ABSTRACT
Enjoying a bravura performance by a professional athlete or virtuoso musician, we marvel at the performer’s skilled bodily motion. We are less apt to appreciate that relatively humdrum activities – such as walking, talking, riding a bicycle, tying shoelaces, typing, using silverware, or pouring milk into a cup without spilling – already require impressive control over one’s motor organs. The ease with which we execute these activities belies their difficulty, as evidenced by our current inability to build robots that match human performance. During the course of each day, a typical adult achieves myriad goals through an extraordinary range of dexterous bodily motions. How do humans manage to achieve their goals by exerting such refined control over their motor organs?
