Figure 8.

Spatiotemporal Tunneling. A dynamical movement can be decomposed into a sequence of slices in time, where each slice has a corresponding feasible activation space. Strung together, the sequence of feasible activation spaces form the “spatiotemporal tunnel” through which the neuromuscular system must operate. In this 3-dimensional schematic example, the black line represents one valid time-varying sequence of activations for three muscles. Because this sequence exists within each feasible activation space, it necessarily meets the constraints of the dynamical task at each instant.