ArticleeLife2022
Human muscle spindles are wired to function as controllable signal-processing devices.
Article in eLife, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 77 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Proprioceptive integration in motor control.The Journal of physiology · 2026Article
- Article
- Eccentric training at long muscle lengths induces greater corticospinal and spinal reflex plasticity than eccentric training at short muscle lengths.Experimental physiology · 2025Article
- Review
- Muscle spindles provide flexible sensory feedback for movement sequences.Cell reports · 2025Article
- Deep-learning models of the ascending proprioceptive pathway are subject to illusions.Experimental physiology · 2025Article
- Dual agonist and antagonist muscle vibration produces a bias in end point with no change in variability.Experimental brain research · 2025Article
- Preparation duration shapes the goal-directed tuning of stretch reflex responses.Experimental brain research · 2025Article
- Muscle spindle afferent neurons preferentially degenerate with aging.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Muscle length influences active joint position sense at the shoulder, but conditioning contractions do not.Experimental brain research · 2025Article
- Quantifying the diverse contributions of hierarchical muscle interactions to motor function.iScience · 2025Article
- Closed-loop coupling of both physiological spindle model and spinal pathways for sensorimotor control of human center-out reaching.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2025Article
- Article
- Article
- Increased muscle coactivation is linked with fast feedback control when reaching in unpredictable visual environments.iScience · 2024Article
- Impaired proprioception and magnified scaling of proprioceptive error responses in chronic stroke.Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation · 2024Article
- Knee movements cause changes in the firing behaviour of muscle spindles located within the mono-articular ankle extensor soleus in the rat.Experimental physiology · 2024Article
- Presynaptic gating of monkey proprioceptive signals for proper motor action.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Influence of pedal characteristics on pedaling control and neural drive in older adults.European journal of applied physiology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Muscle spindles are encapsulated sensory organs found in most of our muscles. Prevalent models of sensorimotor control assume the role of spindles is to reliably encode limb posture and movement. Here, I argue that the traditional view of spindles is outdated. Spindle organs can be tuned by spinal γ motor neurons that receive top-down and peripheral input, including from cutaneous afferents. A new model is presented, viewing γ motor activity as an intermediate coordinate transformation that allows multimodal information to converge on spindles, creating flexible coordinate representations at the level of the peripheral nervous system. That is, I propose that spindles play a unique overarching role in the nervous system: that of a peripheral signal-processing device that flexibly facilitates sensorimotor performance, according to task characteristics. This role is compatible with previous findings and supported by recent studies with naturalistically active humans. Such studies have so far shown that spindle tuning enables the independent preparatory control of reflex muscle stiffness, the selective extraction of information during implicit motor adaptation, and for segmental stretch reflexes to operate in joint space. Incorporation of advanced signal-processing at the periphery may well prove a critical step in the evolution of sensorimotor control theories.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.