Here’s something I’d learned about before, but didn’t really understand until nursing school:
When you put your hand on a hot stove
(or any extremity on any major, unexpected source of pain), the decision to pull it away happens in your back. That’s what a spinal reflex means–not just that the action is automatic, but that your brain isn’t even consulted.
You will never remember it this way. You will always remember the event as “the stove felt hot so I pulled my hand away.” But “you” didn’t do anything. All you did was come up with a justification after your back had already acted. Even if you know this intellectually, it won’t change anything–you still won’t be able to remember your hand acting on its own. Your brain will not allow it.
There are more parts of the nervous system that work this way than you’d probably like to think about.
Alternate framing: your spinal cord (and indeed your whole body) is part of “you” just like your brain
Alternate, alternate framing: Almost none of your brain is “you” either.
The parts of your brain that consciously think “My name is [name]! I want to do good things and not do bad things! Here are some decisions I’m going to make!” are pretty much dwarfed by the ones that don’t. We usually frame them as acting in service to the consciousness–your non-conscious brain may help you balance when you walk, but you tell it where you want to go–but then again, you also think you decided to take your hand off the stove.
Have you ever walked into a room, and then wondered what you were supposed to do in there? You think you just forgot. But what if you really didn’t know?
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(Please note: this is mostly me going “oooh, wouldn’t it be creepy if,” and at this point I have strayed pretty far from the amount of neuroscience I actually know.)
There’re a few sci-fi stories that play with this idea!
I have had this on my mind for days, someone please help:
Why are dogs dogs?
I mean, how do we see a pug and then a husky and understand that both are dogs? I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a picture of a breed of dog I hadn’t seen before and wondered what animal it was.
Do you want the Big Answer or the Small Answers cos I have a feeling this is about to get Intense
Oooh okay are YOU gonna answer this, hang on I need to get some snacks and make sure the phone is off.
The short answer is “because they’re statistically unlikely to be anything else.”
The long question is “given the extreme diversity of morphology in dogs, with many subsets of ‘dogs’ bearing no visual resemblance to each other, how am I able to intuit that they belong to the ‘dog’ set just by looking?”
The reason that this is a Good Big Question is because we are broadly used to categorising Things as related based on resemblances. Then everyone realized about genes and evolution and so on, and so now we have Fun Facts like “elephants are ACTUALLY closely related to rock hyraxes!! Even though they look nothing alike!!”
These Fun Facts are appealing because they’re not intuitive. So why is dog-sorting intuitive?
Well, because if you eliminate all the other possibilities, most dogs are dogs.
To process Things – whether animals, words, situations or experiences – our brains categorise the most important things about them, and then compare these to our memory banks. If we’ve experienced the same thing before – whether first-hand or through a story – then we know what’s happening, and we proceed accordingly.
If the New Thing is completely New, then the brain pings up a bunch of question marks, shunts into a different track, counts up all the Similar Traits, and assigns it a provisional category based on its similarity to other Things. We then experience the Thing, exploring it further, and gaining new knowledge. Our brain then categorises the New Thing based on the knowledge and traits. That is how humans experience the universe. We do our best, and we generally do it well.
This is the basis of stereotyping. It underlies some of our worst behaviours (racism), some of our most challenging problems (trauma), helps us survive (stories) and sharing the ability with things that don’t have it leads to some of our most whimsical creations (artificial intelligence.)
In fact, one reason that humans are so wonderfully successful is that we can effectively gain knowledge from experiences without having experienced them personally! You don’t have to eat all the berries to find the poisonous ones. You can just remember stories and descriptions of berries, and compare those to the ones you’ve just discovered. You can benefit from memories that aren’t your own!
On the other hand, if you had a terribly traumatic experience involving, say, an eagle, then your brain will try to protect you in every way possible from a similar experience. If you collect too many traumatic experiences with eagles, then your brain will not enjoy eagle-shaped New Things. In fact, if New Things match up to too many eagle-like categories, such as
* pointy * Specific!! Squawking noise!! * The hot Glare of the Yellow Eye * Patriotism?!? * CLAWS VERY BAD VERY BAD
Then the brain may shunt the train of thought back into trauma, and the person will actually experience the New Thing as trauma. Even if the New Thing was something apparently unrelated, like being generally pointy, or having a hot glare. (This is an overly simplistic explanation of how triggers work, but it’s the one most accessible to people.)
So the answer rests in how we categorise dogs, and what “dog” means to humans. Human brains associate dogs with universal categories, such as
* four legs * Meat Eater * Soft friend * Doggo-ness???? * Walkies * An Snout, * BORK BORK
Anything we have previously experienced and learned as A Dog gets added to the memory bank. Sometimes it brings new categories along with it. So a lifetime’s experience results in excellent dog-intuition.
And anything we experience with, say, a 90% match is officially a Dog.
Brains are super-good at eliminating things, too. So while the concept of physical doggo-ness is pretty nebulous, and has to include greyhounds and Pekingese and mastiffs, we know that even if an animal LOOKS like a bear, if the other categories don’t match up in context (bears are not usually soft friends, they don’t Bork Bork, they don’t have long tails to wag) then it is statistically more likely to be a Doggo. If it occupies a dog-shaped space then it is usually a dog.
So if you see someone dragging a fluffy whatnot along on a string, you will go,
* Mop?? (Unlikely – seems to be self-propelled.) * Alien? (Unlikely – no real alien ever experienced.) * Threat? (Vastly unlikely in context.) * Rabbit? (No. Rabbits hop, and this appears to scurry.) (Brains are very keen on categorising movement patterns. This is why lurching zombies and bad CGI are so uncomfortable to experience, brains just go “INCORRECT!! That is WRONG!” Without consciously knowing why. Anyway, very few animals move like domestic dogs!) * Very fluffy cat? (Maybe – but not quite. Shares many characteristics, though!) * Eldritch horror? (No, it is obviously a soft friend of unknown type) * Robotic toy? (Unlikely – too complex and convincing.) * alert: amusing animal detected!!! This is a good animal!! This is pleasing!! It may be appropriate to laugh at this animal, because we have just realized that it is probably a … * DOG!!!! Soft friend, alive, walks on leash. It had a low doggo-ness quotient! and a confusing Snout, but it is NOT those other Known Things, and it occupies a dog-shaped space! * Hahahaha!!! It is extra funny and appealing, because it made us guess!!!! We love playing that game. * Best doggo. * PING! NEW CATEGORIES ADDED TO “Doggo” set: mopness, floof, confusing Snout.
And that’s why most dogs are dogs. You’re so good at identifying dog-shaped spaces that they can’t be anything else!
I feel like this explains why Very Young Kids call every unknown foru-legged creature a Dog
Adding different characteristics together into an idea of what something is is called a schema. That’s exactly why young kids do it: they’re so young that they haven’t had a lot of experience with building schemas for things. For example their schema of a dog may = four legs and soft but not not include bark. So when they see an animal that has for legs and is tiny, like a cat or a rabbit, they may end up calling it a dog because it fits into their schema of what a dog *is*. Once they know that dogs bark or that cats are fairly different animals that ALSO are four legged and soft, they can redefine the schema accordingly so that now dog = soft, four legs, and bark, while cat might = soft, four legs, and purr.
I can physically type a sentence really quick without looking at the keyboard but I cannot mentally remember the order of the keyboard. / cr
Does someone have any explanation for this? Happens to me too. For instance: I can write anything I want without looking at keyboard, but if the room is dark, I can’t write good, lots of mistakes… I am not even looking at the keyboard no matter if lights are on or off but can’t really write correctly when off.
it’s because the layout of your keyboard is stored in your procedural memory, which is what you physically know how to do, not in your explicit or declarative memory, which is facts and events you can consciously recall.
basically, you know how to type because you know how to move your fingers, the way you know how to talk the way you know how to move your mouth. it’s not stored as facts, it’s stored as movement. you probably can’t sit there and consciously recall the exact position of your tongue, lips, and throat to say each letter, either, unless you check by doing it or carefully imagine doing it.
Is that why the row/column shift thing happens sometimes? Like I’ll just be typing along trying to make a sentence and it’ll come out as “yjr fph od dp viyr” when I REALLY meant “the dog is so cute”??
yes, that’s precisely why. if your hand shifts just a little— or way too much— and your finger hits between keys, or a control key instead of a letter, or the edge of the keyboard, that feels wrong and you know you need to adjust. but if you shift just the right amount to the next row over, your fingers hit the center of the keys and the motion feels right, even though you’re now tapping the wrong keys, so you keep going on automatic until you consciously notice the wrong letters are appearing on screen.
this isn’t a problem for people classically taught to keep their hands resting on the home row, because they keep their index fingers aligned with the raised nubs on f and j. but most of us have our own individual hodgepodge way we learned on our own just from using the internet. that’s also why our typing speed goes WAY down for most of us if we go from our own personal ‘incorrect’ way of typing to the hands-on-home-row ‘correct’ way— suddenly we’re moving way differently, and have to draw on our declarative memory to figure out what goes where, instead of our years and years of procedural memory.
as another interesting note, things like opening files, moving files, and starting programs can be part of our procedural memory— just try explaining to someone who’s no good with computers what stuff you need to click, what stuff you need to double click, and what stuff you need to drag, and you’ll really notice how fluid and instinctive your handling of digital objects has become.
just moving along like everyone else 