.....I think we
can do that.
About 10 years ago I was walking down the central corridor in my lab at Princeton University when something wet smacked me from behind. I gave a most undignified squawk and ducked with my hands thrown up around my head. Turning around, I saw not one but two of my students — one with a squirt gun, the other with a video camera.
The lab was a hazardous place in those days. We were studying how the brain monitors a safety zone around the body and controls the ducking, cringing, squinting actions that protect us from impact. Whacking people from behind was not part of a formal experiment, but it was endlessly entertaining and, in its own way, revealing.
Our experiments focused on a specific set of areas in the brains of humans and monkeys. These parts of the brain seemed to process the space immediately around the body, taking in sensory information and transforming it into movement. We tracked the activity of individual neurons in those areas, trying to understand their function.
About 10 years ago I was walking down the central corridor in my lab at Princeton University when something wet smacked me from behind. I gave a most undignified squawk and ducked with my hands thrown up around my head. Turning around, I saw not one but two of my students — one with a squirt gun, the other with a video camera.
The lab was a hazardous place in those days. We were studying how the brain monitors a safety zone around the body and controls the ducking, cringing, squinting actions that protect us from impact. Whacking people from behind was not part of a formal experiment, but it was endlessly entertaining and, in its own way, revealing.
Our experiments focused on a specific set of areas in the brains of humans and monkeys. These parts of the brain seemed to process the space immediately around the body, taking in sensory information and transforming it into movement. We tracked the activity of individual neurons in those areas, trying to understand their function.