ABSTRACT
The task of the motor system Students often find the higher levels of the motor system difficult to understand: so do those who do research on them. As we have already seen (p. 189), there are peculiar experimental difficulties with investigating motor systems in conventional ways. At the same time the anatomy of the pathways is complex and open to many interpretations (compare it with that of the visual system, for instance). And finally, and perhaps most important of all, the complexity of the movements themselves is extraordinarily hard to grasp. Think what is involved in one of the most familiar sequences of actions of all, getting dressed in the morning. Faced in semi-darkness with a crumpled, partially inside-out, shirt, what astonishing feats of computation are needed to work out how to pick it up, manipulate into the right configuration, guide it over the correct bits of one’s anatomy, deal with buttons and buttonholes. This is not a peculiarly human ability, not particularly dependent on primate-sized cortex: you only have to see a bird elegantly swoop between the branches of a tree, killing its speed with exactly the right timing to come to rest on one particular twig, to realize that equally daunting motor tasks can be accomplished with remarkably little neural hardware.
