title: How does the brain solve muscle redundancy? Filling the gap between optimization and muscle synergy hypotheses.
abstract: The question of how the central nervous system coordinates redundant muscles has been a long-standing problem in motor neuroscience. The optimization hypothesis posits that the brain can select the muscle activation pattern that minimizes the motor effort cost from among many solutions that satisfy the requirements of the task. On the other hand, the muscle-synergy hypothesis proposes that neurally established functional groupings of muscles alleviate the computational burden associated with motor control and learning. Although the two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, the relationship between them has not been well analyzed. This is probably because both hypotheses are formulated mathematically without a clear concept of their neural implementation. Here, we introduce a biologically plausible hypothesis ("the forgetting hypothesis") for how optimization is realized by a population of neurons. We further demonstrate that low-dimensional structure can be detected in an optimal network even if no muscle-synergies are explicitly assumed. Finally, we briefly discuss an inherent difficulty in testing the muscle-synergy hypothesis, which arises when population level optimization is assumed.
authors.affiliation: Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet), National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, and Osaka University, Suita, Osaka 565-0871, Japan. Electronic address: hira@nict.go.jp.
authors.forename: Masaya
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hirashima
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurophysiology, National Institute of Neuroscience, 4-1-1 Ogawa-Higashi-Cho, Kodaira, Tokyo 187-8502, Japan.
authors.forename: Tomomichi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Oya
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D016014:Linear Models; D018482:Muscle, Skeletal / Q000502:physiology*; D009142:Musculoskeletal Physiological Phenomena; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics
keywords: Muscle; Muscle synergy; Neural network; Optimization; Redundancy