Education and demonstration – Psychology
Reexamination Certificate
2001-09-10
2003-11-11
Rovnak, John Edmund (Department: 3714)
Education and demonstration
Psychology
C434S262000, C434S247000, C434S258000, C128S905000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06644976
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, generally, to addressing the need of promoting or improving bio-motoric performance in some human activities. More particularly, the present invention relates to addressing a possible subject's need to improve the level of synergic cooperation between one or more of his/her body parts with visceral cyclical function, during the execution or realization of an activity. More specifically, from the many possible embodiments of the invention, the possible usefulness of some of these embodiments for the treatment of many human conditions including learning disabilities in general and dyslexia in particular could be explored.
2. Related Art
At present, the characterization of mental life is dictated by a machine metaphor where the brain is viewed by many as a sophisticated computer whose software is the mind. Cognitive psychology views the mind as a grand software which manipulates representations from the environment as symbols.
This “computational” approach dominates today's mainstream in understanding the brain-mind set. Under this approach, the rest of the body simply executes and follows the programs stored in the brain (hardware), which is functionally manipulated by the mind (software). Furthermore, movements and voluntary actions are understood as ‘motor programs’ stored in the brain.
It is easy to see why the computer metaphor has predominated the field of motor control and movement coordination for years. Actions must be precisely ordered spatially and temporally, that is, a central motor program elicits instructions to choose the correct muscles, and then to contract and relax them at the right time. In short, the machine metaphor sees the brain as a central programmer and the body as a mere slave.
All the above theories, although fruitful in some areas, don't say much about the nature of movement coordination and its over all organization. All of us know, in a way, what coordination is, but little is known about how or why it is the way it is.
Getting down to specifics, movement coordination and organization is not a simple task since the human body is a complex system roughly comprising 10
2
joints, 10
3
muscles, 10
3
cell types, and 10
14
neurons and neuronal connections. In addition, the human body is multifunctional and behaviorally complex. For example, we can chew and talk at the same time by using the same set of anatomical components. All the above suggests the enormous potential of the human body for movement production and voluntary action. Nevertheless, how can it be that complex motor behavior organizes and coordinates itself as to produce a simple movement? Or, phrasing it in the language of dynamical systems, how can a high-dimensional system (degrees of freedom of the motor system) be almost infinitely compressed as to produce a low dimensional dynamic?
This issue is not trivial what so ever, since a breakdown in movement coordination and its overall organization is an indicator of several brain disorders such as Parkinson's disease, Huntington's chorea, etc. In the field of learning difficulties, a breakdown in movement coordination correlates with an impairment of cognitive perceptual tasking in people considered normal, leading to a spectrum of learning deficits such as: Dyspraxia, ADD, ADHD, Dyslexia, etc.
The scenery in the physiology field changed radically when the eminent Soviet physiologist Nikolai A. Bernstein (1896-1966) proposed an early solution to these problems (See, Bernstein, N. A., “The Coordination and Regulation of Movements,” Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1967). Bernstein showed that human movements are so intrinsically variable and posses such an unlimited degree of freedom, that finding a single formula explaining movement behavior from efferent impulses alone is inevitably doomed to failure.
In Bernstein's own words “it is a most important fact that the invariant motor task is fulfilled not by a constant, fixed set, but by a varying set of movements, which lead to the constant, invariant effect” and this applies to simple and complex behavior alike. Motor variability according to Bernstein is not accidental, but essential, for the normal course of an active movement and for its successful accomplishment.
Bernstein's great insight was that of defining the problem of coordinated action as a complication in mastering the many redundant degrees of freedom in a movement; that is, of reducing to a minimum the number of independent variables to control. How do we take a multivariable system and control it with just one or few parameters?
Bernstein proposed to solve the above problem by treating each individual variable in the chain of producing a movement as if organized into larger groupings called linkages or “synergies”.
Bernstein's hypothesis on motor coordination was not mechanistic or hard-wired (brain as hard-ware) anatomical units; rather, synergies were proposed to be functional units, flexibly and temporally assembled in a task-specific fashion.
Since Bernstein's contribution to motor control, the concept conveyed in the term “synergy” has been further developed by Hermann Haken in the late sixties in the specific area of “Synergetics”, a branch of physics dealing with dynamical systems (non-linear phenomena). Synergetics describes an entire interdisciplinary field, (e.g., laser, chemical reactions, and fluid dynamics) dealing with pattern-formation spontaneously (self-organization) arising from cooperative phenomena that are far from equilibrium.
The key point in here is that the field of synergetics provides the theoretical and mathematical basis for establishing neuromotor organization through which coordinative modes (the pattern formation of movement) spontaneously arise, stabilize and change.
Perceptual motor coordination is today being considered as a window into biological and behavioral self-organization, thanks to the work and original experiments of Scott Kelso, in rhythmical behavior (bimanual phase transition paradigm). Kelso shed light on Bernstein's claims on movement variability as being the basis for the self-organization of simple and complex motor coordination alike, and in Kelso's own words: The fact that humans can stably produce, without a lot of learning, only two simple coordination patterns between the hands (parallel and antiparallel finger movements) remains for me an absolute amazing fact. A complex system of muscles, tendons, and joints interacting with a much more complex system composed of literally billons of neurons appears to behave like a pair of couple oscillators. A truly synergic effect!′ Kelso further reports that these patterns of motor coordination are far from being accidental, ‘even skilled musicians and people who have had the two halves of their brain surgically separated to control epileptic seizures are still strongly attracted to these two basic patterns’ (See, Tuller, B. & Kelso, J. A. S., “Environmentally Specified Patterns of Movement Coordination in Normal and Split-Brain Subjects,” Experimental Brain Research, vol. 74, 1989).
The point that Kelso is making in here is that biological systems have an acuity for coordinating movement in particular timing patterns. (The present invention extensively modifies and deviates from the idea of synergy as described by Bernstein and Kelso.)
In the self-organized motoric pattern dynamics, cognitive intentionality is viewed as an integral part of the overall orchestration of the organism, that is, the organism's motor-intention potential is constrained by the organism's existing visceral organization. Such visceral-cognitive close relationship is not philosophical, but much to the contrary, recent studies in goal directedness suggest that there is brain activity prior to any overt movement.
A neuroanatomical structure in the brain, the ‘SMA’, determines the right moment to start the voluntary act as well as the sub cortical structures such as the cerebellum and basal
Kullok Jose R.
Kullok Saul
Rovnak John Edmund
Sterne Kessler Goldstein & Fox P.L.L.C.
LandOfFree
Apparatus, method and computer program product to produce or... does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this patent.
If you have personal experience with Apparatus, method and computer program product to produce or..., we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Apparatus, method and computer program product to produce or... will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFUS-PAI-O-3181283