One chalk talk that really intrigued me was Wilson Brace’s, on the neuroscience of motor learning. In his lab he is studying how people learn music, and to do so they have developed a cool and unique method of analyzing motor learning. Particularly they are interested in two concepts in motor learning: chunking and anticipatory movement. Chunking is grouping several movements together, such as a scale in music. A scale is often treated as one unit rather than a bunch of successive individual notes, and that indicated chunking. Anticipatory movement is pretty much what it sounds like; it’s how early a person anticipates and plans their movements before actually performing them.
To explore these concepts they created a device capable of tracking movements, using an xBox kinect camera, a keyboard, and an EMG. A subject wears gloves with some of the fingers colored red, and plays the keyboard. The kinect camera is programmed to pick up and track the color red, so it tracks the movement of the red fingers. In this way they can analyze the smoothness, hesitations, miscues and mistakes of the person playing keyboard. By analyzing subjects at different experience levels they can see how experience and musical ability affects motor moving. In effect, they can see how the brain learns.
All the chalk talks were very interesting, but this one really appealed to me as motor learning (and neuroscience) is something that really appeals to me. The future implications of Wilson’s research, and understanding how we learn as humans, could have huge implications in the future of teaching and education.
