An Instinctive Approach to Motor Learning

Abstract

As living things are called creatures, because they create movements, movements are essential in our life. And movements are also essential in machines, too, because we want them to work for us. Our world is changing rapidly. It is no more predictable, and it becomes a wide, open world without boundaries. When our world was closed with boundaries, we could apply mathematical approaches in a straightforward manner. So, control has been our basic idea in engineering. And what makes the problem further difficult is materials are getting softer and softer. So, direct interaction with the outside world increases its importance. Thus, haptics is quickly increasing its importance. But the octopuses which are on the opposite side on the evolution tree, because they are invertebrate, and humans are vertebrate. As the octopuses die immediately after their babies are born, they do not inherit knowledge from their previous generations. They live on their instinct alone. But they can negotiate any environments and situations and they can escape. This is because instinct is deeply associated with the strategic decision making. But when we look at the current engineering, we pay attention and efforts to improve particular technologies. Thus, our traditional engineering has been tactical. But to cope with the widely and frequently changes of environments and situations. We, humans, need such strategic decision making ss the octopuses are practicing. This paper describes the importance of instinct with special attention paid to movement coordination.