Your tongue and the octopus

From USC News: “A linguist and a marine biologist at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences began an unlikely project two years ago to compare the movement of the human tongue with the manipulation of the arms of the octopus and the undulation of a small worm known as C. elegans. …

Titled “Dynamical Principles of Animal Movement,” the project is supported by the National Science Foundation. Its principal investigators at USC Dornsife are Khalil Iskarous, assistant professor of linguistics, and Andrew Gracey, associate professor of biological sciences.

As a linguist, Iskarous hopes the research will help explain how movements of the human tongue are compromised by Parkinson’s disease, but he said the NSF research is aimed at broader questions of motor control.”