Eric Lenneberg and Motor Control

Abstract

I began my graduate career in 1970. I was somewhat familiar with Eric Lenneberg, having met him during an event for faculty in Psychology and Neuroscience—the fields in which I was interested at the time. He had just arrived at Cornell, as had I, and he didn’t have many other graduate students at that time. I chose him as my graduate faculty advisor. He directed me toward the study of the development of motor control, one of his fields of interest (cf. Lenneberg’s classic, Biological Foundations of Language, 1967). His other students were urged to study the development of language, in which he was most well known. These students went with Eric to New York to study patients with aphasia, while I stayed behind at Cornell in Ithaca, with my young children. That ended up suiting me well! When I began graduate school, I was unsure of the direction or level I wished to attain. This was the 1960s and women were not particularly accustomed to graduate school or aiming high, especially if already married with children, which I was. My husband was a faculty member in the Cornell Mathematics Department, and our children were quite young: one was six and one was four. Eric Lenneberg, who had just begun his time as a faculty member at Cornell University, had participated in a forum I organized for theoreticians of science, and was the only faculty member of neuroscience I knew at all well, since he had participated in the forum. My thesis, when finally completed also included results of a project done after Eric’s death with Professors Carl Gans, University of Michigan, and Farish Jenkins, Harvard University, on rat muscle activity during running. Both sets of results were integrated into my dissertation on rat locomotion, unfortunately, with Professor Gans as my advisor and without Eric on my committee. As a post-doctoral fellow, I remained at Cornell for a few years with funding from a National Institutes of Helath (NIH) grant, which fortunately, I was able to obtain independently. At that point I also became interested in mathematical modeling of the phenomena on which I was working, another area that Eric had urged me toward and about which he was enthusiastic. This resulted in my most cited publication: Cohen, Holmes & Rand (1982). It has been perhaps my most important publication and the fact that it was and still is being widely cited is a testament to its importance in establishing theoretical neuroscience. After this work, which was completed early with two mathematical colleagues, Philip Holmes and Richard Rand, both professors at Cornell at that time, I continued doing research in my own laboratory, also at Cornell. I chose the detailed study