Motor Control, 2015, 19, 105 -107 http://dx.doi.org/10.1123/mc.2014-0052 © 2015 Human Kinetics, Inc.
EDITORIAL
Motor Control Summer School: The First Ten Years Mark L. Latash Pennsylvania State University The field of motor control is relatively young, and there is still no universal agreement on the main goal of research in this field. I would define motor control as a field of research trying to discover laws of nature that describe interactions within the nervous system, and between the nervous system and the rest of the body and environment, leading to purposeful movements by biological systems. This definition makes motor control a subfield of physics of living systems, an area of physics that is still at a prenatal stage, which makes the field of motor control exciting, at least for those of us who believe that it is not a different name for motor behavior and not a particular application of the control theory. Until the mid-1990s, the expression motor control was used relatively rarely, there were no journals with the title that would include this expression, no regular conferences, and no associations with this name. The emergence of the journal Motor Control, the International Society of Motor Control, and the series of conferences Progress in Motor Control (also known informally as Bernstein’s Conferences) emphasized the growing interest to this emerging field and its development. At about the same time, an idea emerged to follow the example set by several other area of science, such as mathematics, physics, linguistics, etc., and to start a series of annual summer schools for young researchers that would expose them to controversial issues in the field of motor control and encourage them to question even the most established ideas and theories. The overall structure of the Motor Control Summer Schools (MCSS) was shamelessly copied after the series of Engineering Foundation meetings in Henniker, New Hampshire, albeit with a few modifications. In particular, this scheme included morning and evening sessions with mid-day hikes and late-evening happy hours. Just like the Engineering Foundation meetings, the MCSS meetings were held in relatively isolated places to ensure that all the participants are not distracted and spend all the time together, including the mid-day hikes and happy hours, in non-stop discussion of relevant (and irrelevant) issues. The philosophy of the MCSS is rather simple: At an advanced level, nothing educates better than active, vigorous discussions of controversial topics led by experts in the field. So, the idea was to have interactive seminars with frequent interruptions and digressions, initiated by all attendees, both speakers and students. The author is with the Dept. of Kinesiology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. Address author correspondence to Mark L. Latash at [email protected]. 105
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106 Latash
There is not much new to this idea. In now legendary Gelfand Seminars that were crucial for the development of the Moscow School of neurophysiology and motor control, interruptions and direct, frank, and frequently aggressive questions were an important, maybe even central, part of the tradition. This tradition has been emulated, in a very mild fashion, in the ongoing series of seminars Action Club at Penn State since 1995. So, MCSS may be viewed as a continuation of this tradition in a three-day format. The general schedule of the MCSS meetings has remained basically unchanged over the past years: Each speaker is given 3 hr to tell a novel, interesting, and controversial story related to research in motor control. Speakers have to be strong scientists, able to tell an interesting story, able to speak for 3 hr, and enjoying, or at least tolerant to, criticism and unfriendly remarks. The financial structure of MCSS has been rather unique. The meetings have been run on a zero budget: All participants, both speakers and students, have been expected to pay their own expenses. I am very much grateful to my friendscolleagues who agreed to come and present seminars at the MCSS without any reimbursement. Fortunately, many conference centers are willing to allow using their meetings rooms without an additional charge as long as a certain number of participants pay for the room and board. These centers have also been very reasonable in their pricing making MCSS easily affordable for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who have always made up majority of the participants. The first MCSS meeting took place in the beautiful setting of Jim Thorpe, PA in 2004. The first set of six speakers included Roger Enoka, Anatol Feldman, Mark Latash, John Scholz, Dagmar Sternad, and Vladimir Zatsiorsky. While the town and surrounding nature were beautiful and offered lots of mid-day hiking opportunities, the only hotel able to accept the MCSS did not have meeting rooms; so, the first MCSS met in the hotel basement – a romantic, but suboptimal, setting. Besides, getting to and from Jim Thorpe was not easy. So, the search for a perfect meeting place continued. By pure chance, a conference center in the Laurel Mountains region of central Pennsylvania agreed to host the second MCSS. This place, The Antiochian Village, offered a pristine and relaxing setting, very comfortable meeting rooms, proximity to several parks with good hiking opportunities, very helpful staff, and, last but not least, great value for the price they charged. The first experience at the Antiochian Village was so pleasant that it turned into a permanent place for future MCSS meetings. The first few MCSS meetings were attended by young researchers from outside the USA who had to pay the rather expensive airfare. This suggested expanding the geography of the meetings. MCSS-5 was held in Canada, not far from Montreal, while MCSS-7, MCSS-9, and MCSS-11 took place in Europe, in Poland, Hungary, and Slovenia, respectively. I would like to thank my friends-colleagues, Mindy Levin, Grzegorz Juras, Kajetan Slomka, Jozsef Laczko, and Nejc Sarabon who took full responsibility for finding excellent meeting places, beautiful and reasonably priced, organized local transportation and made sure that the meetings ran smoothly. A few minor changes have been introduced into the MCSS format since the first meeting. In particular, we now allow (and encourage) participants to bring posters that are available over the whole three days for discussion, in particular during the happy hours. This also helps students and postdocs justify their participation MC Vol. 19, No. 2, 2015
Downloaded by Boston University on 09/24/16, Volume 19, Article Number 2
Motor Control Summer School 107
and ensure financial support for their travel. A major change was implemented to celebrate the Tenth MCSS. By that time, the list of speakers at the MCSS series was nearly overlapping with “Who Is Who in Motor Control.” As of now, in addition to the already mentioned names, it includes Alexander Aruin, Antonio Bicchi, Claudia Carello, Paul Cisek, Tim Cope, Daniel Corcos, Stan Gielen, Ziaul Hasan, CJ Heckman, Yuri Ivanenko, Slobodan Jaric, Zong-Ming Li, Brad McFadyen, Joe McIntyre, Richard Nichols, David Ostry, Monica Perez, John Rothwell, David Rosenbaum, Zev Rymer, Robert Sainburg, Marc Schieber, Gregor Schöner, Jeroen Smeets, Michael Turvey, and David Vaillancourt. The original idea of MCSS-10 was to have 3-hr jazz sessions with a primary speaker and a panel of Responders who were supposed to improvise on topics presented by the primary speaker. Some of the Responders took this idea seriously and came to the sessions with the open mind and without any prepared slides. Others, however, decided that the best improvisation is a thoroughly prepared one and came armed with mini-talks of their own. Both strategies worked well, and the jazz sessions turned into heated discussions that frequently balanced on the edge of being civilized, which was exactly the purpose of the sessions. The primary speakers at MCSS-10 were later encouraged to write target articles, while the Responders were asked to write commentaries. This issue of Motor Control opens a series of target articles with commentaries that are organized in a way similar to the sessions at MCSS-10, although maybe with less improvisation. I want to thank all the contributors to this project including a few colleagues who could not attend MCSS-10 but responded positively to the invitation to write commentaries. In my humble opinion, MCSS has been a successful enterprise. More than 300 young colleagues have so far attended those meetings. Many of them have become active researchers in the field; they are highly visible at conferences, and some of them have already made a transition from a student to a speaker at MCSS. There are plans to move MCSS to new geographical areas with significant interest in motor control, such as Asia, Australia and/or New Zealand, and South America. I am very much grateful to the editor, Dr. Mindy Levin, and the publishers of Motor Control for the opportunity to put together this series of target articles with commentaries. I hope that these publications will encourage more colleagues to join one of the future MCSS as students or speakers. In the spirit of Nikolai Bernstein—Cheers! Mark L. Latash
MC Vol. 19, No. 2, 2015
EDITORIAL
Motor Control Summer School: The First Ten Years Mark L. Latash Pennsylvania State University The field of motor control is relatively young, and there is still no universal agreement on the main goal of research in this field. I would define motor control as a field of research trying to discover laws of nature that describe interactions within the nervous system, and between the nervous system and the rest of the body and environment, leading to purposeful movements by biological systems. This definition makes motor control a subfield of physics of living systems, an area of physics that is still at a prenatal stage, which makes the field of motor control exciting, at least for those of us who believe that it is not a different name for motor behavior and not a particular application of the control theory. Until the mid-1990s, the expression motor control was used relatively rarely, there were no journals with the title that would include this expression, no regular conferences, and no associations with this name. The emergence of the journal Motor Control, the International Society of Motor Control, and the series of conferences Progress in Motor Control (also known informally as Bernstein’s Conferences) emphasized the growing interest to this emerging field and its development. At about the same time, an idea emerged to follow the example set by several other area of science, such as mathematics, physics, linguistics, etc., and to start a series of annual summer schools for young researchers that would expose them to controversial issues in the field of motor control and encourage them to question even the most established ideas and theories. The overall structure of the Motor Control Summer Schools (MCSS) was shamelessly copied after the series of Engineering Foundation meetings in Henniker, New Hampshire, albeit with a few modifications. In particular, this scheme included morning and evening sessions with mid-day hikes and late-evening happy hours. Just like the Engineering Foundation meetings, the MCSS meetings were held in relatively isolated places to ensure that all the participants are not distracted and spend all the time together, including the mid-day hikes and happy hours, in non-stop discussion of relevant (and irrelevant) issues. The philosophy of the MCSS is rather simple: At an advanced level, nothing educates better than active, vigorous discussions of controversial topics led by experts in the field. So, the idea was to have interactive seminars with frequent interruptions and digressions, initiated by all attendees, both speakers and students. The author is with the Dept. of Kinesiology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. Address author correspondence to Mark L. Latash at [email protected]. 105
Downloaded by Boston University on 09/24/16, Volume 19, Article Number 2
106 Latash
There is not much new to this idea. In now legendary Gelfand Seminars that were crucial for the development of the Moscow School of neurophysiology and motor control, interruptions and direct, frank, and frequently aggressive questions were an important, maybe even central, part of the tradition. This tradition has been emulated, in a very mild fashion, in the ongoing series of seminars Action Club at Penn State since 1995. So, MCSS may be viewed as a continuation of this tradition in a three-day format. The general schedule of the MCSS meetings has remained basically unchanged over the past years: Each speaker is given 3 hr to tell a novel, interesting, and controversial story related to research in motor control. Speakers have to be strong scientists, able to tell an interesting story, able to speak for 3 hr, and enjoying, or at least tolerant to, criticism and unfriendly remarks. The financial structure of MCSS has been rather unique. The meetings have been run on a zero budget: All participants, both speakers and students, have been expected to pay their own expenses. I am very much grateful to my friendscolleagues who agreed to come and present seminars at the MCSS without any reimbursement. Fortunately, many conference centers are willing to allow using their meetings rooms without an additional charge as long as a certain number of participants pay for the room and board. These centers have also been very reasonable in their pricing making MCSS easily affordable for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who have always made up majority of the participants. The first MCSS meeting took place in the beautiful setting of Jim Thorpe, PA in 2004. The first set of six speakers included Roger Enoka, Anatol Feldman, Mark Latash, John Scholz, Dagmar Sternad, and Vladimir Zatsiorsky. While the town and surrounding nature were beautiful and offered lots of mid-day hiking opportunities, the only hotel able to accept the MCSS did not have meeting rooms; so, the first MCSS met in the hotel basement – a romantic, but suboptimal, setting. Besides, getting to and from Jim Thorpe was not easy. So, the search for a perfect meeting place continued. By pure chance, a conference center in the Laurel Mountains region of central Pennsylvania agreed to host the second MCSS. This place, The Antiochian Village, offered a pristine and relaxing setting, very comfortable meeting rooms, proximity to several parks with good hiking opportunities, very helpful staff, and, last but not least, great value for the price they charged. The first experience at the Antiochian Village was so pleasant that it turned into a permanent place for future MCSS meetings. The first few MCSS meetings were attended by young researchers from outside the USA who had to pay the rather expensive airfare. This suggested expanding the geography of the meetings. MCSS-5 was held in Canada, not far from Montreal, while MCSS-7, MCSS-9, and MCSS-11 took place in Europe, in Poland, Hungary, and Slovenia, respectively. I would like to thank my friends-colleagues, Mindy Levin, Grzegorz Juras, Kajetan Slomka, Jozsef Laczko, and Nejc Sarabon who took full responsibility for finding excellent meeting places, beautiful and reasonably priced, organized local transportation and made sure that the meetings ran smoothly. A few minor changes have been introduced into the MCSS format since the first meeting. In particular, we now allow (and encourage) participants to bring posters that are available over the whole three days for discussion, in particular during the happy hours. This also helps students and postdocs justify their participation MC Vol. 19, No. 2, 2015
Downloaded by Boston University on 09/24/16, Volume 19, Article Number 2
Motor Control Summer School 107
and ensure financial support for their travel. A major change was implemented to celebrate the Tenth MCSS. By that time, the list of speakers at the MCSS series was nearly overlapping with “Who Is Who in Motor Control.” As of now, in addition to the already mentioned names, it includes Alexander Aruin, Antonio Bicchi, Claudia Carello, Paul Cisek, Tim Cope, Daniel Corcos, Stan Gielen, Ziaul Hasan, CJ Heckman, Yuri Ivanenko, Slobodan Jaric, Zong-Ming Li, Brad McFadyen, Joe McIntyre, Richard Nichols, David Ostry, Monica Perez, John Rothwell, David Rosenbaum, Zev Rymer, Robert Sainburg, Marc Schieber, Gregor Schöner, Jeroen Smeets, Michael Turvey, and David Vaillancourt. The original idea of MCSS-10 was to have 3-hr jazz sessions with a primary speaker and a panel of Responders who were supposed to improvise on topics presented by the primary speaker. Some of the Responders took this idea seriously and came to the sessions with the open mind and without any prepared slides. Others, however, decided that the best improvisation is a thoroughly prepared one and came armed with mini-talks of their own. Both strategies worked well, and the jazz sessions turned into heated discussions that frequently balanced on the edge of being civilized, which was exactly the purpose of the sessions. The primary speakers at MCSS-10 were later encouraged to write target articles, while the Responders were asked to write commentaries. This issue of Motor Control opens a series of target articles with commentaries that are organized in a way similar to the sessions at MCSS-10, although maybe with less improvisation. I want to thank all the contributors to this project including a few colleagues who could not attend MCSS-10 but responded positively to the invitation to write commentaries. In my humble opinion, MCSS has been a successful enterprise. More than 300 young colleagues have so far attended those meetings. Many of them have become active researchers in the field; they are highly visible at conferences, and some of them have already made a transition from a student to a speaker at MCSS. There are plans to move MCSS to new geographical areas with significant interest in motor control, such as Asia, Australia and/or New Zealand, and South America. I am very much grateful to the editor, Dr. Mindy Levin, and the publishers of Motor Control for the opportunity to put together this series of target articles with commentaries. I hope that these publications will encourage more colleagues to join one of the future MCSS as students or speakers. In the spirit of Nikolai Bernstein—Cheers! Mark L. Latash
MC Vol. 19, No. 2, 2015
