Faculty

Aditya Murthy

Office : Ground floor of PRL at Central Animal Facility
Phone : +91 80 2293 3290
E-Mail : adi[at]iisc.ac.in
web : www.cns.iisc.ac.in/aditya/

Research Areas

Movement Control

Research Details

The brain is the most complex information processing systems known to man and considerable neural machinery is devoted to movement planning. While movements in robots can be superior to naturally occurring movements in terms of speed and accuracy, they are still relatively primitive when it comes to mimicking natural behaviours that occur in unpredictable and unstructured environments. Our lab studies the neural and computational basis of movement planning and control with an emphasis to understand the basis of flexibility and control that is the hallmark of intelligent action. From the perspective of behaviour we seek to understand the nature of computations that enable movement control; from the perspective of the brain we seek to understand the contribution of circumscribed neural circuits to motor behaviour; and by recording the electrical activity of neurons and muscles we seek to understand how such computational processes are implemented by the brain. Our research interests span the fields of visual perception, decision-making, and the generation of motor behaviour and involve the application of cognitive/psychophysical, neuropsychological and electrophysiological techniques. We anticipate that in the long term this work will be useful to understand the basis of different motor disorders and develop brain machine interface systems that are only beginning to be exploited as engineering and brain sciences are starting to increasingly interface.