undefined | Better HN

0 pointsdjtango1y ago0 comments

Is beying another typo?

In my personal learning journey I have been exploring the space of intuitive learning which is dominant in physical skills. Singing requires extremely precise control of actions we can't fully articulate or even rationalise. Teaching those skills requires metaphors and visualising and a whole lot of feedback + trial & error.

I believe that this kind of learning is fundamentally non verbal and we can achieve abstraction of these skills without language. Walking is the most universal of these skills and we learn it before we can speak but if you study it (or better try to program a robot to walk with as many degrees of freedom as the human musculoskeletal system) you will discover that almost all of us don't understand what all the things that go into the "simple" task of walking!

My understanding is that people who are gifted at sports or other physical skills like musical instruments have developed the ability to discover and embed these non verbal abstractions quickly. When I practise the piano and am working on something fast, playing semiquavers at anything above 120bpm is not really conscious anymore in the sense of "press this key then that key"

The concept of arpeggio is verbal but the action is non verbal. In human thought where does verbal and non-verbal start and end? Its probably a continuum

0 comments

2 comments · 2 top-level

wh0knows1y ago

I think it’s not entirely accurate to say that we “learn” to walk from a zero state. It’s clear that our DNA has embedded knowledge of how to walk and it develops our body appropriately. Our brains might also have preconditioning to make learning to walk much easier.

Music or sports are more interesting to investigate (in my opinion) since those specific actions won’t be preprogrammed and must be learned independently.

The same way we build abstractions for language in order to perform “telepathy” it seems like for music or sports we build body-specific abstractions. They work similar to words within our own brain but are not something easily communicated since they’re not tied to any language, it’s just a feeling.

I think it’s an interesting point that quite often the best athletes or musicians are terrible coaches. They probably have a much more innate internal language for their body that cannot be communicated easily. Partially, I think, that their body is more different than others which helps them be exceptional. Or that weaker athletes or musicians need to focus much more on lessons from others, so their body language gets tied much closer to human language and that makes it much easier for them to then communicate the lessons they learn to others.

throwaway4aday1y ago

I don't think motor skills are a good object to use in an argument about verbal vs non-verbal thinking. We have large regions of our brains primarily dedicated to motor skills and you can't argue that humans are any more talented or capable at controlling our bodies than other animals, we're actually rather poor performers in this area. You're right to say that you aren't conscious of the very highly trained movements you are making because they likely have only a tenuous connection with any part of your brain that we would recognize as possessing consciousness or thought, they are mostly learned reflexes and responses to internal and external stimuli at this point like a professional baseball player who can automatically catch a ball flying at him before he's even aware of it.