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Tool Use Is Just a Trick of the Mind
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jan 29, 2008 11:37 PM
from the my-tool-myself dept.
from the my-tool-myself dept.
TwistedOne151 writes to recommend a ScienceNOW article describing the work of a team of Italian neurobiologists who have found the roots of the capacity for tool use in the primate brain: the brain treats the tool as part of the body. The experiment as described is passing clever.
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Define:tool (Score:5, Insightful)
Concievably, input, output, and expected responses could be considered an extension, but what about thought process? Is this similar to the human body considering a crutch as an extension of the body while walking?
Somehow, I sense that "tool" is too broad of a word, or perhaps too distorted of a definition, to be used when referring to, well, tools. If I give a thousand monkeys one typewriter each, does that typerwriter become considered as an extension? I can understand a pair of pliers being considered a mechanical extension to the hand, but what about the actually pressing of keys?
Re:Define:tool (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Define:tool (Score:5, Funny)
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So THAT's what's up with Stewie... He's just "going through a phase". Lois must have given him a slapdown for the future Stewie to be well-adjusted.
I found your assertions rather interesting. I would have modded you such just so increased exposure would have dredged up some informative responses.
I have to agree with a sister post, however, that your multiple claims of universality (99.9%; will not be possible; a kid *will* try to kill; etc.) should give anyone familiar with science great hesitatio
Re:Define:tool (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, why not? For a trained operator, the keyboard and mouse become second nature. Staring at the monitor, the operator learns to block out visual information outside of the screen. Many users even use headphones, further tying them to the machine.
I can tell you that when my fingers dance across the keyboard, I'm not really putting a whole lot of thought into the keyboard. Instead, I'm putting thought into the words I'm attempting to type, or the command I'm attempting to communicate with the combination of keys.
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Re:Define:tool (Score:5, Interesting)
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I can play piano by thinking of the sound (Score:3, Interesting)
I've also been learning all the major and minor scales - there are twelve major and thirty-six minor scales, all played with different combinations of keys and fingering. I know all but a few of them now. All the ones I know well I can play just by thinking of their sound, without thinking of the keys or fingering.
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Re:Define:tool (Score:5, Informative)
This is the example I was taught in psych class. Use your finger to apply pressure to your table. You feel pressure in the tip of your finger. Now use a pencil to apply pressure to your table. You then feel pressure at the tip of the pencil, and not in your fingers where you hold the pen.
Note that, if you make an effort, you can feel the pressure on your fingers from the pencil. But the natural experience is to feel pressure in the pencil, as if it were part of your body. What this in fact proves is that the brain can make you 'feel' sensations anywhere, and not just in your body.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
1) I've got a problem with the way my brain or my hand function
2) your experiment is a different kind of psychological experiment: it's an experiment in suggestion:
The lecturer tells students that the natural (ie normal) response is to feel pressure "in the pencil", and because they trust him, they believe that all normal people feel this. Now if they try it them
No trust involved -- try it with a long blade (Score:3, Informative)
It works for me, and I sure as hell don't trust anyone on Slashdot.
Try it with something longer, like a long kitchen knife, or a sword if you have one. You definitely don't think of the touch as occurring in your fingers, but in the tip of the blade. It probably helps when your entire hand is in contact with the handle, so that you can't localize the pressu
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
However, this experiment is not about suggestion. Done right, the lecturer doesn't tell the students what to expect before they try it for themselves.
Anyhow, try this: hold a pencil, and close your eyes. Have a friend hold a book in front of you, and tell him/her to move it around for a while so you don't know where it is. Then try to find t
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Even in that case, it proves that the brain can effectively provide such an illusion. The fact that one has to make a conscious effort to feel the pressure in the pen or that it occurs naturally are two different proofs of this capacity of the brain.
Re:Define:tool (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't seem to do it with anything else, though. I wonder if it is a problem with suggestion, though I mean it differently than you. Knowing where the sensation is supposed to happen (in the pencil tip), and how that sensation can be refocused to the hand (where the sensation actually happens) maybe you (and I) are automatically refocusing to the hand. Basically, a "don't think of pink elephants" sort of thing... Instead of the suggestion working to make people feel it in the pencil, you and I are being suggestible to feeling it in the hand.
Then again, maybe I was just being suggestible (or compliant with the norm) with the string and washer... I should probably shut up now: I feel like I'm approaching a point of "it's turtles all the way down"...
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you drive a car on a regular basis, you've likely also experienced the phenomenon while driving: your proprioception extends to the body of the car, so that you can feel the texture of the road and (once you're used to the car's shape) develop a "sense" of how much space you have around the car. The car-as-prosthes
Handwriting at different scales (Score:3, Interesting)
Here is a more familiar example. Try writing something large on a blackboard. Try writing something tiny. Your hadwriting style is probably recognizeable. However, you are probably using different muscles in each. When writing scles. When writing very large you may be using your arm and shoulder muscles too. When writing small, you may be using your fingertip muscles - perhaps holding the tool very tightly and using the balances of strains in the fingertips to move the tool. Nevertheless, it seems we have
Same as a car (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Same as a car (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Define:tool (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Define:tool (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Define:tool (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Define:tool (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Define:tool (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp.html [wired.com]
Also check out
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/cyborg_mann_041012.html [space.com]
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2002/03/50976 [wired.com]
And the story on Slashdot itself
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/03/155204 [slashdot.org]
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Re:Define:tool (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Define:tool (Score:5, Funny)
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No, it's true... (Score:5, Funny)
Actually quite true (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps nothing is more telling than the data published on crashes. I don't have the figures in front of me right now, but I recall that you're significantly more likely to survive a crash if you're sitting on the driver's side (either the driver himself or the passenger in the back) than if you're sitting in the passenger seat. When this was investigated, it was found that the natural (and often unconcious) reaction in a crash situation is for the driver to turn his side of the vehicle away from the situation in an attempt to protect himself. Sort of the vehicular equivalent of throwing up your arms to stop a blow to the face.
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Consider early tools (Score:5, Interesting)
Look back even further. Anthropologists have long dismissed the 2001-concept of primitive man suddenly discovering tools, preferring to suggest that there was no real "start" to the use of tools, that they merely evolved into being something recognizably manufactured. That being the case, one might well ask if the concept of a "tool" has much meaning, if it can (in principle) be traced back by continuous lineage to non-intelligent utilization of objects in their natural state.
On the other hand, we should consider whether that is always true. Are all tools manufactured by humans today merely descendants - direct but heavily evolved - of objects utilized by sea urchins (shell fragments for camouflage) or birds (just about anything to make nests)?
This is not a trivial question. We know crows can manufacture tools, we have extremely well-documented evidence under (quite literally) laboratory conditions. If we assume all tools have evolved from simpler tools, how do we explain the fact that even close relatives to the crows have only the vastly simpler proto-tools? Manufacturing is definitely not something we see a lot of in the avian world. Utilization, yes, manufacturing, no. This clearly isn't from a lack of intelligence, as studies on African Grey parrots show the avian brain to be quite capable of an impressive level of thought, including the abstract.
Nor do we see much evidence of tool manufacture in Chimpanzees. Studies appear to have shown rudimentary culture and primitive belief systems. We know Neanderthals had discovered stone tools and had gone at least as far as discovering music and the octave scale, long before anything recognizably human evolved. We know that chimps and gorillas are capable of learning sign language, so understand communication to a fairly advanced level. But neither has ever been seen to manufacture anything. Use, yes. Chimps use sticks to get at food all of the time, but using something that already exists is quite different from making something that would not otherwise have ever existed.
Are these evidence of a break in the chain? Evidence that there are actual leaps forward that must be made in their entirety or not at all? If so, then what these researchers have found is not enough. It's important, but it isn't enough. There is a gap, a gap between using and making that distinguishes the very few animals that have tools from everything else. That gap is what distinguishes tools from merely being an extension to the body, which all animals seem to be aware of and capable of using. If you don't explain the gap, then you have not really explained the human use of tools, you have merely explained the multi-cellular use of tools. A very different problem.
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Re:Actually not true (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet I can still attempt a long jump or attempt to skid my car in the snow without the memorized steps. I won't be very good at either one my first time out, but I'll "get the hang of it" after a while.Hey, you try waking up the next morning a foot taller and 150 pounds heavier, and lets see how well you take your first steps, Mister!
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"Imagine that you suddenly acquired a new hand. but you dont know how to use it. So you read a book, and figure out how to deal with it. The new hand is the hardware, and the book is the driver"
Cool. But looking back, we intuitively knew this. When Neo was being fed those martial skills, we knew what exactly was happening. A tool(stick, nunchaku ) was made a part of his body. This is what is driving.
Fuck it, I
Mental tools... (Score:4, Insightful)
So, physical tool use in primates is result of a trick of the mind... activating and training certain regions of neurons to perceive the new tool as part of the body... what does it mean that I use a computer which is a mental tool? Does that mean my psyche is extended into my computer? If so, it would explain a great many things...
I feel like I sort of knew this already. It make sense. In a video game I don't think about smashing "A", "B", or "X", "Y" I just think about the action I want to perform and I hit the right keys... after a learning period. Same with touch typing. I just think about characters and they come out of the keyboard. But, I can't think without a computer anymore... or at least if I don't have one I feel like part of my mind has gone missing. Perhaps it's the part that can spell? I mean I've got the firefox spell checker plugin or else this post would be full of badly spelled words.
But it is... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is nothing that we do which does not affect the outside world. And there is nothing we do which the outside world does not affect. The illusion is in the initial perception of separateness and not in the realization that it is part of us.
Treating the world as an extension of ourselves is a form of enlightenment, not trickery.
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Too Many Jokes (Score:5, Funny)
Wow! Where do I start? I think I'll just say that I have always considered my tool to be an extension of my body, but I do not think it's root is in my brain.
Sorry, I just could not resist.
People are fantastic (Score:3, Insightful)
BTW, is there anything known about diseases where people don't see tools as an extension of the body?
Re:People are fantastic (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, they have special schools for these unfortunate people. The schools are called MBA schools and the people are called upper management.
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Re:People are fantastic (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=678 [damninteresting.com]
Proprioception Deficit Disorder is a disease where people lose the ability to "feel" their body. People suffering from this rare disease can't do things that seems natural to us without a lot of focus.
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Transcendence of the Menial (Score:5, Informative)
The more important part, how the brain can sublimate operating complex machinery so that it doesn't require conscious thought to operate, isn't explained here. Shuttle operators are actually trained to treat the crane like an extension of their arm, video game players eventually move past the controls to directly control the player on the screen, experienced skiers just imagine themselves turning without consciously having to weight their skis or edge, etc. All of these tasks originally required a lot of conscious control and expenditure of brain power (and in the case of skiing, a lot of bruises). And as long as it stays at this level, it stays awkward and stilted. It is at the point in which you transcend the raw mechanics and are capable of controlling it at a higher level (which is what this study found), that the skier becomes graceful, the video game player can race through flaming rotating death traps in super mario brothers, and the space shuttle control can quickly and adroitly manipulate stuff.
The human brain really is a fascinating thing, and capable of really amazing feats, if you think about it.
Not Just Primates... (Score:4, Interesting)
aye (Score:4, Interesting)
Finally, one day, in frustration, I hit upon the answer--just think of it as a very low pitch baseball. I knew how to hit a baseball. Right then, I knew I had it and I tured to my friends and said, "watch this"--and sure enough it went flying.
It's all in the head.
This is old news.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Cheap shot incoming! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Cheap shot incoming! (Score:5, Funny)
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