Eww. I suspect that in the computer age the enduring value of dissecting dead bodies is that it's even more repulsive than cutting open live bodies (which trainee medics will have to do later on).
I had no especial antipathy to the cadaver lab in med school. A preserved cadaver holds very little relationship to a real body, outside of the relationships of anatomical landmarks. I -wish- we had had been able to study from prosections.
But digital cadavers completely fail to capture the three dimensional relationship of the components of a body. I have probably every atlas on the market, paper and digital, and I still occasionally go to our affiliated school’s lab to interrogate a body when I need a refresher.
There is nothing even vaguely approaching a replacement yet, though I’ve been hearing about how we can replace real dissections with simulations for literally decades. I do wish folks who’ve never had to navigate the internal landscape of a body would stop offering their opinions on how one should learn it.
This does seem counterproductive to me as well. I very much scare away from the idea of learning from cadavers myself. But that makes me all the more appreciative of the people who do. If it weren’t for modern medicine I would be crippled or dead. The benefits heavily outweigh the costs.
My gut (non expert) feeling is that when 3D printing can be indistinguishable from natural, and quality assurance can make it reliably indistinguishable, we won’t need humans digging around inside us.
How long that takes I would only embarrass myself by guessing.
A benefit of cadaver disection is the range of anomalies like the penile implant, or finding hair and teeth in a random abdominal nook. Tough to imagine this benefit in 3D printed versions.
There's something about laying hands on flesh that's important. As a medical student at a school that does not practice dissection, I feel envious of my grandfather who learnt his anatomy using a scalpel. We have labs with prosected cadavers, but that leaves much to be wanted.
This technology is insufficiently advanced and does not substitute dead bodies. In fact, I used these digital bodies when I took anatomy and it wasn't enough. Drawn atlases and physical models just weren't real enough for me. Gray's absurdly detailed textual descriptions of the human body only helped me understand things better after I had already memorized the anatomy being discussed.
The best way to learn, at least for me, was in practice. During the year that I took anatomy, I would go to the laboratory almost every single day and spend all day there going over the structures of the human body over a hundred times. I needed to physically manipulate the pieces in order to understand them.
>The sense we have that someone is fit generally comes from their posture.
Exceptions I've noted are joggers with hunched shoulders, splayed feet, leaping too high off the ground, and so on. By no means uncommon.
>Does this idea-retraining work as well as the gym?
Not a gym user but I gained a cm in height within a week of encountering the Alexander Technique (AT). My guess is that the best gym users have good posture too, if only for safety's sake.
It's not so much about fitness and muscular bulk but about whether you are receptive to the proprioceptive feedback from those muscles and joints. AT has a unique way of pointing you towards these sensations but it relies on personal contact with a teacher.
No doubt, but consider that some people will then become cynical about society in order to become freeloaders.
(Rather as in Upton Sinclair's famous quote: 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!')
It's a reason why some people become social cynics, I think, and this reason is represented in their brains. However they may not be able to articulate it, partly because they need to see themselves (and for others to see them) as good people. Indeed the strategy depends on it.
Debate and criticism are defence, it seems to me; their value lies in averting heartache and war. For the purpose of changing the world, the ultimate argument is to create something new and substantial and then make progess with it, giving people somewhere to jump to.
My rough understanding is that's essentially what happens. Mirror neurons (it's a relatively small area) are not, and could not be, a completely isolated replication of all the other subsystems in the brain. They just connect observation or imagination of what someone else might be experiencing to your own respective motor/cognitive areas. If there were no filter/activation subsystem for what someone else was experiencing, you'd be experiencing everyone else's experiences all the time. Or experiencing none of it.
My idea of middle-class existence is a thrifty but relatively happy family life with an emphasis on education. The budget could vary enormously depending on how this is implemented.
Superb stuff. On a more mundane level I hope we'll soon also have a chart of all the asteroids in our solar system (to the most realistic extent possible).
Yes and it's not just at work: most of us feel we should fill every hour of our non-working lives with activities. Especially our kids' lives (no wonder people are having fewer kids!)
There are two things wrong about this I think. Firstly, it confuses activity with purpose. Secondly, unscheduled time is valuable not only for itself but for extra capacity when something important pops up.
For those of us who don't have to, I recommend:
https://www.zygotebody.com/