I broke my Achilles tendon - had to have a FULL reconstruction - they took a tendon that used to help waggle my big toe (the muscle is in my leg) wrapped around my heel and back up my leg and rebuilt my achilles around that - now I have a muscle that used to wiggle my toe than moves my entire foot.
How hard was it to relearn? at first I'd try to move my toe and something else would move, it felt weird - but doctor's orders were essentially don't do anything for 3 months, bed rest and keep the leg raised - all the muscles turned to jelly ... then months of physio, in the pool and then in the gym - at that point, once I started moving stuff again my brain had adjusted - that muscle moves my foot, not my toe - I didn't have to do anything explicitly to make it change, it just did
Yes - I'm learning singing at the moment and just the other day the teacher fed back - don't try to over-conceptualise what you're doing. Just do it, focus on the outcome, stay relaxed and the body will figure it out.
I've been through enough learning cycles to appreciate this but this was a real hurdle for me when I was young because my default was to rely on systems and rules. Ironically as a swimmer my biggest breakthroughs in speed and technique as a teenager were intuition borne out through thousands of hours of repetition but it took me many many more years and a very good piano teacher to conceptualise the art of not conceptualising.
Maybe not really the same thing, but for some reason it reminds me of learning to roll your Rs, when learning Spanish or Italian as an English speaker.
When you try too hard to make the sound it doesn't really work.
But then after a while it just happens as you don't think about and are just speaking with natives.
Similar here. For a very long time, I thought that being good at something was knowing the system and rules, and applying them consciously every time. It's funny because I legit thought that that's what I was doing while playing video games or doing martial arts (the only things I was reasonably good at for quite awhile). It turns out the learning and doing processes are both deeply subconscious; very little goes on in the conscious mind during both.
There is a new shift in the understanding of coaching in sports called the Constraints-Led Approach (CLA). It's both super nerdy and practical (i.e., based on practitioners' empiric experience). Basically, it sees the body as a complex system of organs/tissues/cells that tries to solve movement problem under the pressure of different constraints. In a simple words, coaching then is the art of creating/manipulating constraints in order to optimize that search for the solution to the movement problem.
In a way, it's way deeper than "subconscious". A large portion of the science behind CLA is based on Nikolai Bernstein's works from the 1930-s (the guy who coined the term "biomechanics"). He wrote about the hierarchical model of motor control, where 5 different systems (that evolutionary are completely different) must work in synergy to solve the movement problem.
There is a great book that explains the science behind CLA called "How we learn to move" by Rob Gray.
Yes constraints are great. My piano teacher would basically just repeat to me like mantra:
- was it legato?
- were you playing free from tension?
- was your tone even?
- were you in time?
Very rarely would he actually ever tell me anything. And whenever I'd ask for more or feedback he'd just loop back to the questions and ask if I was actually listening to myself play. It was a very frustrating start but eventually it all clicked what he was doing was teaching me to understand my own constraints and then also understand what are the outcomes I am aiming to achieve - if I can't hear how even my own touch is how will I ever play evenly.
Was the most valuable coaching I ever got and was probably life changing for me in terms of levelling up my ability to learn new things.
Prior to meeting him I held the belief there was a "perfect way to play" the piano and would occasionally peruse books and videos on the subject. Of course, as my teacher was keen to point out, no body is the same so how can two anatomically different pianists play with the same technique?
If you have small hands so much of the repertoire will be different vs if you have rach hands
Great points! I've seen a couple of papers on CLA for music learning, but CLA is a subset of so-called "non-linear pedagogy", so maybe music education has its own "branch" of it, so to speak.
> I held the belief there was a "perfect way to play" the piano
Yes, CLA is actively debunking the myth of a "perfect technique" which is very popular in sports. Like a coach/teacher is one who knows the "perfect" way, and their job is to make students repeat an exercise over and over again, fixing deviations from "perfect" technique. This couldn't be more wrong according to CLA.
Already mentioned Bernstein introduced the concept of "repetition without repetition", which claims that repetition is important in learning but for a different reason. Each attempt of a movement will have slightly different "inputs" - constraints – and thus can't have a single "perfect" technique that will work for all variations of inputs. Each repetition will be slightly different (hence "without repetition"), and the goal of the proper learning process is to give the body enough "input data" to _discover_ the proper movement solution.
It's important to note that "constraints" is a wide term here, and there are few classes of constraints. Task and goal given to the student are constraints, so the size of the hand or level of fatigue. Even environment temperature, mental state, and light conditions are constraints.
Another important concept in CLA is action-perception coupling rooted in James Gibson's theory of perception. This one was mindblowing to me when I first read it. In essence, the brain perceives the world not as a set of geometric objects but as "actionable" items. What you can do directly influences how you see the world. That has direct implications for learning as well – mastering any skill (including playing a musical instrument) is coupled with perception, as your body has to react to how it sees/hears the result of its own movements.
But the core of CLA as an educational philosophy lays in acknowledging that the actual learning still has to happen inside your nervous system. You can't really "teach" a skill, only facilitate a discovery inside the student's body.
It's really fascinating how it all works in practice. One related concept in motor skill acquisition science is the Method of Error Amplification (MAE). Let's say, golf players make a fundamental error of not shifting weight onto the back foot after swinging. Instead of giving them verbal instruction "Shift weight to the back foot", coach might do the opposite – ask them to move weight to the *front foot*. This will increase the error, which will amplify the signal in the nervous system and the body will react to it as it now feels "more wrong" by itself. It's not super clear to which types of errors MAE is applicable, but the research on MAE is fascinating.
So much of this resonates and articulates fragmented anecdata I've accumulated via lots of learning.
I love the concept of increasing the error - it definitely helps. Makes me think of reductio ad absurbum for the body. Do it more wrong to prove the opposite.
I totally get the idea of the learning having to come from the self and have held the belief that is why taichi and yoga use very poetic metaphors to describe their movements. This was a solution our extremely smart predecessors came up with to be prescriptive without being prescriptive to teach motor skills.
Just like my singing teacher telling me to stop thinking and just be a parrot and copy the pitch (which worked almost instantly)
I will definitely be digging into CLA thanks for sharing!
Yes, the core idea here is that our perceptual system wasn't evolutionarily designed to just scan the world around us and reconstruct it inside our heads. It evolved to keep us in contact with action-relevant properties of the world we're acting in. I.e. we're not just looking for the shapes/objects/textures, we're looking for the things we can action upon ("_affordances_") and that heavily depends on what actions you can perform.
We don't see the chair as a 3D object, we see it as an affordance to sit (along with a wide windowsill or gym ball). The wall is a barrier for an elderly person, but an affordance to the parcour performer. The pole dancer perceives the lamp post very differently from the non-pole dancer. An experienced tennis player sees the ball in mid-air as much bigger than the newbie player. Fatigued hiker perceives the hill as much steeper than full-of-energy hiker. If an athlete is more capable, objects like a baseball or tennis ball, or basketball hoop look bigger.
Gibson's theory on affordances started with his 1979 book "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception". My understanding is that it has some criticisms, but still considered as one of the leading theories in perception studies and is heavily used in the design community.
Developing that automaticity with a physical skill also unlocks the brain to do other parts that are conscious.
After a game, Lebron James can explain what happened in a play moment by moment for every player on the floor, and everything he was thinking and planning as the play developed. He’s done it in post game press conferences off the top of his head.
Granted he’s maybe the all time greatest, but it’s illustrative. He’s not thinking at all about how his body is going to do what it does. That’s completely automatic. He’s thinking a lot about the higher level strategy of the game.
Consistent with many technical sports such as Formula One motor racing. Ask a driver to talk about the race, during which they are driving a vehicle at levels normal humans could not approach, and they describe not the driving but the tactics and strategy within the physics window.
Fully agree that mastery allows you to broaden out / think at a higher level. I guess that's the "meta"
I recently read a post about how Nadal gets an unfair stereotype of being brutish due to play style but from a young age in his post match interviews (in Spanish) we would refer to specific points in the match and give critical analysis for how he made adjustments etc.
On rules and applying them I am always reminded of this quote from Bruce Lee:
"Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick."
As applicable to fighting as it is programming. You will see it in high level sports - athletes will do all kinds of unorthodox things from weird positions to eke out a result, because the result is all that matters.
BTW - if you ever find yourself in a situation like this - do the physio work, own doing it, no one's going to tell you to do it more than you, and a good physio will give you a plan to follow - in my case having access to a hot physio pool was the big thing, an hour a day every day effectively I crawled in and eventually walked away to the gym
I had surgery to repair a shattered wrist; after the cast came off, the surgeon said he'd follow up in 3 months to start physio, but in the mean time as much as it hurts, I can't break it by stretching.
So I spent every waking moment looking for motions that I used to be able to do but which hurt when I started to do them, and slowly working those motions despite the pain.
At the followup to start physio, the surgeon did a quick range of motion check. His jaw literally dropped when I demonstrated that I had recovered 95% range of motion without pain, full flexibility. “You… don't have to come back.”
When I went through PT a while ago for a shoulder injury, it became pretty clear that the sessions with the professional were only about 10% of the work. It's all on you to do the large majority of the work between sessions.
When I was young, my first real experience with this was seeing a black and white spiral optical illusion in a museum. I stared at it for a bit, and then my brain adjusted and when I looked away, it affected what I looked at.
I think my realization was that my brain didn't just do simple things, it did complex in many dimensions to adapt and fix things.
The same thing goes with your foot, and it goes way deeper than we realize. It's probably not that one muscle, it is ALL the muscles in the area working together to help you walk. I wouldn't be surprised if there are 50 muscles involved.
That's true of so many things isn't? At my graduation (EE as well as CS, is why it's relevant) I said to my dad that I'm still completely baffled by the simplest AM radio, forget WiFi.
I understand it (especially then), but it's just crazy isn't it, that it actually works? Discovering/theorising and then prototyping some of this fundamental stuff and seeing that for the first time must have been absolutely incredible.
No, turns out there are enough other muscles/tendons pulling on it I haven't really missed it, there's nothing obvious I can't do with it - I suspect the ones that pull it down are more important than the ones that pull it up
Nowhere near as extreme but I broke my leg and there was a weird sensation if I touched my leg near the break, my toes would tingle even though they were quite a ways away. Years later, it no longer does that and feels normal in that area.
I am amazed at whoever first thought of doing a reconstruction like that...what was the inspiration? what evidence and confidence did they have that it was going to work?
I have no idea who pioneered it - AFAIK this is what they normally do for my case (was ~10 years ago)
BTW most achilles breaks are dealt with my putting them in a boot to force the broken bits together and hope that they heal in place - in my case we knew it was damaged but it later broke and my GPs misdiagnosed it so it was broken for ~6 months before we realised
I think if you just exit your subjective perspective, this type of adaptation becomes obvious. What is using a game controller, keyboard + mouse, bicycle handlebars, snowboard, etc but augmentation. Yeah, it's designed to be ergonomic from the outset, but that doesn't change the fact that it is an augment.
Agreed. Furthermore, it feels uniquely weird when a scenario comes up where these "external augmentations" don't behave correctly. I often experience this when putting my laptop in the center of my normal desk setup. I'll instinctively go to move my laptop's mouse cursor via my desk mouse, and suddenly it doesn't work. For a brief moment it feels paralyzing, as if my arm is dead or etc.
That sensation happened to me as well! It feels like your mouse is stuck on something, you move it but the cursor doesn’t respond, only few moment later you realize that it isn’t connected to the notebook.
> what is using a game controller ... but augmentation
Yes.
After 30 years of exclusively "joystick must be inverted Y" I got tired of being able to help other people play a tough spot of a game using their controller, and switched cold turkey. It took 2 - 3 weeks before I didn't randomly aim the wrong way, and 2 months to regain full accuracy.
Similar on the inverted scroll switch that Apple did when they married up scroll on iPad and Magic Trackpad. For several OS versions I stayed with the old way, then too many new users were a direction I couldn't handle, so switched. That switch took maybe 3 days to grok.
One of the weirder tricks you can do is hang upside from jungle gym or over the edge of a top bunk bed and "toss" a ball to your friend, which means you have to throw the ball "down" to them instead of toss it up. You can invert gravity much faster than you'd think!
There was some research after the Vietnam war to provide blind veterans with a device on their back that used a matrix of 'pins' to 'draw' the output of a video camera on the users back..
Supposedly, it worked quite well - wearers got VERY good navigating with it and seemed to like the tech overall. Not sure why it disappeared - cost (it was probably made from pretty pricey tech for the time)? Weight ? battery life ?
Wow, that sounds a tough thing to go through. Hope you are going in the right direction. I had a partial rupture of my achilles 12 years ago and it is still different and still feels like something I need to work around. But I have adapted.
Mostly, I've had issues with scar tissue - this is an operation where you want scar tissue forming in the right places, but not the wrong ones, so I've had a couple of minor ops which seems to have fixed it - mostly now it feels tight (they put it in too tight on purpose, a bunch of physio is stretching it to the right length, starts with an adjustable moon boot, a bit of a medieval torture device that slowly stretches it) - if you stretch too far they can't undo it without opening it up
I can hike reasonable distances (multiple kilometres), running not so much a thing - I feel incredibly lucky I'm doing as well as I am
I'm very aware that if I break it again I'm probably screwed (and all I originally did was step in a hole, nothing strenuous) so I'm generally careful
I can, there are multiple muscles/tendons that move it, I believe this was one that pulls it up and there must be others that do the same - I really have not noticed any change in functionality there
There's this thing called the "curb-cut effect," where you make a change in order to accommodate people with a specific disability, and it turns out that the change is way more broadly useful than you anticipated. It's named after the ramps at intersections that were mandated by the ADA for folks in wheelchairs, but they turned out to be really good ideas in general and helped folks with strollers, on bicycles, and more. Similar things happened with closed captioning. Lots of other examples.
I bring it up because I wonder if this isn't the opposite of that. You come up with a technology aimed at healthy people, study how healthy people can adapt to using it, and maybe popularize it one day with healthy people. Because there are so many more people whose digits all work, it's a much broader audience. But once it's productionized and popular, I bet it'd probably do a lot of good for folks who'd need it.
This is absolutely the case - in software, accessibility features are in many cases identical to power user and engineering quality features. Color-theme support is necessary functionality for color vision deficiency modes, labels and tags on UI elements enable screen-readers just as much as they enable automated testing suites, configurable keybindings make it easier to get your app working with assistive input devices. It's such a strong relationship that even bigcorps know it's a thing; I got talks about it during Google employee trainings.
If anyone needs further convincing, remember that the journey from power user to experiencing disability is inevitable (age-related sensory & skeletal-muscular decline) and in some cases, abrupt (traffic accident, keyboard/mouse related RSI). We all eventually benefit from accessibility features.
Yeah. If you ever thought it was annoying to have to spend two hours on the phone to get Comcast to cancel your internet, imagine how much it would suck to try to do that with a sign language interpreter sitting next to you, or with text-to-speech and speech-to-text systems in the loop.
There are some lucky circumstances where this is true, but most such accommodations are not like that. Usually some trade-off must be made, in cost or in functionality. For example, with those same cut curbs, we now need to put a bumpy panel to allow blind and visually impaired people to feel the transition from curb to street, but these make the cut much worse for anything with wheels.
I would say actually in the vast majority of cases of accessibility interventions, it benefits everyone. Everyone is, at various points in their lives, a varying degree of disabled (defined in terms of functional deficits). Whether injured, pregnant, chronically ill, a wheelchair user, elderly, or — heh — even intoxicated, thinking broadly about users of the spaces and tools we design is always going to yield more positive than negative externalities imho.
In cases where this is not true, I’d challenge designers and engineers to find more novel designs that can genuinely be used by anyone and not cost too much inconvenience. This can sometimes mean starting from scratch and questioning our assumptions. Eg. Even the need for a curb-to-street indicator presupposes a street that is used by both big metal vehicles and pedestrians, whereas perhaps there’s a solution that means those paths never cross. Ie. More fundamental urban and transport design instead of band-aiding atop legacy systems.
I found that whatever material they used in San Francisco for those bumpy curb ramps was incredibly slippery when it rained. Wouldn't surprise me if someone ends up disabled because of them at some point.
All the panels I've encountered in Georgia have had plenty of grip when wet. I wonder what the difference is. Maybe it's because we get more rain and less slippery oil and goop is able to accumulate. I've heard that's part of why drivers in southern California have so much trouble with rain.
Do they use plastic bricks there? I've heard about such things existing, but ours are molded concrete at least. And the pattern is quite unobtrusive as well.
Frankly it's harder to come up with examples where it's actually just a Pareto improvement that was undiscovered until considering accessibility. This isn't to say that this is not worthwhile anyway to make tradeoffs but claiming that tradeoffs don't exist is just magical thinking.
Some obvious examples (even ignoring higher cost, since they are all also higher cost):
* Coloring for colorblind people is worse for people with normal vision.
* Large format type is cumbersome for people with normal vision.
* Traffic signals that are long enough for the elderly to cross cost everyone time every time they are used.
* Stalls in bathrooms suitable for disabled people means fewer stalls can fit.
* Ramps for wheelchairs require way more space than stairs and take much longer to traverse.
Again, I'm not saying we shouldn't do these things.
Speaking of productionalizing and economies of scale... I sometimes imagine an especially enlightened* medieval king would subsidize certain operations for peasants, just to improve the state of the art for whenever he himself might need it.
* But presumably not so enlightened as to transition the structure of government.
Rolled our eyes at fad diets like gluten free (while knowing celiacs is a real thing) only for my wife to develop both lactose and gluten intolerance at 40. And I thought cutting HFCS was difficult. I’m glad that gluten free picked up in popularity now, but it’s still very difficult to shop at conventional grocery stores. Allergens listed on menus has been amazing.
I grew up with a celiac relative. It's great that there are so many gluten free options available now.
One rare downside is that all the people who only do gluten free as a fad don't really need to care about small amounts of gluten. So the 'gluten free' labelling aimed squarely at them can sometimes be rather misleading, ie some restaurants have gluten-light options but still label them as gluten free.
gluten itself doesn't seem to be the problem for many ppl, but it opens the pores in the gut lining and lets other allergens through. There's another one glutinin on which there isn't much research, seems to have same effect.
Marshal McLuhan's book Understanding Media had the full title "Understanding media: the extensions of man."
And he had a chapter about the automobile.
If you've ever had the chilling experience of a skid, the terrifying adrenaline surge during that second where it is clear the car is no longer under your control, you know the dude was onto something. The car is an extension of our bodies. An extra body part.
I have pressed an imaginary "brake pedal" with my foot many times when travelling as a passenger in vehicles with someone else driving, just because i was watching the traffic and sensed the need to slow down.
Another instancee --
In my country growing up we didnt always have "blinkers" on our vehicles (light motorbikes, scooters, bicycles) -- so it was common to use "hand signals" to indicate your intention to turn right or left. I once did "hand signal" when WALKING along a corridor and had to turn right into another corridor / aisle.
"extended cognition" is the generalization of this concept as defined in academia (cognitive science and the like).
I had a very vivid experience while backpacking on acid: I fully comprehended the cyborg nature I had adopted by carrying all the resources necessary to sustain life on my person. The hose pumping water into the organs best suited to deal with it, the extra deployable shelter I had stashed away, the ability to isolate more water from harmful pathogens for continued sustenance, on-demand flame and vessel to cook foods that would otherwise be inedible/undigestable, etc.
Your cognitive processes reorganize themselves around those new affordances you've provided for yourself, and you can reasonably say you're thinking with those faculties and not merely of them.
Its kind of baffling how good at driving and thinking of other things at the same time we are. Henry Ford really lucked out that we’d so readily adapt having never seen something like a car in our evolutionary history before.
Tangentially related - I hit my head last year and lost almost all low frequency hearing on my left side. (I had an existing loss, and had almost no high frequency hearing on the other side already.) Everyone sounded like a chipmunk for a while. A year in, and I am no longer subjectively aware of any difference. I still struggle with direction - which way is that siren? But music sounds like it used to, subjectively. People who I know sound familiar - exactly like they used to. But I have trouble identifying the sex of new people on the phone now. It's very surreal how stable my subjective experience of reality remained, how the brain has sort of just patched over the missing bits. The reports about how people can become accustomed to glasses that flip vision in just days, etc., are much more believable to me now.
The early demos from ctrl labs (aquired by facebook) were VERY interesting.
They put a sensor band around the forearm and used machine learning to interpret the electrical signals the brain was sending.
They were able to interpret intent to move before actual movement. they apparently had a perfect keyboard, but you didn't have to actually move your fingers.
What was interesting is that one of the guys working there had figured out how to have a third arm.
I once saw a documentary on a haptic compass, built from some rumble packs. It allowed people to improve their way-finding skills, and if I recall correctly, people accustomed to the idea of having this extra sense after about a week or so.
I can’t easily find the original research (somewhere in the 1990s), but several hackers and artists have rebuilt or rediscovered the idea.
This was a particular passion project of mine a while back. I tried building a haptic compass that could be worn on the wrist and discovered that that the actual haptics mattered a lot. Vibration didn't work at all for me (I couldn't internalise the feeling - however much the intensity modulated it just felt like buzzing) but ended up using
a kind of trick of directional "tick" lines to represent proximity to North - which felt almost instantly familiar.
That's so cool! I can imagine it kind of feels like when you have a wheel that you can turn with your fingers and it kind of "snaps" into place at regular intervals, like your body rotation is snapping into a cardinal direction.
Have you thought about trying something similar using Android? Taking the compass and doing small short vibration blips, you can also pair them with sound and light for testing or reinforcing it. Although I can imagine that the compass is not very accurate and the vibration control on Android is probably all over the place in terms of consistency between devices. But being able to have it as something compact that you probably already carry around could make it real-life useful.
I can imagine it being an assistance when it's in your pocket and it passively keeps feeding you the blips, you could use the proximity detection to make it only do that when in your pocket, for instance.
People are still doing this and although results may vary significantly from person to person, there is actually utility to it. One friend of mine was saved from electric shock during his work on multiple occasions, thanks to his extra sense.
Bioproofed neodymium implants can even be sourced from shady Chinese vendors at a very low price, indicating a certain level of demand.
The only hurdle is finding someone willing to operate on you; some tattoo shop backroom is often a solution...
I don't think that present resolution would be good enough for me ;)
- I wish an option with small matrix of tiniest, more
sensitive magnets, maybe of varying (resonance) sizes ?
As a touch sense extension it seems intuitive to adapt
- but feeling it more like a sound or colors, less as vibration then.. ?
What about inducted solution - like a matrix of nanocoils calibrated to/messing with nearby neurons electrical levels to provide super precise feedback - or to feel it maybe like different keys being focused to press by mm movements ?
( reverse keyboard ?? )
I vaguely remember one of them being sad after the experiment ended, since it felt like they lost one of their natural senses. Slight ethical concerns were raised, afair.
I can imagine exactly what that thumb would feel like if it was integrated with my nervous system. Wondering how common this is.
When I was a very small child, I was fascinated by the sensation of different body parts - the way touching each finger in turn compares to the next, and the way the opposite side has a similar range of sensations. It feels like I know exactly how it would feel to have a sixth, seventh finger in sequence with the others. I imagine that having a second right arm grafted below my current one would have the 'right' but 'lower' feeling and I could use it immediately. But there's no way to test whether this is just a childish imagining that has stayed with me.
I wouldn't say it's particularly common but I can do it myself and know others that do it too. However the common theme for me is that the reason it happens is species dysphoria (lack of tail, etc). It's easy to imagine having different parts from reality once I've been trying to imagine myself that way for years.
> The Third Thumb is worn on the opposite side of the palm to the biological thumb and controlled by a pressure sensor placed under each big toe or foot
IANAD, but I wonder what it would feel like to control it with the palmaris longus [0] instead. From what I understand, it doesn't really have an important role (14% of people don't even have it), and it's close to the skin, so an EMG could pick it up. It's also closer to the fingers, so it might be more intuitive to learn to repurpose it.
This doesn’t seem like an unusual finding considering how good humans are at tool use in general. Picking up objects and using them as if they were part of our own body is pretty standard for us.
I remember that learning how to drive a car was actually quite difficult, but by now, even rental cars seem like an extension of my body that I can control mostly unconsciously. (Operating vehicles while entirely unconscious: not recommended)
Isn't it also like gaming, especially with a controller? How "good" you are with gaming is at least a function of how well your brain is able to remap desired actions into necessary controller input muscle movements.
I think what this does is blur the line between extra body parts and tools. And maybe it leans more into the fact that our brains treat tools and body parts similarly.
I was one of the lab rats for this - I signed up so I could get a copy of my brain scan.
I found it quite easy to move blocks around, more complex tasks with more fine control was a bit harder but possible with even a limited amount of time. The only time I struggled was when trying to do anything with the thumb while walking on a treadmill - which should be expected when controlling a device with your toes!
I started wearing a bath robe belt as a tail and my brain quickly starts telling me I am wearing it when I am not. I also had a phantom watch ⌚ on for a week after losing it.
What if alien planets filter their population like this too? Jokers and vague ideaa get "berried" because people downvote anything they don't understand.
It's an emoji. On my machine it renders in color and in the same style as other emojis. There are a number of emojis that use pre-existing Unicode glyphs. If I remember correctly there are control characters to opt-in/opt-out of emoji style presentation for these characters.
There's a certain type of people that considers emoji unserious and distracting and thinks they are detrimental to nuanced and intelligent conversation.
Of course it doesn't follow that a lack of emojis is sufficient to create nuanced and intelligent conversation but said type of people also believes HN is tangibly different from Reddit.
Making a good forum is hard, so don’t hate a forum that you find worth visiting for how it works - that makes no sense unless you’re a forum guru or at least know a much better place and want to share it.
I quit using Oura ring and it took almost two years until I didn’t have that feeling in my finger that something was missing. With Apple Watch it took half year.
Makes me wonder maybe brain adapts faster when you add something, and it takes longer to adapt for loss? Also maybe finger took longer time as there are more nerves there?
I can second this. My fursuit has a large tail that uses a kidney belt. I can feel where my tail is without thinking about it. When it curls under me, I use the back of my foot to push out of the way.
Dani, whom the article mentions, has also worked on prosthetic arm replacements which are indeed modelled on tentacles. I don't have a link to hand but I'm sure some use of your favourite search engine would show this for you.
I'm wondering if you could get so used to it over time you would develop a 'ghost limb' syndrome, i.e. some discomfort/itching/confusion when the appendage is taken off.
How would you build a controllable tentacle? Here they control the thumb with two toes. An octopus tentacle would be way more complicated. Maybe with a Neuralink
As a musician I can agree with this - I'm not playing an instrument right now as I type but I can fully 'feel' what it would be to be playing, that extension is such a tight connection. I feel the same way on a bicycle when I'm in a wide open area I can really zoom around on, it's like I have wings.
Seriously. How to acquire and manage an extra set of eyes? How to install a mini-map capability onto your daily person?
I'm thinking about cameras connected to a network where a server computer performs as the central hub for information and control. The set of cameras are mounted on drones or something and you have to control the drones (since artificial intelligence is still a tricky problem to solve).
The problem to solve is getting over not just control but constantly receiving new information types and pathways. Instead of the photo receptors in the human eyeballs, you now have in addition to your old eyes digital information from an array of cameras. You have the drones for taking the cameras with you everywhere you go. A whole lot of new stuff gets dumped on you and you're now basically undergoing physical therapy for a new organism or species.
Maybe twitching your tongue becomes a new daily occurrence? Or how about some hand signals forming to trigger indexed movements (a mapping between signals and output responses stored in the networked system's central database)? This is maybe how commands are sent. And that means you need an increase in power production for supporting the new infrastructure of your new lifestyle. And it will look like a gross hack in the end. Not that clean and sleek looking stuff you see in the movies. I guess pioneering is rough and rugged like that?
Sending commands is the easy part. But reading information, on top of the baseline of daily living, seems to create an information overload situation, yes? Because how to do remote control if you can't see what it is that you're remotely controlling? It's not simple like flying an RC drone. It's augmentation of all aspects of RC drone flying.
We (sort of) have dozens if not hundreds extra body parts - muscles. Most people cannot move their ears or nostrils separately, have limited mimics, cannot do tricks with poker chips or show someone their ring finger without securing their pinky somehow. That’s because we treat our groups of muscles as a whole. It takes time to learn to separate them and counteract tensions. Maybe it’s the same process?
they should test these augmentation techs on people who ride horses as it requires using thought and micro gestures to operate an entire second body in real time using each limb independently.
This is an excellent observation. Dressage (for example) is a set of evolutionary constraints about controlling a 600kg similarly trained million dollar animal through tiny movements (mostly in your thighs and buttocks) in order to win prestigious prizes including Olympic medals.
The horses react with puzzlement if you are not trained to a similar level - if you are a junior rider, expert horses are incompatible.
Not at all is fairly close. Think "beginner friendly" (phone?) vs "expert friendly" (nix?) interactions.
"A good horse" is actually one that matches your level, or is only slightly above, whatever that may currently be.
Note that Teitelman eventually gave up on getting machines to DWIM, and scratched that itch by doing dog agility instead.
(the most indirect control I've seen was someone from the local extension program, mounted on horseback, whistling to his dogs in order to instruct them to herd a flock of geese in slaloms/eights around a set of traffic cones. Roping horses still need to be doing their jobs even after their rider has left the saddle and is on foot to tie/doctor the roped critter.)
good observation, motorcycles are definitely the next closest thing as far as complete machine extensions of the body go vs. say, surfing or snowboarding where the body is unmediated by the engine or gyroscopic feedback in its relationship to gravity.
the difference between an animal and an instrument is in the expression of intent that is parsed by another being. the sensors interpreted by a computer are a feedback mechanism more like a thermostat or ABS, but now with AI we're starting to challenge our understanding of those differences.
What do you mean by mediated by the engine? In snowboarding the board really is an engine. You can define how much friction you give to the slope or your angle to it and therefore throttle. You also engage the board in a carve and get energy out of the carve in transition and this can be controlled by the length of the carve or how you shift your weight or engage your legs. Not to mention the route you decide to take on the mountain and the effect of that topology and snow conditions. This is true for skis as well.
No doubt the human brain is incredibly adaptive, and there are seemingly countless examples of this. Even for people with severe brain damage, who lose some portion of their brain, are able to adapt.
Different parts of the brain can be adapted to serve different purposes. For people who are blind or deaf, these regions of the brain will likely be adapted to serve different purposes.
My big question is how you get input to work. Could you just put a patch on some unimportant bit of skin, let's say a 4"x4" area on your back, and use that patch to deliver tactile information from the thumb in some systematic way? Would it eventually start feeling like it was coming from the thumb?
I'm interested in what ways brains might evolve if they had these extra body parts naturally. What would a 4 armed person with 20 fingers do to a "motor homunculus"?
They should make the schematics and source available so we can all try this.
A quick 3D print plus a couple of ESP32s and analog switches might be all it needs.
I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but this seems to be barely discussed, and the page reads more like an slick advertisement. There is a paragraph expert about it and it's mentioned at start of the video but I don't see anywhere showing how the full device is setup or how it looks. From the images/video b-roll alone it seems almost as if the wrist bad is what's controlling it and not your toe. Not to nitpick of course, just makes things seem a bit rather misleading.
How hard was it to relearn? at first I'd try to move my toe and something else would move, it felt weird - but doctor's orders were essentially don't do anything for 3 months, bed rest and keep the leg raised - all the muscles turned to jelly ... then months of physio, in the pool and then in the gym - at that point, once I started moving stuff again my brain had adjusted - that muscle moves my foot, not my toe - I didn't have to do anything explicitly to make it change, it just did