Presumably just the distinction between the rest of your body being upright and still, but your hands moving very quickly (like something flying) as you solder or screw or assemble.
It occurs to me that there's another sense in which the movement is like an animal in flight, in that pausing the movement to take a break is often not an option.
Paywalled, so I'm probably speaking through my hat...
This one seems obvious: moving around requires senses and at least some degree of central control over moving parts. There's selective pressure to not consume much energy. This leads quickly to a front end, with a brain in it.
from what I understand being "embodied" doesn't necessarily imply movement, but I am afraid even I do not understand it fully to say a computer isn't and an animal is.
From what I understand, not sure if correct, the spine has a weird role. If you touch a hot stove with your hand you instinctively jerk your hand back but there is a small delay until your brain gets it and thinks "hey that's hot!"
> this neural representation of the body is sliced into three sections, one for the feet, another for the hands and a third for the mouth
This smells like Inverse Kinematics to me.
If correct, that'd mean we don't generally move joints manually. Rather, at the planning level the brain just says "put the hand at relative position X" and the motor cortex works backwards how to make it happen.
Conflicting requirements stemming from the psychological illusion of movement spontaniety.
People don't want the realistic, slow response. Normally people aren't aware of how early their body starts a movement, the conscious brain has the illusion of just having decided it but it's actually started much earlier.
Yes, motion is highly uncorrelated. E.g. the whole body has no movement when she raises a hand with a chess piece. Humans don't do that. Everything would move from the chest up to assist the motion.
Reminds me of body-controlled sports, like hang-gliding, snowboarding and motorbike riding: the way the craft responds to body placement really makes it feel like it is part of you.
I'm sure that this effect is separable from human intelligence, and tool-using animals (like chimps using sticks and beavers building dams) feel the same way, because it seems like the simplest way for the mind to integrate tools: after all, a stick behaves as if it were an extension of your hand, so why not reuse existing perceptual and motor control circuitry, rather than constructing entirely new subsystems.
(I'm not saying it's designed, but reuse is more probable than parallel reconstruction from scratch).
It's interesting that movement delay rather than just movement speed is important to feeling "correct" to people interacting with it. It never really occurred to me that a humanoid thing reacting too quickly would be unnerving.
It occurs to me that there's another sense in which the movement is like an animal in flight, in that pausing the movement to take a break is often not an option.
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