Reza Shadmehr co-authors book on Biological Learning and Control

BME faculty member Reza Shadmehr and his colleague Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi are the authors of Biological Learning and Control: How the brain builds representations, predicts events, and makes decisions, available now from MIT Press. In it, they present a theoretical framework for understanding the regularity of the brain’s perceptions, its ability to learn, and its control of movements. The authors offer an account of perception as the combination of prediction and observation: the brain builds internal models that describe what should happen, and then combines this prediction with reports from the sensory system to form a belief.

Dr. Shadmehr is Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University and the author of The Computational Neurobiology of Reaching and Pointing (MIT Press, 2005). Dr. Mussa-Ivaldi is Professor of Physiology in the Medical School at Northwestern University, with joint appointments in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and Biomedical Engineering. He is also Founder and Director of the Robotics Laboratory at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.