Question: Have you had any major discoveries in the past and if so, what were they?

I have made a couple discoveries that had a “major” impact on my field.

We used to think that the brain knows where are bodies are in space only from signals that come from receptors in the outers parts of the body, like skin, muscles and joints. One of my studies suggested that some signals generated by the brain it self also had a role in telling it where the body was. This triggered a reassessment of a well established theory, which has since been amended by my work and the work of other scientists.

More recently I did some work looking at how the brain knows what things are part of our body. It had already been shown that the sense of touch helped the brain to do this. There have been thousands of experiments about the role of touch in telling the brain that our body belongs to us. Recently I did an experiment that showed that our muscles could also tell the brain about what was part of the body. This was the first experiment to show this and got some media coverage recently. One of the articles is here: http://news.discovery.com/human/brain-human-body-biology-110620.html