I am in awe of all Florentine bus drivers. With unfaltering nonchalance, they maneuver massive vehicles through cobblestone streets the width of alleyways, whip around corners with centimeters of clearance, and narrowly avoid collisions with a constant barrage of nuns on bicycles and bewildered tourists. Like a medieval knight's sword, the bus seems an extension of its driver's body and mind.
How can humans get so good at driving? And how can chefs be so fast at chopping, and baseball players so good at swinging bats at exactly the right millisecond?
Yet again, kudos are owed to the human brain. Recent research shows that within a matter of minutes of operating a tool, your brain starts to integrate it into its map of your body. The tool actually does become an extension of your body, according to your mind. You become spatially attuned to the tool as if it were a new limb.
French neuro-psychologist Lucilla Cardinali has conducted a series of experiments investigating how tools affect the way we move. After getting used to picking up objects with a claw at the end of a rod, her test subjects spent several minutes readjusting to the normal lengths of their arms. This showed that the claw tool had been temporarily integrated into the brain's perception of arm length.
In one experiment Cardinali asked each test subject to point his or her finger directly above various positions, first with the claw tool then without. Going back to using their normal arms after using the tool, subjects greatly overestimated the lengths of their arms, bending their elbows in such a way that their index fingers hovered far short of their sought positions.
We've been using tools for so long that our brains have learned to integrate them without a (conscious) thought. And like always, practice - enough swings of a bat, or swerves of a bus - makes perfect.
Why are humans good at human-chosen activities? Hm...!
ReplyDeleteThat's a bit like dragonflies complementing themselves on flying ability: It's within the range of their capabilities, so why wouldn't they be good at it? Outside that range, it's not spoken of. Seems rather elementary and obvious.
Great post-- there's some real poetry in the way you wrote this up.
ReplyDeleteHuman-chosen activities they may be, but I don't think it's mere narcissism to marvel at the diversity of sensorimotor contexts that human brain is comfortable in. That the brain adapts so rapidly to novel contexts and becomes so at home in them suggests that it's a pretty general purpose machine. Not a highly specialized heterogenous bag of tricks, but rather one infinitely flexible invention of evolution. Okay, maybe more than one, but I'm pretty sure there's at least one really good one in there waiting to be understood.
Of course prowess as tool users isn't entirely limited to humans. Personally, I'm a big fan of Kung Fu Bear:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax86tiUTFDY
edmond: regardless of the fact that they evolved the ability, i think it is amazing how well dragonflies fly and wish i knew more about it.
ReplyDeletethanks, guy! love the link.
I rather think if we marveled at ourselves more frequently, we'd see each other less as bored suburban housewives in need of creative coiffing and more as an eye-catching array of Edward Scissorhands (plural). we'd be on the whole less dismissive, less disinterested, and more thoroughly engaged with the whole prospect of human interaction. of course, i advocate for marveling at things in general. the world! it's alive! :)
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F608ouen5C8
(also: given that many of the skills we're capable of acquiring to a particular advanced degree are not directly tied to our survival as a species, isn't it even a little fascinating how we develop and sustain them? that the range of capability is not, by any means, static, however gradual the rate of change? i mean, i'm still pondering the whole one billion heartbeats thing.)
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