E14 Neuromuscular control system

Topic

This module acts as the controller for the entire flight system—the assembly of sensors, processors, and neurological actuators that converts the sensory information the bird receives (its position, speed, orientation, and perceived visual stimuli) into muscle signals that adjust wing geometry, wingbeat force, and flight trajectory in real time.

This flight system controller is precisely the module that closes the loop between observing the flight system's state at a given moment and executing the corrective action that adjusts that state the very next moment; it observes, corrects, and then observes the result of its own correction—over and over again throughout the flight.

The speed of this flight system controller is what enables the flight of the most maneuverable birds; the nervous system of the northern goshawk, for example, processes visual information while pursuing prey and executes the corresponding muscle corrections with a latency of between ten and thirty milliseconds.

This reaction latency in the goshawk's nervous system is comparable to that of the best fly-by-wire control systems in modern fighter jets, with the difference that the goshawk's system is implemented in nervous tissue with a total mass of less than two grams—far below that of any equivalent electronic control system.

However, the key difference between this nervous system and a fly-by-wire control system lies not in speed, but in the capacity to learn: the bird's nervous system can learn and adapt its internal model of the environment while in flight—something electronic control systems have only just begun to replicate using artificial neural networks.

This combination of reaction speed, low weight, and learning capacity makes this flight system controller the component that enables the entire repertoire of maneuvers a healthy bird can perform; And it is, for the same reason, the component whose degradation—whether by a pesticide, a heavy metal, a pathogen, or a toxin—is sufficient to introduce the increased response latency, reduced corrective gain, and oscillations that transform a bird with an otherwise healthy body into one that can no longer fly with the same precision.

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