Nikolai Bernstein — neurophysiologist with roots in the Russian Empire
Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bernstein was born in Moscow on 5 November 1896, and he lived and died in the city. He finished secondary school in 1913 and entered Moscow University; when the First World War created a demand for doctors in the army, he chose to study medicine, and he graduated in neurology.
In 1922 he became director of the biomechanics laboratory at Moscow's Central Institute of Labour, founded by Aleksei Gastev to study the rationalisation of work. There he recorded the movements of skilled workers, pianists and athletes with new methods of photographic and cyclographic registration and mathematical analysis, which allowed him to describe complex movements of many joints in detail. He went on to head research at the Central Institute of Physical Culture and at the Institute of Experimental Medicine, and published a General Biomechanics in 1926.
From these studies he drew principles that changed the understanding of how the nervous system controls the body. He observed that the same movement is never repeated identically, and that the body has far more mechanical degrees of freedom than any task requires; how the nervous system masters this redundancy became known as 'Bernstein's problem'. He proposed that movements are controlled through continuous sensory correction in circular loops rather than by fixed commands, that coordination works by forming synergies, and that the construction of movement is organised in a hierarchy of levels. In learning a new skill, he suggested, the nervous system first 'freezes' many degrees of freedom and then gradually releases them as control improves. During the Second World War he applied his work to the rehabilitation of the wounded.
His book On the Construction of Movements (1947) set out a five-level system for the construction of movement and won the Stalin Prize. Within two years, during the campaigns against 'cosmopolitanism' and in support of Pavlovian physiology, he lost his posts and was cut off from experimental work. He continued to write, developing what he called the physiology of activity, and his late work The Co-ordination and Regulation of Movements appeared in English in 1967.
Bernstein died in Moscow on 16 January 1966, aged sixty-nine. In the West his ideas, rediscovered through translation, became a foundation of the modern fields of motor control and biomechanics, and of the study of motor learning.
"Lived and worked in Moscow throughout his life; his work became widely known in the West only from the 1960s, through translation."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Moscow (Russia)
Born in Moscow in 1896, he graduated in medicine from Moscow University, headed the biomechanics laboratory of the Central Institute of Labour from 1922 and spent his whole career in Moscow research institutes.
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Moscow (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.