The brain connections between our hands and tongues

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-hidden-brain-connections-between-our-hands-and-tongues-20230828/

by fortran77 • 3 years ago

98 24 3 years ago

I have noticed that when babies are trying to figure out how you speak, they will often shove some or their hand in your mouth to try and feel where your tongue is and what it is doing. Perhaps it is that pathway opening in reverse?

freilanzer• 3 years ago

I don't think that's what that is. It's just them touching everything.

polishdude20• 3 years ago

I'm not surprised, the tongue is probably the second most (or third most depending on how you count the hands) "touch interactive" body part we have. Nothing else apart from the hands is as dextrous. It feels fine details just like the hands do but also with added taste ability.

lynx23• 3 years ago

Actually, the tongue can feel finer details then hands/fingers can. It is not socially accepted, so mostly done in secret... But I am blind, and whenever I have to feel something very very tiny, the tongue is better then the finger(nails) can be.

ad-astra• 3 years ago

Interesting, that actually makes a lot of sense. Be careful with capacitors!

friend_and_foe• 3 years ago

We evolve from animals that manipulate the world with their mouths and use their forelegs for locomotion. I'd expect that using hands to manipulate things would be in some way tied to our mouths, it's not surprising to me.

zh3• 3 years ago

I recall a theory that we do it because of our arboreal lineage. When apes moved into the trees to get away from predators, they would often carry things in their mouth (using their tongue to hold them) so leaving their forelimbs free for tree swinging. Hence the connection - if the hands are occupied, the tongue comes out.

deskamess2• 3 years ago

And also walking led to us feeding using our hands... we would just pick stuff up and stuff it into our mouth.

goodbyesf• 3 years ago

We evolve from animals that manipulate the world with their mouths and use their forelegs for locomotion

Technically we didn't. One of our ancestor species did.

daverol• 3 years ago

....tennis players often shout as they smack the ball. And research shows that coupling hand movements with specific mouth movements, often with vocalization, shortens the reaction time needed to do both.

Perhaps this will help reduce my annoyance when watching a very vocal tennis match!

Terr_• 3 years ago

That makes me think of the Puppeteer aliens from Larry Niven's "Known Space" books: Three-legged creatures with the brain in their main body, and two "heads" on prehensile necks.

Each head has one eye--allowing them to simultaneously look in different directions or opposite sides of a nearby object--and they manipulate the world using their lips which have small nodules similar to fingertips.

totetsu• 3 years ago

I wonder is there has been some exaptation where something tongue related was co-opted along the way to make hands work, or vice-versa.

suzzer99• 3 years ago

Michael Jordan and Patrick Mahomes both stuck/stick their tongue out when making plays. Mahomes has said it's involuntary and he doesn't know he's doing it until he sees film later.

venk12• 3 years ago

Even drummers using their four limbs tend to make weird faces or open their jaws wide while playing.

It should have something to do with dexterity, coordination and limb independence I believe. I can still play simple beats without making faces. But I wouldn't be able to play complex polyrhythms without making faces.

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

Or lift heavy weights.

dist-epoch• 3 years ago

Maybe routing commands just to the limbs becomes too complicated and the commands spill over to related routes.

Or maybe the brain is too busy with the limbs and relinquishes face control which starts acting on random signal flows.

You can see this in other situations, for example when you are in a high impact situation you stop caring about "how you look".

jack_codes• 3 years ago

When I play guitar or mandolin my mouth often moves in some sort of way as if keeping time. I recorded a video one time and noticed it. Now I'm a little self-conscious about it but it's a bit relieving to hear it's pretty common / innate.

ChoHag• 3 years ago

Electrical stimulation of this same area triggers a monkey’s hand to make a grip motion while its mouth opens, and its hand moves to its mouth.

Fixed Action Pattern (?) which didn't quite go away.

taneq• 3 years ago

Is this related to Central Pattern Generators?

aszantu• 3 years ago

said it a few days ago: there's an interesting connection between teeth, vestibular system and hip-flexors, which can lead to lower back pain - found it on youtube, there are a few vids on so called "postural restoration"

sharas-• 3 years ago

Truly, we are made in the image of god.

deskamess2• 3 years ago

Gestures are another vector in the hand-tongue highway. They are so interesting and I looked into it in a Cog Sci class. My writeup was so subpar compared to the research I did. I need to get back into it. Ended up being my favorite class as there was so much I did not know.

"“Adult speakers who are blind from birth also gesture when they talk, and these gestures resemble the gestures of sighted adults speaking the same language. This is quite interesting, since blind speakers cannot be learning these language-specific gestures by watching other speakers gesture,” [1]

The brain connections between our hands and tongues

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