As a musician I can agree with this - I'm not playing an instrument right now as I type but I can fully 'feel' what it would be to be playing, that extension is such a tight connection. I feel the same way on a bicycle when I'm in a wide open area I can really zoom around on, it's like I have wings.
How do our brains adapt to control an extra body part?
61–70 of 155 posts
Re: How do our brains adapt to control an extra body part?
#62I broke my Achilles tendon - had to have a FULL reconstruction - they took a tendon that used to help waggle my big toe (the muscle is in my leg) wrapped around my heel and back up my leg and rebuilt my achilles around that - now I have a muscle that used to wiggle my toe than moves my entire foot. How hard was it to relearn? at first I'd try to move my toe and something else would move, it felt weird - but doctor's…
I am amazed at whoever first thought of doing a reconstruction like that...what was the inspiration? what evidence and confidence did they have that it was going to work?
I have no idea who pioneered it - AFAIK this is what they normally do for my case (was ~10 years ago)
BTW most achilles breaks are dealt with my putting them in a boot to force the broken bits together and hope that they heal in place - in my case we knew it was damaged but it later broke and my GPs misdiagnosed it so it was broken for ~6 months before we realised
Re: How do our brains adapt to control an extra body part?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is absolutely the case - in software, accessibility features are in many cases identical to power user and engineering quality features. Color-theme support is necessary functionality for color vision deficiency modes, labels and tags on UI elements enable screen-readers just as much as they enable automated testing suites, configurable keybindings make it easier to get your app working with assistive input devi…
The opposite, dark patterns, are an accessibility nightmare.
Yeah. If you ever thought it was annoying to have to spend two hours on the phone to get Comcast to cancel your internet, imagine how much it would suck to try to do that with a sign language interpreter sitting next to you, or with text-to-speech and speech-to-text systems in the loop.
Re: How do our brains adapt to control an extra body part?
#64I once saw a documentary on a haptic compass, built from some rumble packs. It allowed people to improve their way-finding skills, and if I recall correctly, people accustomed to the idea of having this extra sense after about a week or so. I can’t easily find the original research (somewhere in the 1990s), but several hackers and artists have rebuilt or rediscovered the idea. See for example https://blinry.org/compa…
https://www.noisebridge.net/images/9/91/Jne5_4_r02.pdf and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bach-y-Rita are probably what you're looking for.
Re: How do our brains adapt to control an extra body part?
#65I started wearing a bath robe belt as a tail and my brain quickly starts telling me I am wearing it when I am not. I also had a phantom watch ⌚ on for a week after losing it.
Did HN start allowing emojis or did that one slip through the cracks because it pre-dates the inclusion of Japanese emojis?
There are certain blocks that are not caught by the filter.
Re: How do our brains adapt to control an extra body part?
#66I wonder if they don't even need to be like traditional body parts like thumbs. Perhaps like octopus tentacles with claws on the end...
Dani, whom the article mentions, has also worked on prosthetic arm replacements which are indeed modelled on tentacles. I don't have a link to hand but I'm sure some use of your favourite search engine would show this for you.
I am unsure I want to search for images of tentacle arm replacements.
Re: How do our brains adapt to control an extra body part?
#67Interesting article, corroborated by half a century of video games.
Re: How do our brains adapt to control an extra body part?
#68This is a rather good YouTube documentary about it.
"Bionic 3rd thumb: The future of human augmentation | Hard Reset"
Re: How do our brains adapt to control an extra body part?
#69I can imagine exactly what that thumb would feel like if it was integrated with my nervous system. Wondering how common this is.
When I was a very small child, I was fascinated by the sensation of different body parts - the way touching each finger in turn compares to the next, and the way the opposite side has a similar range of sensations. It feels like I know exactly how it would feel to have a sixth, seventh finger in sequence with the others. I imagine that having a second right arm grafted below my current one would have the 'right' but 'lower' feeling and I could use it immediately. But there's no way to test whether this is just a childish imagining that has stayed with me.
Re: How do our brains adapt to control an extra body part?
#70I started wearing a bath robe belt as a tail and my brain quickly starts telling me I am wearing it when I am not. I also had a phantom watch ⌚ on for a week after losing it.
I quit using Oura ring and it took almost two years until I didn’t have that feeling in my finger that something was missing. With Apple Watch it took half year.
Makes me wonder maybe brain adapts faster when you add something, and it takes longer to adapt for loss? Also maybe finger took longer time as there are more nerves there?