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Our bodies n brains are so cool. Think about what goes into locating a sound in space.
Edit: there’s more to it but at the most basic level your brain calculates the fraction of a second difference between when one ear picks up a sound and when the other does creating a reference point based on that.
My hearing is pretty severely damaged in my left ear, and for several months I thought everything was to my right. but my ability to locate sounds has come back. My hearings not any better, my brain just figured out that my left ears fucked and compensated.
You can also detect is the source up or down thanks to ear shape which delays sound for couple of ms.
Put on some halfway decent headphones and try out the virtual barbershop.
Not advanced maths per se; neural networks are amazing! Fuzzy matching based on experience - taken to an incredible level. And, tuneable by internal simulation (imagination).
there is certainly math going on in the brain at various levels, both equivalent models and identical sorts of calculations, it’s not just fuzzy matching.
But probably not calculating trigonometry and calculus when juggling, right?
almost certainly doing those things and more (especially lin alg and diffeq solutions, and who knows what equivalent mathematical representations). Why wouldn’t it? even stereotyped, there are subtle feedback variations you need to account for.
Don’t be fooled to think computer neural networks is how the brain is structured. Through out history we’ve always compared the brain to the most advanced technology at the time. From clocks, to computers with short and long term memory, and now to neural networks.
That is a good point, though the architecture of computer neutral networks is inspired by how we think the brain works, and if I understand correctly there is some definite similarity in the architecture.
Lots of difference though, still!
I would guess that every statement made is kind of true. It is a clock, a computer and a LLM,…
I would even go as far as LLM is the closest to a functioning brain we can produce from a functional perspective. And even the artificial brains are to complex to understand in detail.
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If you’re about to walk into a bar with you head, or like the top of a doorpost or smt. You’ll instinctively pull back and avoid the obstacle, inches before it hurts, because your brain notice the hairs on your head moved. That’s why men who have recently gone bald, often have bumps and bruises on their head. My bald colleague told me that for him, that was the hardest thing about going bald.
Wow super interesting
Thank you hair! I only cut you out of love!
So by that logic, a boxer who shaves his head will take harder hits!
Or does that fractional reaction cause the brain to shift forward more than it would if they had not reacted? Could that reaction lead to worse brain injuries? Makes me wonder.
You pull away from the object touching your hair, so I don’t think it would lead to worse injuries. I suppose it could set someone up better using fents and jabs.
Maybe I’m understanding wrong but hair don’t have nerves. Is our brain detecting the micro movements of hair follicles inside the skin?
Nerves in the scalp.
Throwing and catching always amaze me. And it’s not something that everyone is always great at, for sure, but anyone can try to toss a wad of paper into the waste basket. Whether or not you make it, the calculations under the hood, happening so quickly, always astound me to think about.
What’s amazing is our ability to calculate the path of something in the air.
There’s a test they did with Cristiano Ronaldo where someone kicked a ball to him so he could head it. They shut off the lights before the ball was in the air and somehow from the body shape of the person kicking it, he was able to know how to make contact with it without being able to see it.
I’m not a fan of Ronaldo but that was very cool to watch, thanks for sharing!
Ronaldo’s ego is incredible, and he’s almost always looking out for himself in everything he does. But, you can’t deny that he’s one of the best ever players. And his charisma means he’s a great choice for something like this where he has to perform and interact with all the “scientists”. Someone like Messi could do the same kinds of moves, but he wouldn’t be able to chat with the presenters and “scientists” between events in a natural way. (P.S. I love that they got someone named Ronald to be the ordinary guy who couldn’t do anything useful, that was just funny.)
I also think Ronaldo genuinely cares about all the biomechanics and all that, as long as it’s something that applies to him, and that he could use to make himself better. A lot of other players just play on instinct and don’t want to have to think about it.
Read somewhere that catching is actually dead simple, just “move towards the image of the incoming target” (I’m not talking about the arm kinematics).
There were a robot paper bin that zoomed under stuff you threw up in the air using no complicated algorithms for example.
Funnily many algos are calked on physical and chemical effects in the real workld, like splines for example were made with a thin metal bar and lead weight bending it to get the lines used in boat hull construction.
I always imagine it more like neural networks. simply based on a lot of training and experience. As an example think of times when you step onto a non moving escalator. Your mind definitely knows its not moving but you still can’t defeat the trained expectation of jerk.
Layered as well. Little bits process very specific things and simplify it for the beast.
Take shrooms and watch as the divisions between the little bits break down into absolute chaos :D
Acid, too. Dissociatives for the body as well, to some extent.
Have you ever swiped on your phone, but the screen doesn’t move (due to end of content, or unknowingly being an unswipable screen), and you feel your eyes jerk automatically in reflex, predicting the movement that didn’t happen?
thank you for enlightening me to the fact that i am definitely not addicted to my phone
A lot of it is less math and more just approximations using old data, just fitting a complex statistical model neural nets suck ass at math
Yeah, your brain is not doing projectile motion equations in real time, it’s the same process as teaching a neutral network to approximate a parabola.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s incredibly impressive that this prediction in our brain requires the visual processing of data from eyes to identify an object flying through the air, moving our hand in a perfect intercept course to catch it. All without having to have a ton of data points to ‘train’ on.
Yeah there is a lot of neural networks, but i don’t think that is the only thing in brain. There could be calculators and integrator circuits
I always thought about how interesting it is that handing things to people is so reliable. We just kind of know exactly when the other person has grabbed something enough for us to let go.
And then there’s the rare moment when you think they have it so you let go and it falls to the floor 😭
A lot of it is the difference between learning practically and learning theoretically. You don’t have to understand the underlying mechanics in practice to know how to keep getting the same result. Your brain doesn’t have to be doing any math, it just has to have shaken a bottle enough times to have a good comparative basis formed.
Learning to calculate the current remaining volume in a container when observing someone else shake it… that would use all that theoretical knowledge and math.
It’s like knowing how hard you have to throw an egg at a wall for it to break instead of bounce off. You do it 100 times, you just get a good feel for it. Doing all the math, and then trying to learn it practically is barely gonna affect how quickly you learn it in practice. But if you wanted to make a robot that throws it exactly hard enough without wasting any energy, practical knowledge will have almost no value, and theory and math will be incredibly valuable.
This is coming from someone who does indeed have the whole “passive trajectory analysis of every moving object around me” thing. I can’t do crowds or drive at busy times. But, for moving through a minor crowd while reading a book, or pulling into a tight parking space while other cars are moving around near me, it’s very helpful. I have good spatial awareness in general, like parking in my garage with only an inch of clearance on the far side of my car has never been an issue in 14 years so far. Or when doing it with someone else’s borrowed car every now and then too. When I shrug off the difficulty of doing something like that, people seem to be amazed. Otherwise, I would have assumed it was normal, feels normal to me.
Another one is levelling.
A lot of people can see a picture frame is about 0.5° out of level and their fucking eye twitches until they fix it
Me included
That’s nuts when you think about it
See, I live in an old apartment. The corners aren’t 90°, the wall a picture is hanging on is convex. When I’m lying in bed and look at the picture it looks like it’s crooked but I used a level several times on it and it’s as straight as can be. It’s driving me insane.
But “level” isn’t what you need. If the floor and ceiling aren’t level, it’ll look wrong.
This is when you set it relative to the rest of the unleveled stuff in your view to make it look level.
The tiles in my kitchen were installed slightly rotated so I had to do that with all my shelves
I worked on an industrial robot once, and we parked it such that the middle section of the arm was up above the robot and supposed to be level. I could tell from 50 feet away and a glance that it wasn’t, so we checked. It was off by literally 1 degree.
Degrees are bigger than we think, but also our eyes are incredible instruments.
I purposefully slightly tilt most my wall hangings. I like watching guests squirm when they mention it and I do nothing
I respect and hate this. I could never
_
I would say there is still some complicated stuff going on in the brain with knowing where your arm, hand, elbow and shoulder are in space as well how much force you need to apply (the precise amount of motor neurons to activate at the exact time) so you can toss the ball in the arc you need to catch it on the other side.
Sure. I myself am not good a coordination, can’t juggle shit.
When sharpening knives, with practice you can tell when you are done by sliding your fingertips along (not across) the sharpened bevel. It’s possible to feel imperfections measured in micrometers this way.
If the earth were shrank down to the size of a golf ball, you could feel houses.
That seems wildly unnecessary. I can already feel houses.
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