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
Bifocal vision – ability to perceive depth
Facia – your body’s sense of itself within space
Practice – repeating a similar task over and over
It’s just a bunch of pattern recognition and experience.
It’s why categorize so hard, because it’s helpful.
I feel the ball in my hand, I know its weight relative to other things I’ve held. I know how much force I’ve used in the past to move things that distance, so I just replicate it.
You’ll notice the accuracy with which that happens varies greatly. Some people are going to throw that ball right to you, others will be miles off.
People with a lot of practice or general reference material are going to be better at it than others. And people who are more practiced at making adjustments will be better than others as well.
This is only tangentially related, but I learned that when you run to *catch* a ball, the only calculation your brain needs to make is to keep the ball at the same angle from your eyes the whole time. If the ball drops below that angle, you move toward it faster. If it rises above, you’re closing in too quickly and you need to slow down.
There are circuits in the brain that do all sorts of specialized tasks. Humans have a sense called proprioception. It’s how you can feel where parts of your body are without having to look at them. It’s the circuit a guitarist might use when playing but not staring at the fretboard.
There are similar systems for things like judging a throw. Our brain is accustomed to handling objects and feeling their mass. We’re used to seeing what happens when they fall or hit something else. We become familiar with how things behave and how our body moves.
I’m not sure even a neuroscientist would be able to explain exactly what’s going on in the brain to accomplish it, we’re still learning. It’s sufficient to say that our neurons connect in a certain way to each other and those connections somehow enable us to perform actions like judging a throw.
Well you won’t actually do it right without practice, first of all. You’re making a mistake if you think you’re gonna do it perfectly on the first try.
You do it not by magic, but by doing it over and over again and observing the results and measuring your mistakes and successes against each other after each try.
It’s all prior experience and muscle memory. Any child who grows up in basketball country has done literally thousands of reps of heaving a basketball towards a hoop. The brain learns from all those experiences how to compensate for distance, height, weight, and even windage.
A similar situation is when you’re driving/cycling and you can tell for which oncoming traffic you have to slow down.
I believe it’s just muscle memory and pattern recognition which the brain is good at.
Really, we’re not doing much calculating at all, it’s more estimating. Our brain draws from experience, if it applies x amount of force in angle y on an object, then said object covers a distance z. If it applies x-1, then that same object covers a distance of z-1.2. Therefore, to cover z+1.2, it needs to apply x+1.
Takeaway from this thread – no one (in this thread) knows, but people have lots of guesses and vague explanations.
I suspect this is something where neuroscience is just not advanced enough to have a precise answer.
It’s physical evolution — human thigh bones slope inward from the hip to the knee, placing our feet under our center of gravity. We can throw hard. Well-developed muscles and quick eyes from quick brains made us top-dog.
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