
Yakovlevian Torque - bookofjoe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakovlevian_torque
======
twic
What's torquing my brain is that in the diagram, the left is on the right, and
the right is on the left!

~~~
Someone
Left and right are defined from “1st person’s perspective”, but that’s not how
medics typically look at their patients. When a doctor looks a patient in the
eye, the left is on the right, and the right is on the left.

That’s why many medical illustrations have the left on the right and vice
versa (examples:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomical_terminology#/media/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomical_terminology#/media/File%3AAbdominal_Quadrant_Regions.jpg),
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_notation))

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Isn’t this also why the terms SX and DX are used (from the Latin Sinister and
Dexter, for Left and Right) respectively - because they always unambiguously
refer to the subject/patient’s left and right?

~~~
twic
Same with port and starboard on a ship.

~~~
KC8ZKF
Or "stage right" and "stage left."

~~~
harperlee
Or rive gauche and rive droite ,at least in french, as you flow in a river.

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prutschman
I was curious whether it ever torques the other direction in individuals, and
came across a claimed link between inverted torque and stuttering:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5537737/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5537737/)

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behnamoh
I wish the article would talk about the consequences of this. For example,
does this make left-handed people more "left-handed"?

~~~
isoprophlex
Yes! Tantalising, but short on details. Some more insight into hypothetical
causes, and generally much more information:

[https://doi.org/10.1017/thg.2012.13](https://doi.org/10.1017/thg.2012.13)

 _Recent morphometry studies have consistently found handedness-related
effects on the extent of the torque, mainly due to differences in the anatomy
of frontal regions._

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voldacar
What causes the torque? Does it have to do with blood pressure being slightly
higher on the heart's side of the body or something like that?

~~~
uj8efdkjfdshf
Given that the rostral (head) end of the neural tube literally bends inward
(cephalic flexure) as it grows into the enclosed space of the head to later
become the brain, and that the tip is also attached to a clump of cells that
will become the heart (cardiac anlage) which is also migrating downwards with
the tip of the neural tube and to the left side of the chest, it is altogether
unsurprising that the brain should be slightly pulled to the left.

~~~
blueprint
The articles doesn't indicate if research is sufficiently advanced to have
established the time that torquing occurs but given that it's associated
strongly with handedness, it seems reasonable to consider it likely that the
torquing develops during the stage of increase neural plasticity during normal
childhood development. I wonder if the torque balances out if a person later
develops ambidextrousness.

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nouveau0
Is this observed only in humans? I'd like to find out if it's just a human
thing or more general like in all mammals

~~~
eindiran
I just edited the article to explain that. It is well observed in modern-
humans and fossil hominids. There's evidence that it is observed in other
primates, including great apes and monkeys, but the evidence is conflicting;
so probably it exists in other primates, but to a lesser degree. It is not
believed to extend beyond the primates.

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naringas
is this a pathology? the wikipedia article doesn't make it clear.

~~~
tropdrop
No. The pathology is if the torque is in the reverse direction (as someone
else mentioned in comments, the result is a stutter).

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martyvis
Why is the diagram "exaggerated"? If the physiology is not that obvious maybe
the significance isn't either.

~~~
Scaevolus
It's pretty obvious on CT scans:
[http://i.imgur.com/hKZqJUO.png](http://i.imgur.com/hKZqJUO.png) \-- and here
I've been thinking I had a weirdly lopsided brain for 8 years!

~~~
marmaduke
I've seen quite a few MRI scans, that's pretty heavily lopsided

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ttizya20
If you look at a picture of Albert Einstein's brain it looks like something
similar.

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knolax
Goes to show how stupid the convention of naming scientific terms after people
is. The name "Yakolevian Torque" is not at all descriptive of what the
phenomenon is, is hard to spell, and is hard to pronounce. You could say that
it's to honor the discoverer but for a natural phenomenon does it really
matter who discovered it first given that its a property of reality itself
that holds true regardless of who discovered it.

Besides that, many such phenomenon by their nature are discovered
simultaneously by multiple people, making their naming by this convention a
point of unnecessary political contention.

Naming scientific terms after people also creates an unnecessary barrier to
international collaboration. Although scientific terms are usually the most
easy terms to translate given the universality of the topic on hand, proper
names are usually the most difficult to translate terms from any given
language to any other language due to their lack of semantic meaning and
therefore the requirement for transliteration, which in most cases is a lossy
process. For any given language and English, there are often many different
transliteration schemes, making it difficult for even someone who speaks both
languages to find the spelling that has been converged upon in English.

The previous point basically nullifies any notion that naming a scientific
term after a person honors that person, since it is very likely that it
results in their name being butchered across multiple languages, often in
egregious ways bordering on offensive.

~~~
blueprint
Well, it's not strictly a bad idea to name it by some unique name if it turns
out to be the case that another, better, more rigorous theory or set of
observations is developed about the cause and range/extent of morphologies
associated with the torque that makes the concept of Yakolevian Torque
obsolete.

~~~
knolax
If the concept of Yakolevian Torque becomes obselete we'll just stop referring
to it regardless of how it's named. If it only needs to be updated in a way
that obseletes the older descriptional name we can just give it a newer more
apt descriptional name.

~~~
blueprint
Kind of like Newtonian mechanics?

~~~
knolax
You mean Classical Mechanics? Plus your example doesn't make sense because the
term "Newtonian Mechanics" was likely coined only after Relativistic Mechanics
were discovered[0][1], Newton himself referred to it as "Natural Philosophy".
In addition "Newtonian Mechanics" isn't even the preferred name, Wikipedia
refers to it as "Classical Mechanics"[2] while the Webster's definition of
"Newtonian Mechanics"[3] is just the words "Classical Mechanics", which
themselves have a much longer entry[4]. The fact that we do not in fact refer
to "Classical Mechanics" as "Philosophiae Naturalis" actually supports my
point: as our understanding of Physics improved we renamed the field, with
older concepts/terms falling out of use and being renamed when they are
reused.

[0]
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Newtonian+Mech...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Newtonian+Mechanics&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CNewtonian%20Mechanics%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2CNewtonian%20Mechanics%3B%2Cc0)

[1]
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Natural+Philos...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Natural+Philosophy&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CNatural%20Philosophy%3B%2Cc0)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Newtonian_Mechani...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Newtonian_Mechanics&redirect=no)

[3] [https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/Newtonian%20mecha...](https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/Newtonian%20mechanics)

[4] [https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/classical%20mecha...](https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/classical%20mechanics)

~~~
blueprint
Crazy how you knew exactly what I was talking about.

~~~
knolax
Can you elaborate? I'm not sure what you're getting at. I never claimed that
you can't use an arbitrary name to convey information. You can call it
Classical Mechanics "gleeebnok" and people will understand you long as they
can look up "gleeebnok" but that doesn't mean it's not a dumb name.

