And then there's the rare moment when you think they have it so you let go and it falls to the floor 😭

My brain is like a neural network? No way...

Have you ever swiped on your phone, but the screen doesn't move (due to end of content, or unknowingly being an unswipable screen), and you feel your eyes jerk automatically in reflex, predicting the movement that didn't happen?

Don't be fooled to think computer neural networks is how the brain is structured. Through out history we've always compared the brain to the most advanced technology at the time. From clocks, to computers with short and long term memory, and now to neural networks.

I remember we once installed something on a beam 40' feet up. While waking through an inspection of many such things, the engineer stops, cocks his head for a second, and says "that's not quite straight"

And then it wasn't. Like a cast of manual breathing, the thing I had been frequently walking past for weeks was suddenly wrong, ever so slightly

See, I live in an old apartment. The corners aren't 90°, the wall a picture is hanging on is convex. When I'm lying in bed and look at the picture it looks like it's crooked but I used a level several times on it and it's as straight as can be. It's driving me insane.

I purposefully slightly tilt most my wall hangings. I like watching guests squirm when they mention it and I do nothing

I worked on an industrial robot once, and we parked it such that the middle section of the arm was up above the robot and supposed to be level. I could tell from 50 feet away and a glance that it wasn't, so we checked. It was off by literally 1 degree.

Degrees are bigger than we think, but also our eyes are incredible instruments.

Also masturbation might be a challenge in that scenario.

Or tiny birds that can expertly navigate wind currents with an almond sized brain using real-time force feedback. The computational power at their disposal is very well optimized for what they do.

If the earth were shrank down to the size of a golf ball, you could feel houses.

Beyond that there's been a considerable amount of research about our ability to estimate room size/material/shape while blindfolded just based on the reverberation of sounds in the space.

Oversimplified conclusion, untrained humans are really good at it.

My hearing is pretty severely damaged in my left ear, and for several months I thought everything was to my right. but my ability to locate sounds has come back. My hearings not any better, my brain just figured out that my left ears fucked and compensated.

I think the “more to it” might be significantly crazier than the timing thing.

Or ears have unique complex shapes that attenuate certain frequencies and bounce sound around in complex ways depending on the direction they are coming from. And our brains instantly process all that stuff too. It’s why our sense of hearing isn’t just on a flat plane around our head.

Yeah, your brain is not doing projectile motion equations in real time, it's the same process as teaching a neutral network to approximate a parabola.

Don't get me wrong, it's incredibly impressive that this prediction in our brain requires the visual processing of data from eyes to identify an object flying through the air, moving our hand in a perfect intercept course to catch it. All without having to have a ton of data points to 'train' on.

What's amazing is our ability to calculate the path of something in the air.

There's a test they did with Cristiano Ronaldo where someone kicked a ball to him so he could head it. They shut off the lights before the ball was in the air and somehow from the body shape of the person kicking it, he was able to know how to make contact with it without being able to see it.

https://youtu.be/0k2ey_okQ4E?t=1255