why can your brain quickly process something like the angle and speed needed to throw something to someone , but would have to work to figure out the math behind the throw?
In: Mathematics
I studied brain science in university.
You don’t actually solve the problem using the same math as in science class. Instead, you simply learn how a ball heading right toward you should look, and adjust your position until it looks right.
The best explanation I’ve run into is that your brain isn’t processing the physics behind your throw, it’s just using what it remembers from previous throws you’ve made. “They look kinda far away, and this is a heavy ball, I should probably throw like… This”
Because you have many, many years of throwing a ball and testing out all of the angles and speeds that don’t work. It took much more “work” to train your brain that way than would ever take to do the math.
Your brain is really good with patterns, pulling in stuff you’ve learned and applying it to the current situation. These patterns include what physical movements to make to accomplish certain goals. When you want to throw something to someone, your brain draws from past experiences of throwing things with similar weight and to a similar distance to make the throw. If you had never thrown anything in your life, you would have terrible accuracy, but most people have had practice all throughout life. And likewise, if you practice regularly such as athletes in throwing-related sports, you can train your muscles to throw with high accuracy at various ranges.
Just watch a toddler attempt to throw things to see how terrible our brains are at first, as the object will almost always fly up or to the side and only very rarely be within catchable range. By early primary school age, they can usually get an object in your general direction. And by late primary school, most kids can throw reasonable well, especially if they participate in a sport which requires throwing a ball. These kids are unlikely to be able to perform the math on paper, but they’ve trained their muscles through play how to perform the actions.
When you throw a thing, you’re drawing on the learned experience of throwing stuff before. You’re not thinking: this ball is .5kg, my arm is .75m long, so I need to rotate at x to impart force. You’re going: this is a similar weight to something else I’ve thrown, so if I throw it like that, it should go the same distance. Whether it does or doesn’t, you add a new data point.
Are brains are doing the math, just without numbers. We pretty much learn through guess and check. That’s why toddlers have horrible aim, children can hit each other with a water balloon or a dodge ball, and adults join in shooting competitions and games like basketball or tennis.
Your brain learns the same sort of way AI does. You give it inputs from your eyes which tell it the end result which gives a feedback of how far off it was and in what way (too fast, too slow, too high, too low, too left, too right)
Your brain has a series of outputs tied to motor neurons controlling your muscle groups.
As you age, you’ve fed your brain thousands and thousands of test cases. That first time you managed to connect a bottle with your mouth. That first time you crawled with your arms. The first time you reached out and grabbed something.
Your brain develops a good mapping of how motor neuron firings correlate to the observed outputs your eyes have fed back.
By the time you are ready to throw a ball, your brain has a pretty good guess of how many muscle fibers to move, and it what order, to result in the desired output. No math required, entirely organic in every sense of the word. It’s a very complicated fleshy control system that makes this happen, with thousands of neuron by neuron weight functions that dictate how it will steer your muscles.
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