Introduction to Motor Skills
B sharp to C sharp.
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While perception skills use the motor system to get information (know-what) about some aspect of the skills arena, motor skills use that information (know-how) to affect the world in some way. You see what needs doing, and you do it. Read and react! Though we don't normally express things quite this way, we do apply both skills to solve problems.
Both types express knowledge, and both empower you. At a street crossing, for instance, perception may tell you no cars are coming. You might then cross the street. Other motor skills include driving a golf ball a country mile, buying a carload of wheat, or running a gas station.
See my ebook/game package: Tennis Target-Shooting Games as another example.
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You can draw the inference that all skills are really motor skills, particularly if you believe that any attempt to acquire information about the world affects the world in some way. It requires an interchange of energy. Gathering information isn't usually very subtle. For example, to get the tensile strength of a metal bar, you have to stretch the bar to its breaking point to know what it can, or can't, support. The same for getting information from prisoners of war -- it's not headline news that prisoners don't always walk away from the questioning unscathed.
Tools of the Trade
Getting information frequently involves instruments. To get the length of a table, for instance, you apply a measuring device, possibly a flexible tape. The action is motor, involves obstacle-course mechanisms or action patterns of one sort or another, and requires a certain level of skill. But its objective is still to get information -- to find out about something. The world of science is filled to the brim with such devices, as is everyday life.
Perception and Motion
If you manage the skill properly, perception lets you find out what's going on. Without it, you'd have no way of knowing what you were doing. The motor component provides the motive force. Only by exerting your muscles can you get around the environment.
In the military, for example, the motor component is the firing that occurs after reconnaissance has discovered the location or condition of the enemy. Or it's the application of antibiotics and bandages to treat a wound. Knowledge-based actions of this nature define motor skills. They produce certain environmental consequences, like a destroyed enemy or a well patient.
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Motor skills are not without their perceptual aspects. Trivially, of course, you can easily pick up information in the course of performing a motor act. More essentially, though, you can't make a move without engaging sensors, mainly the sensors in your muscles, tendons, and joints. They are components of complex neuronal loops with the brain that guide and control muscle contractions -- the means by which the body exercises its mobility.
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To behave in skillful ways -- like climbing stairs, solving a math problem, threading a needle, or serving a volleyball -- we must energize all of our neural clusters in organized ways. It requires learning. This is a creative process, since you get something you didn't have before. For optimal execution of skills, each and every muscle has to be contracted or relaxed in a manner that best serves and supports the skill being performed. We know very little about the neurological details, but it takes mind/body to gain the objective.
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