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Science 7 September 2001:
Vol. 293. no. 5536, pp. 1845 - 1848
DOI: 10.1126/science.1060976
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Reports

Control of Octopus Arm Extension by a Peripheral Motor Program

German Sumbre,1 Yoram Gutfreund,1* Graziano Fiorito,2 Tamar Flash,3 Binyamin Hochner1dagger

For goal-directed arm movements, the nervous system generates a sequence of motor commands that bring the arm toward the target. Control of the octopus arm is especially complex because the arm can be moved in any direction, with a virtually infinite number of degrees of freedom. Here we show that arm extensions can be evoked mechanically or electrically in arms whose connection with the brain has been severed. These extensions show kinematic features that are almost identical to normal behavior, suggesting that the basic motor program for voluntary movement is embedded within the neural circuitry of the arm itself. Such peripheral motor programs represent considerable simplification in the motor control of this highly redundant appendage.

1 Department of Neurobiology and Interdisciplinary Center for Neuronal Computation, Institute of Life Sciences, Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel.
2 Laboratorio di Neurobiologia, Stazione Zoologica di Napoli "A. Dohrn," Naples 80121, Italy.
3 Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
*   Present address: Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University School of Medicine Stanford, CA 94305, USA.

dagger    To whom correspondence should be addressed: E-mail: bennyh{at}lobster.ls.huji.ac.il

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