When you hold a pair of pliers, where do you end and the pliers begin? As far as your brain is concerned, it may be a meaningless question. A new study by a team of Italian researchers suggests that the minds of primates conceive of tools as body parts.
The researchers studied the brain activity of a pair of macaque monkeys as they learned to use pliers to hold food. Reports ScienceNOW:
The researchers first established the brain’s firing sequence when the monkeys grasped only with their hands. The experiment was then repeated while the monkeys used normal pliers that required first opening the hand and then closing it to grasp the food. The same neurons fired in the same order. Remarkably, the same neurons also fired, in the same order, when the monkeys used “reverse pliers” that required them to close their fingers first and then open them to take the food …
The brain acts, write the researchers, “as if the tool were the hand of the monkey and its tips were the monkey’s fingers.” An archeologist at University College London says the study “fairly clearly show that monkey tool use involves the incorporation of tools into the body schema, literally as extensions of the body.”
And yet it’s not quite so simple when you take a step up the evolutionary ladder. Whatever our neurons might be doing, our conscious minds have no trouble distinguishing our bodies from the tools we use. A macaque monkey may not know its hand from a pair of pliers, but we do. And so, unlike our distant cousins, we’re fated to be of two minds when it comes to technology, at once embracing it and keeping it at arm’s length.
Argh! Neurovoodoo AND technometaphor!
The example that immediately comes to mind is that of a highly proficient musician, or even a chef for that matter.
Ever watch the best guitar players, or a top chef, use their “tools?” I would certainly say that a guitar in the hands of [insert your favorite guitar play here] or a knife in the hands of [insert your favorite chef here] would certainly qualify as an “extension of the body.”
In fact, it’s at this point that you would begin to define someone’s skills as “transcendent,” where the inspiration flows right through them, independent of the “tools” that they happen to be using at the time.
Perhaps we’re just not there yet with “technology” as I think that you’re describing it. Picture Tom Cruise manipulating the graphical interface of the computer he’s using in the opening scene of the film ‘Minority Report’ and you’ll get an idea of what might be possible in the future as our technology becomes more of an extension of our bodies.
Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck at the “people walking around airports talking to themselves on blue-tooth headsets” stage at this point.
Lots of work to be done…
PS – What does this research imply about the musicians and the chefs among us? That they’re lower down the evolutionary chain, as you’ve described it, or that the next step up somehow reconnects with these sorts of abilities?
With the exception of drummers, I’d guess that it’s probably the latter…
Previous blog entries have talked about the tools we use affecting the way we think. Genetic factors such as this may shed some light on that.