Novel ‘body-swap’ robot provides insights into how the brain keeps us upright

By Jean-Sébastien Blouin, Professor, School of Kinesiology, University of British Columbia
Patrick A. Forbes, Associate Professor, Erasmus University Medical Center

Imagine driving a car with a steering that doesn’t respond instantly and a GPS that always reflects where you were a second ago. To stay on course, you must constantly infer how to steer the wheel from outdated information.

Our brains do exactly that every time we move: sensory signals reach the brain tens of milliseconds after an event and motor commands take similar time to travel to the muscles, which then need extra time to generate force. In other words, the brain is always working with “old news” and must predict the…

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