To join: email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu for a Zoom link to the seminar.

Corollary Discharge and Proprioception: two brain mechanisms for spatially accurate movement.

Michael E.  Goldberg M.D. (Columbia University)

A longstanding problem in cognitive psychology is to understand how the brain can turn the spatially unreliable retinal signal into a spatially accurate visual signal for action and perception.  Two great 19th century neuroscientists proposed very different solutions to the problem.  Herman von Helmholtz postulated that the motor system could feed information about upcoming eye and head movements to the visual system to compensate for those movements.  Sir Charles Sherington postulated that the brain could use proprioception to measure where the eyes are in the orbit and where the head is on the shoulders and calculate where an object is in space from those data.  I will present evidence demonstrating that the brain uses both of these strategies to achieve a spatially accurate representation of the visual world.