Tool Use Is Just a Trick of the Mind 326
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.
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?
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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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Cool stuff isn't it? I like to think of the brain as a very large FPGA with some ROM attached. I'm sure there are probably cpu like processor bundles in the brain but I figure it's more of a very large array of neurons that does most of the processing work. Computers have got nothing on the brain.
As far as tools being an extension of the body, I have to agree. I kinda thought that was the definition of a
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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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The cerebellum ('the little brain') does a lot of the work of automating such motor skills. There's even a simpler description of what
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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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
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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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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)
Re:Same as a car (Score:5, Funny)
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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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Something about getting closer to, and interacting more directly with, the machine.
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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.
Actually not true (Score:2)
Not on initial exposure.
Competent driving requires time and practice...repetitive situations that are eventually rehearsed subconsciously (to the point of prediction) that make it appear that the driver is adept, when in actuality, there is a specific percentage of basic scenarios that have simply been memorized.
You can't take a driver used to a sub-compact and expect them to apply their familiarity with a sm
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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"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
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That sounds like exactly what my wife experienced during pregnancy. Her center of gravity shifted significantly forward rather rapidly, so that all of the balance she had learned over the years worked against her instead of for her. It's the only time since I've known her that she's moved with less than elegant grace. Once the baby was born, she quickly reverted to her
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I have two vehicles: a car and a truck. The truck is my primary and it does indeed feel like an extension of my body (and I've often said as much). This applies even when I'm towing something, much like wearing heavy boots over your regular shoes doesn't change the fact that they're YOUR feet, just a bit more clumsy than usual.
The car never did become "part of me" even when it was in regular use. It just doesn't "feel right", even tho it's a much nicer vehicle
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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.
Cars are one of the best user interfaces (Score:2)
I think the reason is its user interface. When driving a car, the brain is using its innate knowledge of physics and object recognition in much the same way as natural transportation (walking). The user interface of a car does a g
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Later, learning to improvise seemed impossible until my hands 'knew' a catalog of idioms that could be readily applied and adapted opportunistically. Once the catalog reached a critical mass, improvisation became natural.
Looking back, it seemed that programm
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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.
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Occurs to me that computer-aided robots blur the line back in the other direction -- the robot is an extension of the computer that is in turn an extension of your brain, controlled by the mouse and keyboard that your brain regards as extensions of your hands.
My brain hurts. I think I st
Seen it (Score:2, Interesting)
-uso.
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Isn't this merely habit, as opposed to thinking of the watch as being an extension of yourself? This study is looking into tools that are directly manipulated by the hands (pliers) in order to accomplish a task that could normally be accomplished with your hands (grasping food). I would think that telling the time by looking at your wristwatch is on a much higher level.
I used to wear a watch too, and would also "instinctively" look at my wrist whenever I wanted to know the time for quite a while after I s
Who'd'a Thunk? (Score:2)
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Just kind of wondering (Score:2)
The study sounds really cool, but to be perfectly honest, I don't find it at all riveting. We developed a highly dextrous hand and fingers, complete with opposable thumbs, and so we use them. It wasn't an instant process, though. Our basic hand got every so slightly more flexible, and with this came a new ability to perform slightly more complex mechanisms. This allowed our hand and
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"That would be akin to not being aware of our own bodies, and since we're quite capable of not bumping into door ways..."
I have this weird thing where sometimes I'll whang my right shoulder into the doorjamb as I'm passing thru the doorway -- but only in big wide doorw
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.
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I just knew (Score:2)
New meaning to an adage (Score:2)
yes this is true (Score:2)
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[runs away screaming]
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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Yes, they have special schools for these unfortunate people. The schools are called MBA schools and the people are called upper management.
I've had managers who I was convinced did nothing but play with their tools all day.
I'm sorry, but I must take issue (Score:2)
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.
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.
Sounds Like A Driver (Score:2)
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It's kind of like training our brain with a new assembly language routine, once we know it we can just call it from a higher level
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... such as thinking about it.
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Obg. Emo Philips:
"I used to think that the brain was the most interesting part of the body. But, then I thought 'look who's telling you that.'"
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Charlie Kaufman recursion (Score:2)
To investigate how the brain performs this sleight of hand, a team led by neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti of the University of Parma in Italy recorded brain activity in two macaque monkeys.
I wonder if the researchers' brains thought the tools they were using to measure the monkey's brain (to test the hypothesis that the monkey used the pliers as an extension of its body) was also an extension of their own bodies. If so, they could also hook up another machine to their own brains where that second machine could also then measure itself AND the first machine being considered by the researchers' brains as an extension of the researchers' bodies. The data would be absolute nonsense, but man, c
Well... Duh.... (Score:2)
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.
Natural-Born Cyborgs (Score:2)
This is old news.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Mirror Neurons (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder what causes some people who are new to video gaming to try to move their physical body while attempting to navigate on the screen with a controller....
Outing the Mind / Dumb in Peace (Score:2)
Philosopher Andy Clark has been seriously arguing the point for some time now that the human mind is not confined to just the brain, but can include the tools we use and the environment we manipulate. This view rejects the old Mind-Inside-The-Head concept, and says that the real genius of the human mind is its ability to export intelligence into the environment, so that we can then be "dumb in peace".
Some light reading:
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Re:Cheap shot incoming! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cheap shot incoming! (Score:5, Funny)
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Quid quid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
That's a clumsy attempt to say "Whatever is said in Latin, it seems grand", deriving from a misunderstanding about how tenses work in the passive voice in Latin. "Dictum sit" means "was said" or "has been said". You surely mean "dicatur". I'm also doubtful about the use of "videtur" ("is seen as") when we're talking about how something sounds, not how it looks. But I'm no Latin scholar, so I shan't push the point.
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I don't know about you, but I do occasionally get phantom vibrations. There are times when some other minor vibration being transmitted through the building I'm in causes me to look down at my cell phone to figure out if it just started ringing or not. Drives me nuts. Especially since Razr vibrates are a bit on the chinzey side*.
* I'd get Moss to boost the vibe on the phone, but I'm a bit scared after what he managed to d
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My God, is there no limit to the cruel games of vivisectionists ?