Q.1: Is the global neuronal workspace a bottleneck for motor control?
I vote strong no, or else I’m misunderstanding what you’re talking about. Let’s say you’re standing up, and your body tips back microscopically, and you slightly tension your ankles to compensate and stay balanced. Are you proposing that this ankle-tension command has to go through the GNW? I’m quite confident that it doesn’t. Stuff like that doesn’t necessarily even reach the neocortex at all, let alone the GNW. In this post I mentioned the example of Ian Waterman, who could not connect motor control output signals to feedback signals except by routing through the GNW. He had to be consciously thinking about how his body was moving constantly; if he got distracted he would collapse.
I vote strong no, or else I’m misunderstanding what you’re talking about. Let’s say you’re standing up, and your body tips back microscopically, and you slightly tension your ankles to compensate and stay balanced. Are you proposing that this ankle-tension command has to go through the GNW? I’m quite confident that it doesn’t. Stuff like that doesn’t necessarily even reach the neocortex at all, let alone the GNW. In this post I mentioned the example of Ian Waterman, who could not connect motor control output signals to feedback signals except by routing through the GNW. He had to be consciously thinking about how his body was moving constantly; if he got distracted he would collapse.
Yeep, you + Kaj mentioning the basal ganglia are making me shift on this one.