#OldNeuroPapers #neuroscience #activesensing Microsaccades (outside of a coterie of researchers) are most often treated (and taken to be facts) by the larger neuroscience community as either "involuntary", "random", "fixational artifact", all to the end that they serve no functional purpose. While termed micro-saccades, the typical view is that they are distinct from and nothing like regular eye movements (saccades). However as far back as 1965, Zuber, Stark and Cook, publishing in Science suggest that they are indeed "micro" saccades: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5855207/ They write in the abstract: "... these movements are produced by a common physiological system, or the characteristics of the movements are determined by a single dynamically limiting element." which later, researchers like Hafed, Krauzlis, Martinez-Conde and others have experimentally shown have their neural origins in the superior colliculus or the frontal eye fields much like saccades. What purpose does such a delineation then serve? And even worse, treat them as artifacts instead of as important behavioral signatures/markers? After all, isn't one of the brain's functions to ensure that the body/organism moves and behaves in the environment?