Nadia Dominici; From Physics to Neuroscience: Understanding How Humans Learn to Move

Speaker: Nadia Dominici (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Title: From Physics to Neuroscience: Understanding How Humans Learn to Move

Abstract: Human infants display rudimentary stepping movements from the moment they are born, yet it takes about a year before they can walk independently. How does the nervous system transform these early movements into the flexible and highly coordinated locomotion of an adult? Walking is a deceptively simple behaviour. Behind each step lies the coordinated activity of many muscles, joints, sensory signals and neural circuits. Understanding how the nervous system manages this complexity, and how coordinated movement emerges and changes during development, remains a fascinating question.

In this talk, I will use my own journey from physics to neuroscience as a thread to introduce the study of human movement. I will first discuss some basic principles of locomotor control and the idea that the nervous system may simplify movement by organizing muscle activity into a limited number of functional building blocks, often referred to as locomotor primitives or muscle synergies. Studies of newborn infants and toddlers learning to walk provide a unique window into how these building blocks emerge and are progressively reorganized during development. I will then turn to the question of what happens when the neural circuits controlling locomotion are damaged. Experiments in animal models of spinal cord injury have shown how the nervous system can reorganize these locomotor patterns during rehabilitation, providing insights into how walking can be relearned after injury. Finally, I will return to human development and present our recent work investigating how the developing brain interacts with these locomotor building blocks as children gain walking experience. Together, these studies provide a window into the mechanisms underlying learning and relearning to walk, and more broadly into the question of how we learn to move.