INSERM: Ten days after astronaut Thomas Pesquet take-off into space
on the Proxima mission, many questions remain about human adaptation to
gravity. The research team at Inserm Unit 1093, “Cognition, Motor
Activity and Sensorimotor Plasticity” (Inserm/Université de Bourgogne),
focuses on the manner in which movements that depend on this parameter
are performed. For 30 years, it was thought that the brain, when giving
motor commands, continuously compensated for the effects of gravity. In
this study, the researchers reveal that it uses gravity to minimise the
efforts our muscles have to make. These results have been published in
eLife.
