From information to action:

The basic mechanisms by which a skill controls physical action - (annotated Table of Content for basic action)

Physical action, for vertebrates, involves moving bones in the skeleton relative to each other and relative to the environment. Connected bones move relative to each other by rotating about a joint.

• Bones are moved through changes in the tension of muscles attached to these bones.
• a simplified picture of neural information causing rotation about a joint
• The movement of bones are described in terms of changes in the relative angle of joints connecting these bones (and only at joints).
• A pose that could be part of a walk that illustrates rotations about joints
• The tension of muscles is controlled through binary neural information flowing to the muscles.
• In general, muscle tension is not static over time, i.e. joint angles keep changing.
• The muscle-tension information controls the sequence and timing of the action and is generated from the information representing and specifying the skill.
• To simplify the investigation, I ignore muscle tension and the associated forces and momentum, and just look at joint movements.
• A pose is a special case where the joint angles are more or less unchanging.
• Action: The information controlling muscle tension, and thus the joint-angles, is frequently updated (at roughly 10 to 50 msec intervals).
• In general, muscle tension does not disappear, so that the neural information keeps flowing.
• An animation of a walk that illustrates coordinated rotations about joints, without the consequence of moving across the stage
• Skills provide the information required for generating the neural information to control action.
• My model of skills manages the geometric transformations required for the joint-angles of an action sequence.
• My model of skills manages the timing information required for an action sequence.

Innate skills have to be encoded in DNA.

• Because of the limits of DNA, skill information will have to be highly compressed.
• My model of skills proposes an 'inner language' to represent the information in a highly compressed form.

Skills have to be stored and processed by the brain.

• Skill storage and processing is limited by resources such as memory and processing capabilities (brain power, speed).
• My model of skills proposes feasible mechanisms.