Motor behavior, longevity, and the dissolution of virtual governors

Motor behavior and morphogenesis are both processes by which an organism transitions from one form to another. Motor behavior is fast and flexible, with forms assembling and dissolving rapidly. Morphogenesis is slow and sticky, with some organisms taking years to mature and the adult form generally being highly resistant to perturbations. But the underlying dynamics are the same.

Organismal forms, whether flexible motor forms or sticky morphological forms, are organized by virtual governors, system-level preferences embodied in the coordinating relationships (e.g., the bioelectric network) among the system’s components. The relative flexibility of motor behavior versus morphogenesis might be a consequence of the relative flexibility of the construction and maintenance of virtual governors: perhaps motor behavior remembers and forgets virtual governors rapidly and easily, while morphogenesis takes longer to assemble the virtual governor, defends it more stubbornly, and then lets it decay over a longer period of time, a process that results in aging.

Motor behavior may end up being a useful way of studying longevity because it happens much faster than ordinary aging processes. Just like fruit flies are useful to biology because of their rapid generation time, motor behavior may end up being useful because of its rapid death-and-resurrection time.

If the dissolution of any particular motor form or motor behavior is in fact analogous to the collapse of a morphological form, then motor behavior could serve as a useful model system for studying the causes of aging and potential treatments. The question of how motor memories persist even as morphological ones fade may also be highly relevant.

Motor behavior also highlights the multicausal nature of the construction of these memories: environmental patterns such as music are very helpful for assembling motor memories.

One totally speculative hypothesis is that motor memories persist because they change (allostasis: stability through change). The boredom theory of aging may not occur in motor behavior because developmental goals are never complete. As long as there are new tasks to do, there are new motor forms to develop, or new meanings to give to old forms.