For example, if you’re standing 20 feet away from me, and you tell me to throw you a ball, how is my arm able to generate almost the exact amount of power required to throw the ball 20 feet? How and where does this “calculation” happen?
In: Physics
It often isn’t. Most people’s sense of throwing range is cultivated by Hundreds if not Thousands of repetitions. Muscle memory is a deeper question.
Mechanically – force, arm angle, release timing, spin and grip can all inpact throwing.
In a general sense, since F=mass * Acceleration, if two things have similar mass, they can be thrown similarly. This may account for throwing regular objects like keys – your arm an feel the weight of an object and reference it vs other thungs you’ve thrown before.
Now that someone else has brought up a question that I didn’t even know I wanted answered, I’m wondering if our brains were special in some way for being able to use throwing to our advantage throughout our history. I mean, at some point, a caveman had to notice it was even more effective to *throw* a spear at a dangerous animal than it was to walk up and stick it. Do other apes besides us use thrown objects with any sort of efficacy, or is it all “chimps throwing poop” levels of throwing?
It’s unlikely that our brains are doing any specific math when deciding how to move our bodies to create the throw we want. It’s more likely that is putting together its best guess based upon experience making and observing hundreds or thousands of previous throws.
Even if you don’t consciously remember any of the details of those throws, your brain/body does in some sense, and can do a pretty good job of replicating those movements again, as well as slightly alter them depending on the requirements of this specific throw.
Also worth noting that humans are by far the animal that is best at accurately throwing objects and it’s not even close, probably based on an evolutionary bias for skilled weapon hunting. There have been experiments where primates like monkeys and apes were trained to throw things accurately for a reward and they always just perpetually sucked no matter how much practice they got.
To note most animals make this kind of judgement call in order to survive, it isn’t a mathematical sum being done it is more a combination of knowledge and experience and general understanding of how things work. As an example if you throw a ball into a pool a dog can calculate how far they should run round the edge of the pool before jumping in and swimming to the ball. In general if you map out the triangle of the movement of the dog (fast round the edge of the pool, slower swimming to the ball) the dog will take the shortest route timewise to reach the ball.
Although not applicable to all predatory species, humans have binocular vision. While our field of view is limited, forward-facing binocular vision helps us calculate distance. This is turn, makes it easier for the brain to send the proper signals to tell our muscles with how much force they must work to throw a ball and have it reach the target.
I often think about that when I grab something and NBA 3 point it from across the room. How quickly you not only know how hard to throw, but know quickly based on the object. Is it a crushed can, crumpled paper, a napkin, a flat object, a ball… Brains and muscles are impressive.
Tangental question:
If we were on a different planet such that the acceleration due to gravity was 10-20% different, how quickly do you think our brains could adapt in the short term?
Or do you reckon once you’re past a certain age, g is hard wired into our throwing muscle memory?
It’s not calculation, it’s practice and muscle memory. You’ve been analyzing how your actions effect your environment since before you can remember. After thousands of throws you can just kinda feel how far something will go based on how hard you throw and what technique you use.
When you throw a ball, your brain forms a memory of things like:
* What you were trying to achieve
* The object you were holding
* What the environment was like (wind, temperature) at the time
* How much force you used
* What type of body motion you used
* What it felt like
* Whether or not you achieved your result
We start to throw things from a very young age, so our bodies start forming these memories very early. If you watch an infant throw an object, you’ll observe that they are not very good at it. They can’t hit the broad side of a barn. The object often lands at their feet, or is launched straight up into the air, possibly landing on their head. Sometimes it lands behind them.
All of this goes into our memory. We take for granted just how much we’re able to recall. We think of memory in terms of facts, but the function of our memory extends well beyond simple facts.
Our brains don’t compute ballistics in the same way we might compute them with physics formulas. We recall the last time we tried something similar, then make adjustments that are an approximation based on past experience. The more numerous the memories, the more our brains have to draw from.
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