Good lord! Has anyone tried?
This reminds me of the backwards bicycle video on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0). I... really want to try what you're suggesting.
"So here's why I did. It was a personal challenge. I stayed out here in this driveway and I practiced about 5 minutes every day. ... after 8 month it happened ... in two weeks he (the son) did something that took me 8 months to do".
Well, if you were serious about learning a skill you wouldn't just do one 5 minute session per day for eight months.
A more appropriate training regime would be way more intensive than one 5 minute session per day. Are we to believe he limited his son to one 5 minute session a day?
Do children really learn languages quicker than adults? By age 3, children will probably have words for almost everything. Babies might even say mama and dada by 6 months of age.
Children have several language learning advantages over adults: complete immersion; it is imperative they learn; effectively unlimited time; no responsibilities.
But, it takes them years to learn their native language to basic competency.
Compare: an English speaker can learn Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, or Swedish to General Professional Proficiency in Speaking and Reading in 600 hours carried out over 24 weeks (25hrs per week). Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, or Arabic will take 2200 hours over 88 weeks (25hrs per week).[1]
Is it easier for a child? Yeah probably, they don't even have to look after themselves.
If I could live as a child in a foreign language house in a foreign language city, with only two tasks: learn to speak and read the language to basic competency, and learn to ride a backwards bicycle, I'm firmly of the believe I could out pace the 95th percentile of children at both tasks.
As an aside, he says his son is the closest person to him genetically, but aren't his parents both equally as close to him genetically as his son?
1. http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lang...
And any siblings.
So it only took him about an hour, over three days, to get it worked out well enough to not immediately fall off, and an hour and a half over four days to get to 50 meters.
There's a comment in on the YT video from Destin saying "the RC helicopter pilot was able to learn it in about an hour but I don't think his brain is normal" - good point, the RC helicopter pilot has more experience understanding reversed input while the helicopter is flying toward him, also he had the opportunity to watch Mike learn first.
I reckon the learning process could be sped up even more by taking the pedals of, turning it in to a balance bike, learning how to ride it down slight inclines, get that sorted then putting the pedals back on.
It’s possible to represent n+1-d scenes into n-d scenes.
This is an old philosophy debate about wheather if I blind person could suddenly see if they’d understand that a sphere is round just by looking at it.
When some people that had had cataracts for 50 years were treated they not only couldn’t tell that a sphere was round, they couldn’t understand shadows or depth of field/distance. They thought shadows on people were black splotches and when something was moving away that it was actually getting smaller.
I suspect visual input gets trained on our neural network like anything else, though we do have some specialized hardware for it.
Even though there's no shading, a bad resolution and zero context anchoring it in a familiar setting you immediately see it as a 3D object when effectively that's just 3 2D quadrilaterals changing colors and shape. We really need very little to be able to extrapolate depth information from a very limited 2D-only display.
If you did that with 4D cues in 3D space (say in VR or something) I think it wouldn't work. It'd just look like a 3D object changing shape, not a projection of a higher dimension (the same way an hypothetical 2D being would see 3 quadrilaterals changing shape in the above video, not a solid 3D object that would be an abstract concept to them, not a familiar reality).
Could we teach our brain to "think in 4D" and interpret these cues differently? To a certain extent probably, maybe if you spent hours and hours and hours in a VR simulation with 4D objects you'd start getting a feel for it. I doubt you'd ever get as good as with 3D objects since we've been exposed to these literally every waking moment since birth, but maybe I underestimate the plasticity of our brain.
That actually leads me to an other question: is 3D somewhat hardcoded in our brains or is it purely learned? If we were mad scientists and took a baby brain into a 4D "plato's cave" style simulation, could it grow into being able to perceive 4D as intuitively and effectively as we do with 3D space? Also unrelated question: does anybody have a baby I could borrow?