Member-only story
Bear with me. I’m going to try to explain something slightly abstract but incredibly interesting.
You, the brain reading this
Look at your hands. Admire your reflection in a mirror. That’s you, right?
Wrong. That is not you. You are the brain inside that person. You are a chunk of meat piloting a bone-armored meatsuit, using your limbs as tools to let you interact with the physical world. And they’re our best tools because they’re so generalizable; I’m currently using the fingers on mine to hit my keyboard in specific combinations to write the words you’re reading.
However, their generality leads us to create more specialized tools to make certain tasks easier for us. Hammers allow us to piece together pieces of wood with bits of metal. Pianos make it easy to create specific sounds reliably. Keyboards enable precise electron changes on tiny, tiny silicon chips. We use our general tools to create and harness more specialized ones.
But there’s a problem. Whenever we use a tool, we are actually trading use of our hands or feet for use of a more specialized tool. Even if we know exactly how we want to use the tool, we have to figure out how to best interact with it. This is an added learning curve called muscle memory.
