BNN
In 1991, Carl Lewis was both the fastest man on earth and a profound long jumper, perhaps the greatest track-and-field star of all time in the prime of his career. On June 14th of that year, however, Carl Lewis was human. Leroy Burrell blazed through the 100-meters, besting him by a razor-thin margin of three-hundredths of a second. In the time it takes the shutter to capture a single frame of video, Lewis’s three-year-old world record was gone.
In a paper just published in the journal Neuron, a team at the Stanford School of Engineering, led by electrical engineers Krishna Shenoy and Maneesh Sahani, explored the neurological explanations for why Lewis may have lost that day. The team, which included graduate students Afsheen Afshar, Gopal Santhanam, Byron Yu, and post-doctoral researcher Stephen Ryu, studied how the brain plans for and executes movements in reaction to a “go” signal.
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