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Tool Use Is Just a Trick of the Mind
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.
It's interesting to have scientific confirmation of this. I've often considered how it is that humans are so well adapted to controlling vehicles. (e.g. driving a car, flying a plane, etc.) It didn't take much consideration to come to the conclusion that the vehicle becomes an extension of the driver. You stop thinking in terms of your physical body's size and start thinking in terms of your vehicle's size. You stop paying attention to the sensations on your skin and start paying attention to the vibrations and force feedback that are transmitted through the vehicle. Even your visual patterns change as you begin checking various mirrors, gauges, windows, and other situational monitoring devices.
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
For years, I wore watches on my left wrist. (Nonstop, from 1996 to about 2004; also a lot of the time from 1990-1994.) It got to the point that I would look at my wrist for the time, even if I wasn't wearing the watch, and I would feel like a part of me was missing if I didn't have the watch on.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Although the article is interesting and the research findings seem to be somewhat reasonable, I would be especially interested in applying a similar experiment to birds. Some birds, it should be said, have the ability to not only use wires to grab items in experiments, but can use a wire to open a box to get a key to open a door. They can also bend the wire as needed in order to achieve their goal. If we assume they also think of the tool as a part of the body, this does not at all explain how tool manipulation arose (you don't see animals reshaping their limbs in order to achieve a certain task).
I guess the point here is that the finding is interesting from a topological perspective (which area of the brain is active in tool use), but doesn't at all approach the more interesting, deeper questions of how an animal can construct a tool for a particular purpose.
I think what you are referring to is another learning mechanism which bypasses redundant mental steps on tasks that you repeatedly do. So when neurons A B C and fired in sequence often enough it will create a connection between A and C, so that the task is preformed quicker - essentially "you are doing things without thinking" is a very good description of what is happening!
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Sounds alot like Clark and Chalmer's theory of The Extended Mind which they outlined in the paper of the same name. In it they suggested that certain objects which we use frequently for information storage and retrieval should be considered part of our cognitive agent. For instance, if someone always carries a cellphone on which they store all their contact's phone numbers, it should not be considered incorrect for them to say they "know" a certain number, when in reality they have to look it up on their phone.
Yes and no. I'm actually referring to the mechanism being used in support of communication. I don't think "move my hands to type h-a-n-d-s". I think "hands" while focused on "communicate with typing" and my body does most of the rest of the work automatically. What this study is showing is that the action of saying "hands", the action of writing "hands", and the action of typing "hands" are all related on a basic command-level. Your brain gives the command with the proper I/O routines selected, and out pop the results. :-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I've heard people having considerable success with wiring up devices to be used as a new 'sense' - for instance, a belt that placed pressure on the northern-most part of the body, used to give the wearer a rock-solid sense of direction. I can imagine that it's really the same thing going on for tool users.
Crows, well some of them, are able to not only use tools as an extension of their body, but they can MAKE the tool first. How many primates can do that? Movie of crow making and using a tool here.
I've read Slashdot for the last 5 years, and now I start posting... Go figure
This reminds me of how I learned to hit a golf ball. For years, every time I tried it, it would just wizzle (is that a word?) along the ground for 15 or 20 feet.
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.
expandfairuse.org
I've experienced exactly that (computer as an extension of the body) a few times for a few moments playing BZflag. I no longer had any conscious recognition of my hands, the mouse, or the keyboard, and only a very dim awareness of anything outside my screen. I didn't think about pressing keys, I thought about how I wanted to move... The low-level interface (pressing buttons and moving my mouse ball) abstracted itself away. I even found myself carrying on a conversation with someone; I didn't even notice when I switched between typing or playing, and kept playing as I typed. It's a truly strange experience.
Now I just need to figure out how to enter this magical state while I do homework and design circuitry...
When you drive a car, the car becomes an extension of your body. For most people. Some people really struggle with the car and presumably it's more like trying to move around a prosthetic limb. Hey, at least we don't have nerve endings going through into the tires. Driving through the desert: "OW! OW! OW!"
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I came across this interesting example of a guy teaching his granny or someone what a driver is.
"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 say the reverse is true, our limbs and senses and other parts are just like other tools, just that we have them built in.. sort of a readymade kit, for the purpose of survival. I can go ahead and extend it, but that would become philosophy. But this is a cool new way of seeing things.
http://monkeynesianeconomics.blogspot.com/
TFA mentions "mirror neurons" at one point. I guess that's why people who really enjoy boxing will find themselves ducking and dodging along with a match, and why some people feel so uncomfortable watching someone else drive a car.
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....
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.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
is that anything like the phantom pain amputees experience in limbs that are no longer there?
Where is this free beer everyone on Slashdot keeps talking about?
I don't know about you, but I never really think about the mouse when I play games like that. And when you aim a gun you only tend to aim using two dimensions as well - or do you prefer to move the gun forwards a bit when you need that little bit of extra power?
which is totally what she said
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?
In some senses similar. There are some neat experiments going on with direct brain interfaces in quadriplegics. Not read-you-mind kind of interfaces, but simple, usually 1 or 2-D cursor movements, based on some really gross EEG measures. The subjects get (relatively) little training time with them and are usually trained to move the cursor by "trying to move" some physical body part. The subjects who get good at cursor movement report that they're not thinking about the body part anymore, but just moving the cursor. ie: that their brains have somehow mapped the cursor onto the EEG signal onto a reasonably specific population of neurons.
It's unfortunate that the studies (at least the ones I've seen) only allow an hour or two of daily training. If these subjects could just be left alone with the devices, I suspect they would rapidly develop that mapping. Kind of like an immersive foreign language experience.
Aiming a gun isn't just "pointing it" in the right direction. One must align your eye, the target, and then the front sight and rear sight of the weapon all in a line in order to hit the target. You also have to worry about trigger squeeze, breathing, and stance in order to ensure your round does not miss your target. Although it becomes almost entirely subconscious, as a soldier and an avid FPS-er I can't classify those two tasks the same way. Pointing a reticle on a screen subconsciously is fundamentally different in one's mind than aiming a real life pistol or rifle subconsciously.
I've just spent the last ten minutes trying this with various objects (while varying other factors like eyes open/closed) and couldn't seem to do it either, until it occurred to me that I've experienced that sensation before. When jigging (fishing) I can feel the lead weight touching the bottom, and follow the contours of rocks, etc. I'm definitely experiencing the contact in the weight. So I tried it with a washer and a piece of string, and sure enough, it felt like I experienced the contact with the floor via the washer.
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"...
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 some learned kinematics, which we can rapidly map from one set of muscles to another, in a way we can't when trying to walk on our hands.
The example of 'feeling the pressure at the tip of the pencil' is not wrong, but most people when asked will claim they know they are pressing on the pencil all the time. Then again. most people will claim they are in concious control of their body. It is sometimes a bit of a shock to discover that different parts are doing complex stuff 'by themselves'.
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 hesitation to accept your claims and conclusions. Just for fun, next time spice it up a bit with more realistic and hence confusing figures: 83.2%; 13.4% of first time 1-year old murderers are successful; etc.
I was able to find at least one recent text addressing this issue:
Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals about Morality
This seems to be basic nature vs. nurture sort of a thing. Oddly enough, however, your position seems to be that the nature aspect of it is simply ZERO. It is really not so simple. Indeed, the role of the frontal cortex seems to be evidence of the role of nature (evolutionary history, etc.) here which IS part of the innate aspect of morality.