s how you can learn as an organism. It’s the same with the motor system. The way the motor system learns is by changing things, not through recombination, but by changing the output, and then carefully monitoring how each of those changes results in better or worse performance.

“This may seem like a fairly counterintuitive finding because you could take the view that the more precisely you can produce a movement, the more control you have, so the better you should be able to learn,” Ölveczky said. “But that’s not necessarily true. What we’re saying is … you need to explore first to find the solution that best fits your needs for a task. Then once you find it, you can exploit it and try to reduce variability. I think this should give people some understanding and appreciation of the errors they make, and that they’re actually, fundamentally, a design feature rather than a flaw in what their brain is doing."