"Freezing and Freeing of Degrees of Freedom"

An interesting paper in Adapative Behavior, "Motor Skill Acquisition under Environmental Perturbations: On the Necessity of Alternate Freezing and Freeing of Degrees of Freedom" (Berthouze, Lungarella; Neuroscience Research Institute, Tsukuba, Japan). I'd like to try to conceive of the "freezing and freeing" approach along the lines of neutral mutations. I realize it's a bit far-fetched, especially in the paper's particular focus on infant development, but I'm interested in ways to coerce a system to be fully traversable by nearly neutral mutations, and this is perhaps good inspiration.