[Martin Taylor 2012.09.06.14.56]
[From Rick Marken (2012.09.06.0900)]
Fred Nickols (2012.09.06.0725 PDT)–
A friend sent me this little
exercise. I wonder how PCT accounts for it.
While sitting, raise your right leg
and rotate it in a clockwise direction. After starting
that movement, keep it going while you use your right
hand to draw the numeral six in the air. Note what
happens.
What’s going on?
Very interesting. My guess is that what is going on is
hierarchical control. Apparently the system in our brains that
controls the perception of direction of movement is at a higher
level than the systems that produce the muscle forces that move
our limbs. So when you rotate the leg clockwise you are
controlling that perception (clockwise motion) by varying the
muscle forces appropriately to produce that perception. Now when
you try to draw a six with your finger, if you start the six a the
top tail you will have to produce that perception by varying you
arm muscle forces so as to make a counter clockwise motion with
your finger.
Apparently the direction of movement control system is now being
used by two still high level systems that want to perceive two
different directions of motion; the leg rotation system wants to
perceive clockwise movement and the finger drawing a six system
wants to perceive counter clockwise movement. The result is a
conflict which is resolved by both finger and leg ending up moving
in the same direction – for a moment, at least, until it is
noticed that you are either no longer moving the leg clockwise or
not making the six
. So what's going on (I think) is a conflict where two higher
level control systems – the one trying to perceive the leg moving
clockwise and the one trying to perceive the finger drawing a six
– are using the same lower level direction of movement control
system to produce their desired perceptions: the leg rotation
system is trying to make the reference for direction of movement
“clockwise” and the finger drawing six system us trying to make
the reference for direction of movement “counter-clockwise”.
It's a nice analysis, but I think there might be a different
possibility, or maybe both Rick’s and the following might work
together to create the problem. The other possibility is that the
confusion might be on the perceptual side. It would be interesting
to try this with subjects under hypnosis.
The reason I make this suggestion goes back about thirty years, when
I had a summer student who was studying with a hypnosis researcher
for her graduate degree. I helped them analyze an experiment in
which the subject was exposed to two monaural streams separately or
together. The subject was asked to shadow (speak with no delay the
same words as) the stream in one ear, while pressing a button when
some prespecified item occurred in the other ear stream. When the
subject was unhypnotized, the two streams interfered. They didn’t
shadow as well when they had to detect the “cue item”, and they
didn’t detect the cue item as well if they were also asked to shadow
(d’ detectability theory measure). Under hypnosis, the mutual
interference went away, and the two streams were processed as though
by independent people rather than in the same brain.
My impression of what was happening here is that it is very similar
to what happens with skilled performers in sports or music.
Conscious perception ceased to be involved under hypnosis. When a
performer is learning the new skill, what happens in one place
sometimes confuses the conscious perception of what is going on,
but as skill develops, the different streams begin to be perceived
separately, like the lines in polyphonic music. The skilled
performer has reorganized the perceptual side so that instead of a
meld of sound (in music) what they hear is the separate lines, and
they can selectively attend to any of them (based on personal
experience and what others have said about their experience).
If we accept that what is accessible to conscious perception is a
subset of what is available for control, this would suggest that the
novice performer is much less able to control the individual lines
of music because the perceptions of the lines interfere with each
other. The skilled performer may have interference at the output
side (no pianist can stretch two octaves with each hand
simultaneously), but that is a different matter.
In the case raised by Fred, which is akin to the classic "rub your
stomach while patting your head" challenge, there is no output
conflict between leg movements and hand movements. The conflict may
well be where Rick places it, but it could also at the same time be
a perceptual conflict in which an already organized perception such
as “clockwise rotation” has to be reorganized into two separate
perceptions that include place: “clockwise arm movement” and
“clockwise leg movement”.
Martin