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yml's picture

walking, breathing, CPGs...

As several of others mentioned in the forum, I found the discussion about infants don’t learn to walk but born with central pattern generator for walking.  Since it takes awhile for infants to learn to walk and there are steps they have to develop in order to walk, I never thought there would be a system “pre-installed” in our brain that makes you walk, even before you know how to walk. For the case of breathing, as it is another example for CPG, infants don’t require practice or experiences to have CPG for breathing to take a place. Then is that mean some CPGs require experiences, like walking, and some don’t, like breathing? Also, is this because there are less muscle movements to be learn to breathe than to walk, therefore can be done faster?

Another sets of questions I have for CPG are, so if you were not born with central pattern generator for certain activities, you won’t be able to create CPG for an activity of your choice? Meaning, does CPG always have to be there from the birth or can it be created from experiences, repeated actions, etc? So for example, as we discussed, is playing a piano without thinking an example of CPG that is created after birth? If it is, then shouldn’t we say that CPG can be “learned”?

 

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