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Thumbs Are the New Fingers for GameBoy Youth
An anonymous reader writes "Reuters is running an interesting story on how the use of gadgets such as mobile phones and GameBoys has caused a physical mutation in young people's hands. The use of the thumb is a deviation from the use of the index finger..."
It is possible that the use of hand-held devices make one's own thumbs more dextrous, but that certainly doesn't cause a mutation, which is a genetic change. That would be Lamarkian inheritance of accquired characteristics. Both Slashdot and the article are using a completely incorrect term.
Except for the fact that our eyesight is going down the tubes for playing all these games. We are going to be the most versatile group of half blind geeks around. I know personally I'm only in my early 20's but have been playing games since I could pick up a controller and I'm having some problems with my hands lately. If I don't use an ergonomic keyboard I'll be in major discomfort for a few days. I've started taking Vioxx as an anti-inflammatory for my right thumb and index finger. I must be overworking these. I don't know about other geeks out there but I get scared about my hands cause these are my livelyhood and how I bring home the $$. I lose a finger or two and I'm SOL. So a message to geeks of tomorrow: Protect the digits at all costs!
"I'd always had longer hair than other boys. I was a long-haired musician before hippies came along." Willie Nelson
They're suggesting people have used thumbs so often that they are more skilled with using thumbs than index fingers. Not a mutation.
If I play a musical instrument then I don't look at my fingers anymore (either when playing the piano or guitar), does that mean that I have mutated in a musick playing monster?
I think the author mixed 'learning' with 'mutating'
--
If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
See here for articles from last year on this topic.
It's not evolution! It's common sense! Use your thumbs more, and they'll become stonger, more flexible, and more dexterous. Not evolution, muscles.
HEADLINE: People who use their thumbs more are able to use their thumbs better! Scientists are baffeled because of the "geek" tie in. There might be link between this and runners who run alot can run better. News at 11.
...people who use their thumbs more often have better coordination with their thumbs.
Can anyone say "slow news day" ?
Tomorrow on slashdot:
"People who type a lot don't even have to look at the keys"
"Study discovers that engineers better at factoring quadratic equations than grocery clerks"
"Musicians who practice more often are better musicians"
Robotiq.com is heavily tested on animals
Okay, as much as they fucked up with the whole "mutation" thing, you can't say that their refusal to use the word "terrorist" is not noble, at least within the context of journalism.
Reuter's editorial policy is that they will never use the term "terrorist" or "freedom fighter" or whatever, unless they are quoting. The goal is to be objective, and since Reuters is an international news service, they cannot afford to be US-centric or centered on the terminology of any nation.
Remember, one person's terrorist is another person's freedom-fighter. The word terrorist is very loaded. Reclaim The Streets! parties have been labelled terrorists simply for dancing in the streets. The French resistance against the Nazis was also called terrorism. It would be unethical, in the context of objective journalism, to use any government's definition of terrorism, so Reuters simply refuses to use the term, unless they are quoting.
Now, honestly, is that so bad?
(I do agree that journalism can never be truly objective, which is why I support media projects like the Independant Media Center, which wear their bias on their sleeves, but that's a debate for another day)
Back in the NES days I would use my index and middle fingers for the b and a buttons, the genesis controller was designed so I could do the same. But once shoulder buttons started to be on all controllers, from the SNES onwards, I couldnt pull that off. Now that the GBA has shoulder buttons, I cant think of a game system that you can reasonably use all the buttons with out using your thumb as the main button presser
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
Lamarckian inheritance lives!
My research shows I've become very adept at casting spells in video games.
Oh, and sorry about turning any readers into a newt, this morning, I'm still working on that one.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I know most left-handed individuals feel that many standard tools are awkward to use because of some subtle biases towards the right-handed majority. E.g., think about the standard manual can opener.
Will the "thumb users" find standard objects equally awkward to use? What about after some thumb-based tools have become widely available (e.g., I could imagine swapping out a standard keyboard for a thumbboard), since that will provide less exposure to finger-based devices?
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
2. An alteration or change, as in nature, form, or quality.
Why don't you go look up "connotation" and "denotation" in your fancy computer dictionary too, cut and paste boy.
P.S. you forgot to paste entries 3 (genetics) and 4 (linguistics).
-Kevin
Well, far be it for me, a biochemistry student, to argue with a dictionary that gives an overall definition of each word, but... you're wrong.
Mutation is a genetic alteration at the cellular level; what these people are doing is training their bodies, in this case, their thumbs, in such a way that they have better control. You could technically paint with your toes as well (many people do it) but it's not a mutation.
A mutation is a random alteration of one or more chromosomes in the nucleus of the cell resulting in different productions/responses.
Nor is the parent of your comment correct, either; a mutation does NOT have to be in the germ line cells in order to be a mutation (in which case the mutation would be transmitted to offspring). Mutations can occur in standard mitotic cells and never be passed to offspring; Lemarkian inheritance has nothing to do with anything, but especially not with mitotic cells. I think we all know that a 'mutation' for the dexterity of the thumb is not occuring in the 'balls' of the 'gentlemen' who use technology and then father offspring.
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) :
Mutation \Mu*ta"tion\, n. [L. mutatio, fr. mutare to change: cf. F. mutation. See Mutable.]
Change; alteration, either in form or qualities.
The vicissitude or mutations in the superior globe are no fit matter for this present argument. --Bacon.
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) :
Mutation \Mu*ta"tion\, n.
1. (Biol.) Gradual definitely tending variation, such as may be observed in a group of organisms in the fossils of successive geological levels.
2. (Biol.)
(a) As now employed (first by de Vries), a sudden variation (the offspring differing from its parents in some well-marked character or characters) as distinguished from a gradual variations in which the new characters become fully developed only in the course of many generations. The occurrence of mutations, and the hereditary transmission, under some conditions, of the characters so appearing, are well-established facts; whether the process has played an important part in the evolution of the existing species and other groups of organisms is a disputed question.
(b) The result of the above process; a suddenly produced variation.
From WordNet (r) 1.6 :
mutation
n 1: an organism that has characteristics resulting from chromosomal alteration [syn: mutant, sport]
2: the process or event of mutating
Free Mac Mini
This strikes me as really being just a matter of practice and conditioning. As has been pointed out in many of the posts above, a musician has not only learned what to press/move to come up with certain notes, they've developed a certain "muscle-memory" that allows them to hit notes without really thinking about it.
Same thing applies to any twitch-type game - the player learns the right keypress combinations through highly repetitive actions. Eventually, they don't think "Left, Left, A, C, A, B, Up" but rather they think "I need to use a whirling dragon kick here."
I'm a touch typist and the same thing applies...
One other example of what Reuters would incorrectly call mutation that I haven't seen here would involve the ability of those born without arms to use their feet almost as well as many of us use our hands. I remember seeing a show about that many years ago and was fascinated by it. I decided that if they could use their feet, then I could certainly teach myself to write with my left hand. It didn't work too well, though.
My parents are very intimidated by their computer and are constantly calling me for tech support... I got a Vic 20 when I was 12 and never learned that fear... just a different kind of muscle memory I suppose. They don't want to experiment because they're still unfamiliar with the computer and don't know what will and won't cause problems. I think it's just practice...
Slashdot comments... splitting hairs since 1997.
does this mean the phrase "all thumbs" is now a compliment?
Thank god someone finally went public with this.
For years now, I've noticed myself using my thumbs for everything: opening doors, eating, picking things up, and almost everything I use my hands for.
I've hid my hands in shame for so long now, thinking I was a freak. At least now I can take the mittens off... ~sniff~
A Refutation:
1) Nothing is random. Actually logic and science teach you the exact opposite. At a quantum level, everything is random, you don't know if a particular particle will decay at a given moment or not, and as far as science can tell, there is no way of knowing. In larger systems, tiny variables add uncertainty until the system becomes completely unpredictable. We will probably never have accurate 1 year weather forcasts. Theoretically if you knew the position and speed of every particle in the system (note: this is by definition impossible) you could theoretically predict, and perhaps if we knew the exact state of the world at 4 Billion BC, an infinitely powerful computer could predict the outcome of evolution. But since this is unimaginably difficult, the individual events that influence evolution, and the mutations that give it material to work with, are for all intents and purposes "random." *
2) Nothing is absolute, nothing is for sure. An arguable point. According to pragmatic philosophers at the turn of the (last) century, there is no absolute truth, and scientific knowledge in its current state represents the closest thing to an absolute that we have. This philosophy generally fell out of favor by the 30s. I don't really see what it has to do with your point though.
3) Say what? Let me get this straight... if our actions control revolution, we with our brains control evolution? Why, because they rhyme? I'm sorry, but I don't get you here.
Nobody is arguing for a "mysterious force of nature" a mysterious force of nature would imply some sort of push or outside control. Evolution is an almost mathematical trend to all self-replicating systems. In survival situations the best genes survive, and those genes get passed on, making for a more fit next generation. That's all there is, really. Modern alterations to the theory come from discoveries about how the genetic code is structured, how major structural changes can be achieved with the change of just a few genes. All this means is that the process can be faster than we previously thought, but the basic idea remains unchanged from Darwin.
The language of some can confuse the point. It's hard to phrase sentences about evolution that don't make it sound like evolving is something that individual creatures actively do, or that evolution is some giant ghost nudging the little critters in the right direction. The best analogy I can think of is the Adam Smith's invisible hand. (The "force" that generates more wealth in capitalist systems) there is no hand, there is no mysterious force, it's just a typical result of free market economies, it goes with the system. Evolution is just a natural product of populations of reproducing things.
* Here's the source of a very common misconception. While the events that make up evolutionary process are random, the process itself is anything but. Think of an ideal gas, while the individual particles are moving in a basically "random" fashion, the gas itself will expand according to very strict laws. Evolution works on populations. While a mutation or an accident has an effect on the genes of a particular member of this population, for the population as a whole, such chance events work out to be constants in the equation rather than noise that throws the whole thing out of whack. And like gasses, evolution behaves simply and predictably in the lab, throw it out in the wild, where those gasses become warm and cold fronts in a storm system, and predictability goes out the window. Evolution is a chaotic process made of random events, on the short term it is predictable, but due to the system it is in, it rapidly becomes unpredictable. But it is *not* random in the sense of a tornado flying through a scrapyard and creating a 747.
Richard Dawkins does a better job of explaining this than I do.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Ignoring the nonsensical use of "mutation"... I've noticed that little kids use their thumbs like adults use their forefingers. But the current crop of kids are the first generation that grew up with buttons on EVERYTHING, and were introduced to it right out of the crib. How many kids nowadays have ever seen a rotary dial telephone?
I think it's the natural effect of a transition from gadgets where the forefinger or a thumb-and-fingers grip was the reasonable choice (such as rotary phone dials and rotary controls on TVs, stoves, etc) to gadgets that are button-driven, so any digit will do the job.
If you watch toddlers, you'll notice they try to press buttons with their thumbs far more often than they try to press them with an index finger. To a toddler, everything is for gripping (not for poking) so the gripping member (the thumb) is the natural choice.
If you grow up with buttons on every gadget in the house, it's likely that you'll continue to use your thumb, rather than getting retrained to use an index finger (as getting your thumb damnear ripped off by a phone's rotary dial will enforce in a hurry).
This is no different from the sort of retraining that happens with any interface transition. It just happens to coincide with a physical action that comes more naturally to little kids, hence is easy to continue doing as they grow up.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Quantum Particles arent random at all, we simply dont understand them so they SEEM random.
Wow. It looks like a 19th century classical physicist has invented a time machine, zoomed forward 100 years, and opened a Slashdot account! That would be exciting. I have a sinking feeling, though, that you are not a time traveler from the pre-1920 era, but rather, you're just another scientifically illiterate 21st century creationist.
Physics went through this debate about 80 years ago and decided that you are wrong. Unlike the rolling of dice, etc., where randomness is only apparent because of our ignorance of all the details of the situation, events on a quantum level are truly random. If you're going to say otherwise, you have to provide a mechanism (like little fairies deciding when a nucleus will decay).
But even rolling dice is a bad example of a deterministic process- we figured this out in the eighties. To predict the outcome, you need such exquisite detail of the initial conditions that even minute contributions from quantum processes cannot be ignored.
You can find the exact text of the original "research", such as it is, here. Google dwells in the sky and rules us.
The thing is a glossy advertising sheet which motorala purchased - NOT a research paper. The word "Data" DOES NOT EVEN APPEAR. Likewise, the words power, mean and measurement, and the letter n, are nowhere used in any statistical sense. The "research" seems to involve no hard numbers WHATSOEVER. The report has no references, although the author has peppered it with the names of her friends, along with vague, sweeping claims about the results of their "research" (if you can find evidence anywhere of where this supposed work was reported, by all means, post!) If there was ever any primary data associated with this report, it is not here and I cannot find it, although Dr. Plant includes a dozen glossy photographs she took herself. Dr. Sophie Plant, the author of the article, has quit her job at the University of Warwick's cybernetic culture research unit (a fact reuters also glosses over) in order, supposedly, to write full time.
Incidentally, the cybernetic culture research unit, established by Dr. Sadie Plant (author of the report), seems to do a lot of, yes I will keep the quotes, "research" into the experiences of people abducted by UFOs. Their homepage reads like the ravings of a new age schizophrenic.
This paper is absolute vapor; even in the field of Sociology is stands out for it's lack of substance.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.