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Gravity Hard-Coded Into The Brain
guiding_knight writes: "A study by French scientists suggests that gravity is imprinted in the human brain. Interesting article, tells of human ability to calculate effects of Earth-normal gravity and how difficult it is to adapt to another model."
Sounds like a serious design flaw.
No artist tolerates reality. -- Nietzsche
with a little genetic engineering, we can all go around floating?
Sounds to me like the scientists in space adapted to a new situation. You don't just erase 30 years of subconscious heuristic calculation overnight.. We don't even understand how the brain learns to catch, or how it stores the information, so how can we speculate on how hard it is to change that?
Pretty old stuff they are dredging up this days. I remember discussing this in college with the physics and biology geeks when they originally did the exp.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Anyone reading this article will see a big red "DUH!" in their mind. They're taking astronauts, presumable 30+ years old, and having them perform various experiments in alternate gravity situations. 30 years of experience on earth with 9.8m/s^2 gravity will surely look like hard-coded parameters when you try tossing a ball in zero-g for 5 minutes. Now if they could bear a child up in weightlessness, and raise that kid in space, teaching him to play catch without gravity, then that kid would be just as messed up once he'd return home and tried to play his game.
Brains do not store any hard-coded information, they just adapt; once they've adapted to something, it takes an equal amount of effort to change that knowledge. Say you've been playing Pacman for the last 20 years, and can pull a perfect game up to the 112th level. Then you play Virtual Fighter for the first time in your life, and get your ass savagely beat within 4 seconds. DUH! Your knowledge of Pacman's rules and strategies means nothing once you move to a new game. Same thing applies here.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I was able to accurately play video games that used non-earth physics when I was younger. This can't be too different. I am sure it got to the point that I did not have to think about compensating for constant speed rather than acceleration.
Okay, so that wasn't a scientific experiment, I just find that there reasoning is quite poor, baby's on a glass table are scared, ya, that is really good scientific proof.
One way to figure this one is to test one of those dudes whose been in space for months, and then test him just as he get's back to earth, I bet for at least a few hours he would be on "space gravity".
just my $.02
http://monkeyserver.com --- weeeeee
Also look at computer games which can have arbitrary G constants. People playing video games can get very very good at predicting when their character hits the ground no matter what G is thrown in.
Upon reading the article, it looks as though they have found evidence that we are attuned to normal earth gravity but they have proven nothing. Their experiments are all done with people who, after having grown up in normal gravity, are thrown off by less gravity. I don't think they have much in the way of nature/nurture on this. Better experiments would involve raising a kid in space and seeing how he could catch a ball.
I would not be suprised if we somewhat expect earth's gravity after years of evolution (the same way we are easily get phobias of snakes but not much more dangerous things like cars and electricity), but humans obviously have wide skills with other acceleration constants. This study is hardly conclusive from the summary of it in the news article.
It's also possible that the brain is able to learn and retain multiple models of acceleration.
:P
Like multiple hardware profiles? I don't know about this, my brain couldn't even switch back over to the "short hair profile" of my past when I went back to having short hair.
proton != antielectron
...that the material presented in the article suggests the exact opposite of its hypothesis. As was stated, the astronauts began to adapt after a little while days. (The article also suggests that new models can be learned--but isn't that the opposite of hard-wiring?)
Think of it this way: A little kid can't just start catching a ball naturally. It takes a while for it to click. It just so happens that, by the time someone is a teen-ager, they've had to catch things so often that they do it without thinking about it. That's not hard wiring, it's conditioning. Of course, when you've been conditioned to do something over a long period of time, it takes a little while to unlearn it.
Anyway, I just don't see any solid evidence from the material presented that predicting gravitational acceleration is hard-wired into the brain. Take some kids who haven't yet learned to catch into a zero-G environment (Vomit Comet, anyone?) and do the experiment with them. That way, conditioning won't contaminate the results.
It's one thing to try and do something WITHOUT gravity, that I had originally learned how to do WITH gravity. That's what this experiment was attempting to do.
I'd be more interested in how well they did learning, for example, to play hacky sack (passing a small, bean-filled leather bag using only your feet). if they had no prior experience with the game, I'd be interested in seeing how well they did, learning it in zero-G; compared to others learning how to do it with normal gravity. That would be a more valid experiment in my book.
In order for something so fundamental as trajectory calculation to be encoded in the brain, it would have to be there at the so-called "root level". Which means it needs to be laid down early on--like 100 million years ago at the latest. 100 million years ago the Earth's day was only about 18 hours long. So gravity would have been proportinally weaker (actually the centrifugal force would have been higher). So back when these supposed "gravity circuits" were being formed g would have been about 15.2 m/s^2.
I guess this is evidence that aliens didn't come down and fuck the monkeys.
Despite its title, the article states the scientists are unsure of how "hard-coded" gravity is in the brain:
It's possible that the astronauts did adapt to 0-g, and then readapted back to 1-g again. It's also possible that the brain is able to learn and retain multiple models of acceleration. In different situations, it might simply choose which one to apply. That, in fact, is what McIntyre and his colleagues believe is going on.
In other words, like on Slashdot and other publications, the headline writers didn't read the article, or deliberately misstated its conclusion in the interest of an exciting headline.
evanchik.net
But what irks me about your post is the comment, "baby's on a glass table are scared, ya, that is really good scientific proof." Do you even know what that experiment is, who conducted it, and what were the follow-up studies? It's one of the classics of developmental psychology. And they were careful not to draw too many conclusions from it. But it does support (not prove, nor does it claim to) the notion that our sense of gravity is innate.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
The problem with this article is, not that they assume that gravity is hardwired, the article actually states that they are not sure, but rather that there assumptions are off base.
They say that it takes about 2-3 days before you get over the (lack of) motion sickness. That is, it takes the human body roughly 48-72 hours of doing something that it considers really wrong before it gets used to it.
Now consider the throwing, they say that after 15 days the astronaughts were getting used to it. Lets assume (for sake of argument) that they were throwing the ball 3 hours a day. It might seem unlikely given the cost of putting someone in space that we would give them them such a task, but even if we did, then we are saying that after roughly 45 hours of practice the body is getting used to something that it considers really wrong.
Am I really the only one that sees the parallel here?
Here is an interesting story about Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller) and his experiences with zero-g. It's pretty long, but it's detailed and amusing.
This scientist is......erm...screwed up.
the Political Inquirer
If you hadn't included this one obvious item we would probably have fallen for the rest of your doubletalk.
Kittens raised in a room with nothing but horizontal stripes on the walls will be forever blind vertical stripes and vice versa. Kittens raised without any light will be completely blind. Is it any wonder that humans experience a mild timing error in zero G? At least we are not "blind" to free fall.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
I think a more valid conclusion from that experiment might be that free fall makes you clumsy.
Second, we are poorly adapted to weightless environments (if you look at things from the anatomy point of view). Attempting to say "oh look how we do poorly there than on earth" is much like saying "oh, look how lousy a whale walks on land".
Finally, if you view it from an objective point of view (which I always do [grin]), what would be the point of hardwiring gravity in the brain? We didn't evolve catching baseballs! This is just plain silly.
And while we're at it, why are you banging those two halves of coconuts together?
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
Just like most you guys say.. it's just a matter of adaptation that the brain knows how to catch a falling object.
They should let the astronaunts do somethin' that they haven't been doing everyday in their entire lives: shoot the ball up from below and let them catch it, I bet they will get the timing right in minutes.. since they don't have to fight with their years of experience.
Better yet.. don't friggin' waste the money doing such experiments on space missions: just let them play computer games that simulate gravity and you can adjust the gravity factor up and down the scale to see how they react.
For your entertainment: goto www.orisinal.com and play the dozen egg game.. you will feel awkward at first since the trajectory of the eggs are not natural.. but you get used to it in minutes.
must
const float G = 6.68 * 10^-11 Nm^2 / (kilogram)^2
float g = 9.81 m / s^2
thanks for the great info!
"Wireless : LAN
this article. Oh well..