The hand its mechanism and vital endowments as evincing design

Bell, Charles; Murray, John

doi:10.5962/bhl.title.107147

Cited by 28 publications

(33 citation statements)

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“…Since the ancient Greeks, it has been tempting to regard the hand as a pinnacle of efficient design, as an indicator of a creator's intervention. Sir Charles Bell (1833), who wrote one of the earliest accounts of the upper limb in the animal kingdom, recognised the human hand as 'this more perfect instrument' , but one which 'corresponds with man's superior mental capacities' such that it should be 'capable of executing whatever man's ingenuity suggests' . He realised that the hand was not a mere appendage grafted onto the limb but that it required the brain to put it into action.…”

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confidence: 99%

Constraints for control of the human hand

Duinen

Gandevia

2011

The Journal of Physiology

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More than 30 muscles drive the hand to perform a multitude of essential dextrous tasks. Here we consider new views on the evolution of hand structure and on peripheral and central constraints for independent control of the digits of the hand. The human hand is widely assumed to have evolved from hands like those of African apes, yet recent studies have shown that our hands and those of the earliest hominids are very similar and unlike those of living apes. Understanding the limits of hand function may come from investigation of our last common ancestor with the great apes, rather than the great apes themselves. In the periphery, movement across the full range of joint space can be limited by mechanical linkages among the extrinsic muscles. Further, peripheral limits occur when the hand adopts some positions in which the contraction of muscles fails to move the joints on which they usually act; there is muscle 'disengagement' and functional paralysis for some actions. Surprisingly, the central nervous system drives the hand seamlessly through this landscape of mechanical limits. Central constraints on control of the individual digits include the spillover of neural drive to neighbouring muscles and their 'compartments' , and the inability to make maximal muscle forces when multiple digits contract strongly which produces a force deficit. The pattern of these latter constraints correlates with amounts of daily use of each digit and favours enslaved extension to lift fingers from an object but selective flexion of fingers to contact it.

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confidence: 99%

Constraints for control of the human hand

Duinen

Gandevia

2011

The Journal of Physiology

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“…Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.' 3 In our context, it can be taken to mean that, if we have over one hundred years of sensorimotor neuroscience since Sir Charles Sherrington [74], and if the principles we have deduced are sound, then we should be able to build components that embody those mechanisms in such a way that when assembled they behave like biological systems [75,76]. One example of such a neuromorphic approach uses ultra-fast computer processors to simultaneously implement populations of autonomous, interconnected spiking neurons in real time that follow Hodgkin-Huxley rules of how action potentials in neurons are initiated and propagated [77].…”

Section: Mechanics and Neuromechanics As The Common Ground Between Bimentioning

confidence: 99%

On neuromechanical approaches for the study of biological and robotic grasp and manipulation

Valero-Cuevas

Santello

2017

J NeuroEngineering Rehabil

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Biological and robotic grasp and manipulation are undeniably similar at the level of mechanical task performance. However, their underlying fundamental biological vs. engineering mechanisms are, by definition, dramatically different and can even be antithetical. Even our approach to each is diametrically opposite: inductive science for the study of biological systems vs. engineering synthesis for the design and construction of robotic systems. The past 20 years have seen several conceptual advances in both fields and the quest to unify them. Chief among them is the reluctant recognition that their underlying fundamental mechanisms may actually share limited common ground, while exhibiting many fundamental differences. This recognition is particularly liberating because it allows us to resolve and move beyond multiple paradoxes and contradictions that arose from the initial reasonable assumption of a large common ground. Here, we begin by introducing the perspective of neuromechanics, which emphasizes that real-world behavior emerges from the intimate interactions among the physical structure of the system, the mechanical requirements of a task, the feasible neural control actions to produce it, and the ability of the neuromuscular system to adapt through interactions with the environment. This allows us to articulate a succinct overview of a few salient conceptual paradoxes and contradictions regarding under-determined vs. over-determined mechanics, under- vs. over-actuated control, prescribed vs. emergent function, learning vs. implementation vs. adaptation, prescriptive vs. descriptive synergies, and optimal vs. habitual performance. We conclude by presenting open questions and suggesting directions for future research. We hope this frank and open-minded assessment of the state-of-the-art will encourage and guide these communities to continue to interact and make progress in these important areas at the interface of neuromechanics, neuroscience, rehabilitation and robotics.

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“…For a long time, no one talked of bodily awareness or the sensory system underlying such awareness—proprioception—at all. It was only in the nineteenth century that proprioception was identified as a separate sense in physiology (Bell ), and not until rather more recently that it became a serious object of study.…”

Section: Introducing the Non‐pilot Phenomenologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Embodied Agency

Wong

2017

Philos Phenomenol Research

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Is bodily awareness a condition on bodily action? I approach this question by weaving an argument based on considerations from action theory, the phenomenology of embodied agency, and from the psychology and neuroscience of action. In this paper, I discuss two accounts on which bodily awareness is a condition on bodily action. The first is an influential philosophical account from O'Shaughnessy, which claims that bodily awareness is necessary for the online control of bodily action. I argue that there are empirical counterexamples to O'Shaughnessy's account. Instead I propose an account on which the capacity for bodily awareness is a condition on our capacity for ordinary bodily action. This alternative account does justice to the causal and functional character of ordinary bodily action as well as its phenomenology. It is also consistent with the psychology and neuroscience of action. I provide a two-stage argument for my view. The first stage shows that a sense of the spatial possibilities of one's body is a condition on intentionally acting with one's body. The second stage demonstrates that bodily awareness is a condition on a normal afferented agent's sense of the actions open to him through examining the role of bodily awareness in motor imagery and the role of motor imagery in preparatory processes for everyday actions.

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The hand its mechanism and vital endowments as evincing design

Cited by 28 publications

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Constraints for control of the human hand

Constraints for control of the human hand

On neuromechanical approaches for the study of biological and robotic grasp and manipulation

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