7 ms·

The same shit happens when driving. Our internal understanding of our own bodies seems to adapt to take the tools we're using into account. https://en.wikiped

by yarg 4y ago

The same shit happens when driving. Our internal understanding of our own bodies seems to adapt to take the tools we're using into account. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_schema https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_schema https://scholar.google.co.nz/scholar?q=related:5uSissKo6EgJ:scholar.google.com/&scioq=human+tool+use+body&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1 https://scholar.google.co.nz/scholar?q=related:5uSissKo6EgJ:...

Gordonjcp 4y ago
> The same shit happens when driving. In a broader sense, it never fails to amaze me that a kilo and a half of goopy cells that evolved to work out where the plants that won't kill you and where to trap rabbits in the next valley are - things that are, generally speaking, not much further than you can see - can visualise every step and turn of a journey of hundreds of miles, while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed, and do this for many different journeys *including ones we have not taken yet* but which happen to be in roughly the same direction as where we were a last week. Where I'm sitting it is a four hour drive to even get to England and yet I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford, another couple of hours further south. For that matter, it's not much more effort to visualise driving right to the south coast of England, working out where to get the ferry at Dover, and then how to drive right to Geneva from Dunkirk, and drive around there too. How do we do this with a brain that evolved to cope with a couple of miles of hills and forest? Is it because I can drive a car at 60mph and therefore cover twenty times the distance I can walk in roughly the same time, so it all just scales naturally? It's crazy, isn't it? You'll be thinking about this next time you drive.
- xxs 4y ago
  One can tell the British background by the mix of metric ('kilo') and imperial ('mile'). Mentioning that as the way we adapt with different units, feeling natural about them, and getting defensive about them, too.
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    I'm not particularly "defensive" about units. I would however point out that I am not British, I'm Scottish.
    - toyg 4y ago
      Being Scottish technically makes you British, at least until independence comes. I'd argue that, even then, it will remain the case - as long as we accept that Scotland will continue to be part of the British Isles, and in particular of the island of Britain.
      - jprete 4y ago
        Scotland and Britain are separate countries in the UK with separate histories. No-one means the island when they talk about being British, they mean the descendants of the Britons.
        yarg 4y ago
        > The term "Great Britain" can also refer to the political territory of England, Scotland and Wales, which includes their offshore islands.[12] This territory and Northern Ireland constitute the United Kingdom.[13] The single Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the 1707 Acts of Union between the kingdoms of England (which at the time incorporated Wales) and Scotland.
        hwntw 4y ago
        Would be a nice thought, but literally nobody means the descendants of the Britons where talking about being British. If they did, depending upon what that encompasses, then either large swathes of Scotland would be included (Glasgow is a Brythonic name!), or you'd be excluding England from the discussion. Largely without fail, someone talking about Britain is talking of the island itself, or the current inhabitants.
        Dalewyn 4y ago
        You're incorrect, so have the obligatory CGP Grey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10
- yarg 4y ago
  We're been selected for the more extreme events that our ancestors went through, not just the day to day. We're a species that has navigated its way across the world. Human tribes frequently migrated seasonally with the herds on which we depended for food and clothing. We're very well equipped for long distance travel.
- ilyt 4y ago
  > while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed Predators are way faster than our walking speed. And the faster road is the more gentle any turn is so going 120km/h on a highway doesn't really require that much more reflex than running on twisty forest path. > Where I'm sitting it is a four hour drive to even get to England and yet I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford, another couple of hours further south. For that matter, it's not much more effort to visualise driving right to the south coast of England, working out where to get the ferry at Dover, and then how to drive right to Geneva from Dunkirk, and drive around there too. That has nothing to do with cars, people travelled before them. You might say "but it is bigger area" but it is also scaled up to car size. And with clear landmarks, hell, even signs telling you where you are and where to go. That's significantly easier than going into dense forest, that also changes look based on seasons.
- devnullbrain 4y ago
  Mentally, we seem to be able to adapt well to things that we can relate to what we 'should' know about. So roads are similar to naturally occurring tracks with landmarks. This seems to break down when we deal with things without easily appreciated analogues e.g. black holes and quantum physics. OTOH I don't know why we can pick up driving and cycling so easily. Some people instinctively know how to countersteer an oversteering car.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  It's possible because the road you're driving is an abstraction that eliminates so much information. While you're running through the woods, you have to see and account for every rock and root or you trip, fall, and get literally eaten alive. While driving on a road, you don't need to consider the road itself at all, really. That's the technology of roads - removing all obstacles to travel. A road is literally an empty, smooth space. So now you only need to consider traffic, turns, and distance. I'm not surprised at all that our brains that can probably remember the locations of every fruiting bush and tree in our territory can efficiently encode some turns.
- a_bonobo 4y ago
  What really blows my mind about driving is that with a little bit of training, we get a feel for how big the car is. You can squeeze into a tight parking lot and you won't scratch your or the other car! By feel! We can somehow transfer our feeling for how big our body is to avoid running into obstacles, to feel how big our car is. There is nothing in the history of mankind that would need for this to be a possible skill; no conceivable evolutionary pressure lead to being able to transfer the feeling for the size of our body onto other objects, while being inside those objects. We can just do that!
  - wasmitnetzen 4y ago
    I'm not so sure. Using tools is the defining specialty of our species, and knowing where the end of your tool is in 3D space seems fairly important to be able to hit that tiger with a spear.
  - snowwrestler 4y ago
    Well for this to work you also have to “feel” how big the parking space is, which is obviously not an extension of your body. What’s happening here is that your eyes are connected to a very highly trained model of the physical world around you. And your subjective experience of vision occurs post-processing through that model. It’s the same model you use to physically navigate the world, so it has a similar subjective feel regardless of what you’re doing. It’s not limited to cars and tools; pitchers can “feel” the strike zone, even though it’s 60 feet away. Like driving, this takes a lot of reps to develop (lots of training data).
  - kroltan 4y ago
    Maybe our monkey cousins carrying their offspring on their back? But yeah it's a very slight pressure.
  - lukeschlather 4y ago
    We evolved to wear all sorts of clothing. And really when you think about it the brain is probably the descendant of some parasite which crawled into another organism and used the exo-organism as a puppet, so in a sense it's exactly what a brain was originally adapted for is glomming on weird new appendages.
- codersfocus 4y ago
  > How do we do this with a brain that evolved to cope with a couple of miles of hills and forest? That’s where your misunderstanding is. A lot of animals are migratory, including us. We _did_ evolve to understand how to cross continents.
- mst 4y ago
  > I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford Straight on at full speed and hope you manage to dodge the local nutters driving like maniacs en route. (I did actually like Bradford in a bunch of ways but the drivers were still impressively aggressive, to the point where being a pedestrian in Italy was honestly quite a comfortable experience)
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    I mostly only went down there for Infest once a year, and the city centre isn't as terrifying as some of the suburbs which actually do like they were just LIDAR-scanned for some of the Fallout scenery. Fucking *Wakefield*, though.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  >> an visualise every step and turn of a journey of hundreds of miles, while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed, and do this for many different journeys. That is nothing. Try to run through a forest chasing a deer. Your brain will be calculating paths around trees, planning each footfall based on 3d terrain scans in your peripheral vision, constantly recalculating the position and likely path of the deer, and all the while a subroutine is calculating the trajectory of the rock you are about to through at your (hopefully) future dinner. That is what the human brain evolved to do. In comparison, driving a car along a road is like watching paint dry. Then think about what the deer brain is doing. It does all the same terrain mapping and 3d planning, but does so at double or triple the bandwidth. Deer see 300+ degrees, humans only 130ish.
- _dain_ 4y ago
  On the other hand, kids that are driven to school have a much worse mental model of their surrounding neighbourhood than kids who walk or bike. The agency and feedback matters.
- Andrex 4y ago
  This thought occurs to me constantly. And I apply it to the other drivers too, it's pretty crazy how we got traffic and automobiles working without crashing into each other. The brain is an amazing organ. It's also pretty amazing on a social level too. With a few obvious exceptions (certain signage, driving on the left or right side, etc.) the whole system was standardized for every adult in the entire world in something like 50 years. Everyone wanting to "get into" driving has to play by some basic rules. (And not following them is far more likely to be a mistake than intentional, at scale.) Then I look at bees and I realize we're really not that special. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/honeybee-mental-number-line-order-left-right https://www.sciencenews.org/article/honeybee-mental-number-l... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230307144358.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230307144358.h... https://today.ucsd.edu/story/complex-learned-social-behavior-discovered-in-bees-waggle-dance https://today.ucsd.edu/story/complex-learned-social-behavior...
dpoljak 4y ago
This strongly resonates with my memory of Marshall McLuhan and his book Understanding Media: Extensions of man; Where he defines media as any extension of ourselves or our senses. Arguing that a car (but in essence) its wheels, are extensions of our legs, and by giving us the ability to traverse further faster shaped our perception and the evolution of society. However it's a large book and I'll have to give it a reread since this is based on a vague recollection. But it's been in my mind more and more lately, especially with all the AI hype in the news.
- r4ltman 3y ago
  Logical maturity (AI) pushed to extreme revives human maturity
- dingusdew 4y ago
  [dead]
staringback 4y ago
I have wondered if this phenomenon had a name, thanks!

by yarg 4y ago

Gordonjcp 4y ago

> The same shit happens when driving. In a broader sense, it never fails to amaze me that a kilo and a half of goopy cells that evolved to work out where the plants that won't kill you and where to trap rabbits in the next valley are - things that are, generally speaking, not much further than you can see - can visualise every step and turn of a journey of hundreds of miles, while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed, and do this for many different journeys *including ones we have not taken yet* but which happen to be in roughly the same direction as where we were a last week. Where I'm sitting it is a four hour drive to even get to England and yet I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford, another couple of hours further south. For that matter, it's not much more effort to visualise driving right to the south coast of England, working out where to get the ferry at Dover, and then how to drive right to Geneva from Dunkirk, and drive around there too. How do we do this with a brain that evolved to cope with a couple of miles of hills and forest? Is it because I can drive a car at 60mph and therefore cover twenty times the distance I can walk in roughly the same time, so it all just scales naturally? It's crazy, isn't it? You'll be thinking about this next time you drive.

xxs 4y ago
One can tell the British background by the mix of metric ('kilo') and imperial ('mile'). Mentioning that as the way we adapt with different units, feeling natural about them, and getting defensive about them, too.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  I'm not particularly "defensive" about units. I would however point out that I am not British, I'm Scottish.
  - toyg 4y ago
    Being Scottish technically makes you British, at least until independence comes. I'd argue that, even then, it will remain the case - as long as we accept that Scotland will continue to be part of the British Isles, and in particular of the island of Britain.
    - jprete 4y ago
      Scotland and Britain are separate countries in the UK with separate histories. No-one means the island when they talk about being British, they mean the descendants of the Britons.
      - yarg 4y ago
        > The term "Great Britain" can also refer to the political territory of England, Scotland and Wales, which includes their offshore islands.[12] This territory and Northern Ireland constitute the United Kingdom.[13] The single Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the 1707 Acts of Union between the kingdoms of England (which at the time incorporated Wales) and Scotland.
      - hwntw 4y ago
        Would be a nice thought, but literally nobody means the descendants of the Britons where talking about being British. If they did, depending upon what that encompasses, then either large swathes of Scotland would be included (Glasgow is a Brythonic name!), or you'd be excluding England from the discussion. Largely without fail, someone talking about Britain is talking of the island itself, or the current inhabitants.
      - Dalewyn 4y ago
        You're incorrect, so have the obligatory CGP Grey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10
yarg 4y ago
We're been selected for the more extreme events that our ancestors went through, not just the day to day. We're a species that has navigated its way across the world. Human tribes frequently migrated seasonally with the herds on which we depended for food and clothing. We're very well equipped for long distance travel.
ilyt 4y ago
> while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed Predators are way faster than our walking speed. And the faster road is the more gentle any turn is so going 120km/h on a highway doesn't really require that much more reflex than running on twisty forest path. > Where I'm sitting it is a four hour drive to even get to England and yet I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford, another couple of hours further south. For that matter, it's not much more effort to visualise driving right to the south coast of England, working out where to get the ferry at Dover, and then how to drive right to Geneva from Dunkirk, and drive around there too. That has nothing to do with cars, people travelled before them. You might say "but it is bigger area" but it is also scaled up to car size. And with clear landmarks, hell, even signs telling you where you are and where to go. That's significantly easier than going into dense forest, that also changes look based on seasons.
devnullbrain 4y ago
Mentally, we seem to be able to adapt well to things that we can relate to what we 'should' know about. So roads are similar to naturally occurring tracks with landmarks. This seems to break down when we deal with things without easily appreciated analogues e.g. black holes and quantum physics. OTOH I don't know why we can pick up driving and cycling so easily. Some people instinctively know how to countersteer an oversteering car.
hypertele-Xii 4y ago
It's possible because the road you're driving is an abstraction that eliminates so much information. While you're running through the woods, you have to see and account for every rock and root or you trip, fall, and get literally eaten alive. While driving on a road, you don't need to consider the road itself at all, really. That's the technology of roads - removing all obstacles to travel. A road is literally an empty, smooth space. So now you only need to consider traffic, turns, and distance. I'm not surprised at all that our brains that can probably remember the locations of every fruiting bush and tree in our territory can efficiently encode some turns.
a_bonobo 4y ago
What really blows my mind about driving is that with a little bit of training, we get a feel for how big the car is. You can squeeze into a tight parking lot and you won't scratch your or the other car! By feel! We can somehow transfer our feeling for how big our body is to avoid running into obstacles, to feel how big our car is. There is nothing in the history of mankind that would need for this to be a possible skill; no conceivable evolutionary pressure lead to being able to transfer the feeling for the size of our body onto other objects, while being inside those objects. We can just do that!
- wasmitnetzen 4y ago
  I'm not so sure. Using tools is the defining specialty of our species, and knowing where the end of your tool is in 3D space seems fairly important to be able to hit that tiger with a spear.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  Well for this to work you also have to “feel” how big the parking space is, which is obviously not an extension of your body. What’s happening here is that your eyes are connected to a very highly trained model of the physical world around you. And your subjective experience of vision occurs post-processing through that model. It’s the same model you use to physically navigate the world, so it has a similar subjective feel regardless of what you’re doing. It’s not limited to cars and tools; pitchers can “feel” the strike zone, even though it’s 60 feet away. Like driving, this takes a lot of reps to develop (lots of training data).
- kroltan 4y ago
  Maybe our monkey cousins carrying their offspring on their back? But yeah it's a very slight pressure.
- lukeschlather 4y ago
  We evolved to wear all sorts of clothing. And really when you think about it the brain is probably the descendant of some parasite which crawled into another organism and used the exo-organism as a puppet, so in a sense it's exactly what a brain was originally adapted for is glomming on weird new appendages.
codersfocus 4y ago
> How do we do this with a brain that evolved to cope with a couple of miles of hills and forest? That’s where your misunderstanding is. A lot of animals are migratory, including us. We _did_ evolve to understand how to cross continents.
mst 4y ago
> I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford Straight on at full speed and hope you manage to dodge the local nutters driving like maniacs en route. (I did actually like Bradford in a bunch of ways but the drivers were still impressively aggressive, to the point where being a pedestrian in Italy was honestly quite a comfortable experience)
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  I mostly only went down there for Infest once a year, and the city centre isn't as terrifying as some of the suburbs which actually do like they were just LIDAR-scanned for some of the Fallout scenery. Fucking *Wakefield*, though.
sandworm101 4y ago
>> an visualise every step and turn of a journey of hundreds of miles, while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed, and do this for many different journeys. That is nothing. Try to run through a forest chasing a deer. Your brain will be calculating paths around trees, planning each footfall based on 3d terrain scans in your peripheral vision, constantly recalculating the position and likely path of the deer, and all the while a subroutine is calculating the trajectory of the rock you are about to through at your (hopefully) future dinner. That is what the human brain evolved to do. In comparison, driving a car along a road is like watching paint dry. Then think about what the deer brain is doing. It does all the same terrain mapping and 3d planning, but does so at double or triple the bandwidth. Deer see 300+ degrees, humans only 130ish.
_dain_ 4y ago
On the other hand, kids that are driven to school have a much worse mental model of their surrounding neighbourhood than kids who walk or bike. The agency and feedback matters.
Andrex 4y ago
This thought occurs to me constantly. And I apply it to the other drivers too, it's pretty crazy how we got traffic and automobiles working without crashing into each other. The brain is an amazing organ. It's also pretty amazing on a social level too. With a few obvious exceptions (certain signage, driving on the left or right side, etc.) the whole system was standardized for every adult in the entire world in something like 50 years. Everyone wanting to "get into" driving has to play by some basic rules. (And not following them is far more likely to be a mistake than intentional, at scale.) Then I look at bees and I realize we're really not that special. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/honeybee-mental-number-line-order-left-right https://www.sciencenews.org/article/honeybee-mental-number-l... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230307144358.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230307144358.h... https://today.ucsd.edu/story/complex-learned-social-behavior-discovered-in-bees-waggle-dance https://today.ucsd.edu/story/complex-learned-social-behavior...

dpoljak 4y ago

This strongly resonates with my memory of Marshall McLuhan and his book Understanding Media: Extensions of man; Where he defines media as any extension of ourselves or our senses. Arguing that a car (but in essence) its wheels, are extensions of our legs, and by giving us the ability to traverse further faster shaped our perception and the evolution of society. However it's a large book and I'll have to give it a reread since this is based on a vague recollection. But it's been in my mind more and more lately, especially with all the AI hype in the news.

r4ltman 3y ago
Logical maturity (AI) pushed to extreme revives human maturity
dingusdew 4y ago
[dead]

staringback 4y ago

I have wondered if this phenomenon had a name, thanks!