
Artists who paint with their feet have unique brain patterns - pseudolus
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/artists-who-paint-with-their-feet-have-unique-brain-patterns-180974064/
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dhbradshaw
The result itself isn't shocking of course.

However, being able to guess that painting with your feet leads to different
brain patterns is much different than showing that it's the case. So the big
deal here isn't that the brain patterns differ, but that we can detect the
difference and that it's to some extent repeatable.

Becoming able to map specific brain patterns to specific abilities -- that's a
big deal.

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zxcmx
Agree and am a bit disappointed with all the dismissals.

Taking
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus)

As a starting point I think I could guess ahead of time that sensory maps
might be distorted from the "norm", but

a) It think it would be interesting to see what moves to where and; b) How
much this process differs between individuals; the remapping or densification
_could_ be highly idiosyncratic.

Leading to many other related questions from the article like:

a) What are the critical developmental thresholds for all this stuff? b) Is
total area conserved if a person with fingers also uses their feet like this?
What happens, exactly? c) Are nerves in appendages or spinal cord affected in
any way by this process? (probably not right? but...) d) For people who suffer
from phantom/ghost limbs, do their maps change over time? How? [EDIT: after a
look around it seems like there are some interesting studies of this].

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parsimo2010
The people dismissing the article are right, but for the wrong reasons. This
result would be interesting, but they only studied two people, and here's the
important part:

BOTH OF THE PEOPLE THEY STUDIED WERE BORN WITHOUT ANY ARMS. THAT'S A
CONFOUNDER THE SIZE OF JUPITER.

They really need to look at people that have functioning arms, but choose to
paint with their feet to see if this result still holds (but maybe with a
smaller effect size). Someone that doesn't have arms can very plausibly
develop maps that have nothing to do with painting. These guys have been using
their feet as hands for their entire life. Is painting with your feet a couple
hours each week enough to develop new maps (indicating that these mappings are
very malleable), or do you have to go whole hog and stop using your arms
entirely for these differences to be noticeable (indicating that the mappings
are not as malleable).

That's basically questions a) and b) that you listed, but they are so
fundamental that the study is sort of worthless without them. The remaining
follow on questions can wait until we determine if this even generalizes to
people with arms (which make up the vast majority of the human population).
Because right now, we found out that a creative person with no arms has a
brain that fires differently, and that's not really worth the cost of the
electricity it took to do the study.

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saltyfamiliar
I can barely handle the simultaneous absurdity and obviousness of this study.

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taneq
Rear-wheel-drive cars have different electronic stability control algorithms
than front-wheel-drive cars.

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def8cefe
The best RWD cars have none at all.

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taneq
Depends what you mean by "best", though. A good racecar is not a good family
car or commuter, for example.

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booleandilemma
I hope they paid these artists a lot of money for this.

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anentropic
Everyone has unique brain patterns

