What a marvellous article. One thing I’ve never quite appreciated in neuroscience is how useful physical movement is as a debugging layer. During a task, in observing gaits, tremors, speed, accuracy, etc., you’re able to gain a deeper understanding of how cognition works for non-movement tasks. I guess cognition is, after all, still just movement, but through a conceptual plane instead of a physical one.
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It's been argued that most, maybe all, of human cognition is based on a sort of folk-physics mental model with objects. We throw ideas into the ring to be chewed on and distilled and maybe brought in to practice or thrown out as useless. The linguistic metaphors we use, at least, to talk about ideas and abstractions, are never more than one, maybe two, steps away from a hand moving or rearranging something.
In fact the Glasgow coma scale (1), which gives you levels of human consciousness, is precicely that.
I'm confused at what exactly the link is here but I'm curious. Could you elaborate?
I was responding to this comment:
“The linguistic metaphors we use, at least, to talk about ideas and abstractions, are never more than one, maybe two, steps away from a hand moving or rearranging something”
And the Glasgow scale is exactly that, how people physically respond to stimulus with a body movement, and subsequent complex body movements - eg just humans vaguely deciding - is how we treat for levels of consciousness.
It’s not scientific at all is the point and is very “folk-physics mental model with objects” to the OPs original assertion
I think part of this connection reflects an universal (not just coincidental) equivalence: between intelligence, (logical) reasoning and planning. Finding a solution to a logical problem is perhaps similar to finding a path in a motion planning problem. You have to consider a number of paths going from A (premises, or in general your current state), to B (a desired proposition, or in general "something that is good/satisfies you"). You have to search a path (within a heuristic list of possible paths) or plan a path of consistent propositions that in the end prove what you want (although our notions of proof and consistency are usually relaxed for practical purposes: when I say "The window was left open, and we are in the winter, therefore the room will be cold", this is not a real proof in the Euclidean sense.
> folk-physics mental model with objects
Kind of like how object permanence [0] must be learned by babies, slowly worked into their internal model, even though "things don't usually vanish when they go behind other things" seems like reliably low-hanging fruit for any process (whether evolutionary or meddling demigod) to wire up as instinctual physics knowledge.
Animals like newborn deer fawns are born knowing how to walk, follow their mothers around, and run away from danger, although their legs are weak at first. So this makes me wonder if having to learn object permanence is just one more example of human babies being underdeveloped compared to those of other species of animals.
Alternatively, God made human babies superior in design from birth by giving them increased adaptability. The extra flexibility might require the specific movements to be trained, puts them behind on any specific goal at the start, and over time makes them exceed the innate capabilities of other species over time. By exceed, they might have a higher variety of behaviors or do them better (esp with tech).
In A.I., we see this with hard-coded, assembly FSM’s vs interpreters running high-level code. The former works with high-efficiency out of the box but can’t change behavior or improve much. The latter does nothing until it’s taught the extra knowledge (interpreted codes) which also might have new behaviors (functions). Many game developers switched from hard-coded assembly to interpreted code for AI agents for that reason.
So, it’s not under-developed: it’s a better-developed component with different tradeoffs.
> God made human babies superior in design from birth by giving them increased adaptability.
Holy assumptions batman. Homo sapiens aren't "superior", that's a terrible starting place for a hypothesis. There are plenty of metrics a human will never beat other species. Reaction time is a great starting place.
Sure, but which species is sitting here having a conversation about it?
Why does that imply superiority?
It's like you're saying "We humans are the smartest in the world. Smarter animals are better than other animals, so we're better than all other animals."
A giraffe may just as well believe "We giraffes have the longest necks in the world. Animals with longer necks are better than others, so we're better than all other animals."
"Intelligence" itself is not well defined anyway. It may as well mean thinking like a human.
The apex predators of the Earth who are in control of it using their brains that nothing else can match. They also regularly contemplate this using their morals, imaginations, and reasoning. Definitely far above the rest.
To me it makes very little sense for object permanence to be learned rather than innate - have a look at the "contradicting evidence" in the article you linked
See the book Metaphors We Live By for more on this. (It's a little heady and the authors lost me with some of their deeper claims in the second half of the book, but the first few chapters were fascinating)
The first video linked in the OP is astonishing to me, a layperson with no medical training.
It's giving me lots to think about with regard to motor impairment. (Basically, I'm reviewing my prejudices and nodding due better understanding the plight of afflicted individuals.) [0]
One thing I’ve never quite appreciated in neuroscience is how useful physical movement is as a debugging layer.
My sister, who is a choreographer, had some interesting views on how movement could be used as therapy. (Specifically, crawling, as a base-level movement.) I thought that was woo-woo, but later I read that there was some medical support for this.
Brains are contextual. A scent might bring back a specific memory of a time and place complete with visual and auditory hallucinations, for lack of a better term. All trauma happened in the individual's past, often childhood. It makes sense that revisiting childhood contexts in any form might offer access to the regions of brain which encode the traumatic experiences. Revisiting prior experiences with present perspective and working to put them into words is the underpinnings of talk therapy.