Playing Ball in Space

oo7tushar writes "Although most experiments in space seem simple they have profound results. Take this for example, astronauts trying to catch a ball in space. What's so hard about that? Nothing much really, down here on Earth. In space it's a completely different story. Here on earth our eyes see the ball and our brain anticipates it's movement according to gravity. In space the brain continues to anticpate gravity but unlike motion sickness (which is adapted to within days), astronauts continue to anticipate the path of a ball for 15 days (after which they start to show progress). What are the ramifications? The brain must have some sort of internal gravitation model."

Comments

Encoding Specificity

[Transient0]

An internal gravitation model would be theorizing far more than is necesarry to account for the data. In cognitive science, there has long been an understanding of encoding specificity. This simply means that data, including skill knowledge, is best retrieved from human memory under the same conditions which it was learned.

An example from the real world is underwater welding. When underwater welders were first being trained, the companies tried to simply train professional welders in all the ways that underwater welding was different from normal welding. But, in diong this, they found that when they were underwater, the welders had serious trouble calling on those skills which supposedly transferred over unchanged. As a result, they had to be entirely retrained in skills they had apparently already learned.

Similarly, if you lose your keys while you're stoned and then can't find them the next day. Psychological evidence shows that your best chance to find them is to get stoned again and then look for them.

Any number of other controlled psychological experiments have been performed to domonstrate this same effect(memorizing words under different lighting conditions, etc.). I don't see why gravitation would be any different.

Re:Encoding Specificity

[sunhou]

Re: learning welding underwater -- when I visited Australia, driving was a somewhat similar experience (driving on the opposite side of the road from what I was used to).

At first, it was hard because everything was the opposite of what I knew. But within a few days, I simply learned to reverse my innate responses, since I knew that those responses were backwards, and so it got easier. But after a couple of weeks, I had started to get accustomed to the new configuration, and so some of my natural responses were correct. That meant I could no longer just "do the opposite of what felt natural", and it actually got harder again and took more thought; I always had to think "is my gut feeling about what to do an old gut feeling from the US, or a newly acquired gut feeling from the past couple of weeks in Australia?"

I was there for about 4 or 5 weeks. When I got back to the US, within a day, I promptly drove on the wrong side of the road. (It was a small road with no traffic, so fewer cues, and I did catch myself within a few seconds before causing any major havoc.)

Or...

[ruiner13]

It could be that a baby born in space would not have such models. I'm guessing that is a learned response of the brain, not an inherited one. I took a Psychology of learning class in college once, and i learned many interesting things. For one, spacial perceptions depend a lot on the environment in which you are raised. For instance, if you live in a rectangular type house, you can generally make good guesses as to the dimensions of other rectangular shaped rooms. If you bring that person into a round room, the estimations are way off. It works in reverse, too. If you live in a round hut your entire life, you won't be able to make good guesses about rectangular rooms. Seems kinda analogous to the gravity story. I say we get some randy astronauts to give birth on the space station, and kinda have a truman show in space. We'll see how that baby will catch a ball then.

Re:Or...

[Peyna]

Yeah, reminds me of "The Forest People", by Colin Turnbull. He took a pygmy out of the forest where he lived and up on this mountain, and the guy thought that everything he saw was miniature versions of what they really were. His eyes had never had to look at anything more than 15-20 feet in front of him in the forest, and he had no clue what things looked like when they were that far away.

Isaac Asimov used this for a SF story

[Seth Finkelstein]

Isaac Asimov wrote a prescient short story "The Singing Bell", about this effect. The plot hinges on proving that a man has recently been to the moon, by catching him off-guard in catching something as if he was on the moon (i.e. he had adapted to the lunar gravity in terms of ball-catching). Absolutely great science-fiction story.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

bees, parachutes, & linear thinking

[hawk]

From other seminars I've attended in the past:

there's a certain amount of linear modeling the brain can do. Note that, for a small enough interval, a linear model can be made "good enough".

The interesting examples:

1. Move a beehive by a fixed amount each day while they're out gathering. The bees adjust to this (e.g., 10feet/day), and head to where they know it *will be*. Increase this amount by a fixed amount (10, 11, 12, etc.) and they can't do it.

2. Parachute landing. Don't look at the ground. You're falling at a rate the brain can't handle; if you watch, you compensate incorrectly, and often hurt yourself. (so hear the brain seems to expect the gravity induced quadratic, whereas you're moving at a linear rate?).

hawk