Introduction to our Neuromechanics Blog

Welcome to our blog, where we will be discussing everything and anything related to neuroscience, biomechanics and all things in between.

What are these things you may ask? Well, neuroscience is the science of studying the brain, and biomechanics is the science of studying how we move.

So now you ask how are these things related? Amazingly, our brain actually controls how we move. Projections from our brains (nerves) send signals to our muscles to control how we want to move. The truly amazing part though is that we do all this without having to think twice (or even once) about it.

How does our brain do that? This is what we will be discussing in this blog. From basic neuroscience and biomechanics to pathologies and injuries that disrupt these systems.

We are a group of scientists-in-training at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago studying how our brains control how we move. Let us introduce ourselves:


Sarah Wohlman: I am a PhD student at Northwestern University in biomedical engineering. I am studying how our muscles control how we move our hands, especially our thumbs. I am interested in learning how our brain controls so many muscles at once to let us perform some of the most basic tasks, such as typing on a computer or picking up a cup. Our lab (shout out to the Applied Research in Musculoskeletal Simulations, ARMS lab, you should like us on facebook) uses biomechanical modeling (check back soon for more on this) to study these topics.


Chris Bresee: I am also a PhD student at Northwestern University, in the Interdepartmental Neuroscience program. I study how the sense of touch works. Specifically, I'm looking at how the way we move affects what we sense. Our lab (the Hartmann lab: http://www.mech.northwestern.edu/hartmann/) looks at how rats use their whiskers, what they sense with them, and what their brains are doing while they do this. We use rats because they are experts at using their sense of touch (through their whiskers). Humans are experts at using our sense of sight, so almost half of our brains are involved in processing vision. And so when scientists are looking at the brain to find out what it's doing to let you see, it's easier to find things, because there's just more to find. We use rats to investigate touch for the same reason.

Gregg Tabot: I am a PhD student at the University of Chicago in the Committee of 
Computational Neuroscience. I am studying the sense of proprioception, which is how the body knows where its limbs are in space. Try this: close your eyes and see if you can touch your two index fingers together. You can achieve this feat with pretty good accuracy because your brain has an internal representation of where your body is and is able to use it without visual aide! Specifically in my research, I am looking at proprioception in the hand, which translates into how the brain represents the posture or conformation of your hand.

Mukta Vaidya:I am a PhD student in Computational Neuroscience at the University of Chicago. I study how your brain coordinates movement during both naturalistic and artificial tasks. For example, the naturalistic task I am currently looking at is reaching and grasping. Go ahead and pick up something around you right now, a pen, a cup, anything; you were probably able to move instantaneously, without having to think too hard about what you had to do. Now do it again, and pay attention in particular to your hand. Your hand probably opened up to grab the object before you got there, without having to plan on how or when that would happen. In this task, I study how neurons in motor and premotor cortex in your brain work to coordinate these types of movements and so quickly too! My research will also involve looking at how neurons on both hemispheres in your brain play a role in coordinating movement on one side of your body, as well as how the coordination between neurons works when an artificial task is learned. For this artificial task, we will be developing a brain-machine interface to control a robotic arm.

Check back soon for some interesting science!!