The master puppeteer: how the brain controls the body

The master puppeteer is part of the Cambridge Science Festival

The effortless ease with which humans move our arms, our eyes, even our lips when we speak masks the true complexity of the processes involved. This is evident when we try to build machines to perform human tasks. While computers can now beat grand-masters at chess, no computer can yet control a robot to manipulate a chess piece with the dexterity of a six-year-old child. How the brain is able to learn to generate such skilful movement is one of the most intriguing questions in neuroscience and the focus of Professor Daniel Wolpert's lecture visit Wolpert's lab. Professor Daniel Wolpert read medical sciences at Cambridge and clinical medicine at Oxford before completing a PhD in the Physiology Department at Oxford. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at MIT in Boston, before moving to the Institute of Neurology, UCL. In 2005 he took up the post of Professor of Engineering for the Life Sciences at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of Trinity College. His research interests are computational and experimental approaches to understand how humans learn skilled movements.

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