I was thinking about how when I was a young teenager back in the early 90's I really wished I had telekinesis so I started reading a bunch of mystical
mumbo-jumbo and started meditating trying to achieve some sort of out-of-body experience because I remembered occasionally having weird perspective shifts where it seemed almost like I was playing a shooter from a 3rd person perspective except I couldn't see my back, it just seemed like my head was deeper and I was waaaay back there.
So all that shit did was
annoy the fuck out of me except I noticed a trend in some of the seemingly random skills I had/would later acquire: throwing knives,
"pchew-ing" coins accurately, using a slingshot, using a homemade sling, using firearms, probably some others... all of those involve the ultimate goal of doing something to something further away than I can reach from where I am.
The wtf bit was noticing how we often think of/call ourselves/consider ourselves toolmakers, which yeah, we're good at, but it is ultimately something we learn to do, not an innate ability.
It is a side effect of our ability to learn anything because we start blank and have to learn everything. Show a human a problem from "this damn piece of wood keeps giving me splinters and is unpleasant to touch even when it doesn't" to "I wish I could move this mirror around the room and adjust the angle it stands at easily" and we start looking for materials...
...which is a neat ability, handy too, and is even fascinating to other animals. There is a video of an orangutan with a handsaw like "oh hell yeah, gonna cut me some fucking wood and shit!"
That isn't something we are unquestionably the best at so much as our species lucking into a useful build for it, our thumbs (for material prep/processing/finishing) and being on land (for material access/fire) help us compared to other tool users like corvids or octopodes.
Similarly we're really good at pursuit predation, but so are wolves, hence our doggification of them.
Perhaps domestication of useful species is our thing? Oh wait, no, there are ants which started doing that shit with fungi while we were still struggling with that whole "walking upright" jazz. At this point those species and their crops are damn near symbiotic and the fungi exist nowhere else but their farms.
Ultimately the thing where we all have a sort of innate knack which is far and away better than the rest of the animal kingdom is throwing things.
Sounds odd at first maybe, but imagine holding a palm sized stone in your dominant hand, then imagine the act of throwing it overhand at something specific you can see around you.
You probably got a sensation of an arc in your head indicating the trajectory you should try to follow to hit that target.
Now pick another target and see how it changes as you do so.
WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?
Assuming you're not ambidextrous, imagine doing the same with your other hand, did the arc pop up or did you get some weird sort of interference which may even include a brief sensation that the arm you wanted to use is on backwards or the arc wanting to aim back behind you like a glitching targeting indicator in a videogame?
Try the original dominant hand thought experiment except imagine throwing it underhand at the target.
Now do so with your off-hand.
Did your brain seem to know you could more easily hit a target that way with your off-hand?
Did the arc for your main-hand curve upwards more?
Did you feel a sort of ghostly preparation for the throw in your head?
I've checked with people who've never really tried to throw something accurately before and this shit happens, and sometimes it pops up in my head and never fails to get a "wtf" about how it is so taken for granted we basically ignore it.
Watch another animal try to throw something, or hell try to find any other animal trying to accurately hit something at a distance basically ever instead of just flinging stuff around! Even our cousin chimps SUCK at it but we don't think twice about our knack for it. Is it because we're aware of shit like baseball pitchers whipping out 100 mph fastballs or dudes sinking 3 pointer after 3 pointer and figure "I can't do that so I suck at throwing things" or something?
Like, we're not the only thinkers, we're not the only pursuit predators (though we are still REALLY good at jogging efficiently), we're not the only toolmakers, but we're so far beyond literally everything else on the planet at throwing stuff at a target (nevermind the various tools we've invented for launching projectiles which is just sort of an obvious progression for us) it is almost laughable to think the second best is probably the archerfish... AND WE CAN DO THAT TOO! People get bored and figure out how to do shit like knock flies down by spitting watermelon seeds at them for fuck's sake!
Author
Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14910829 times)