Sensorimotor control
Stein J.
Later in development many marine tunicates that start life as mobile larvae fix themselves onto a rock and never move thereafter; they then proceed to autolyze their own nervous systems because they no longer need to waste precious resources on servicing such an energy-hungry organ as the brain. This highlights that the main reason for having a brain at all is to control movement and to plan and execute appropriate actions in any given situation by representing in the brain, the whole panoply of current sensory inputs plus stored memories of previous sensory contexts, of the actions then selected and how successful they were, in order to predict which behavior will now best meet current requirements. Hence this sensorimotor section of the Reference Module in Neuroscience will include not only articles on muscle, proprioception, and spinal, subcortical, and cortical control of muscle contractions, but also articles on how decisions to embark on a particular course of action are made and how these movements are planned in relation to past experience and current predictions of their likely outcomes in order to optimize their adaptation to the needs of the moment.