We are masers of physics, whether we were good at it in school or not. We have an intuitive ability to predict how objects behave in the world around us. This is thanks to the brain's "physics engine".
Jason Fischer and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, scanned people's brains doing a task involving intuition. It was found that we have a physics engine, like a game engine, that predicts how things will happen.
Avoiding someone walking towards you. Balancing a cup and changing it's angle to avoid a spill. A ball rolls off a table and we catch it. Riding a bike we constantly keep balance. These are all acts done by our high processing brain to make predictions about the future.
We make 3D models of objects in the world to plan out how they move. We do this in our minds, before they happen in reality, and without even seeing it in the brain's vision center. It turns out, we don't execute any actions without first running a model of it in our heads. And we do this on a mere 20watts of power. No game engine will do that. We use a tenth of the power a graphics card does.
The brain has regions for planning actions that are constantly doing real-time physics calculations so that we are ready to catch, dodge or lift ourselves or other objects as needed, in a moments notice. The movement disorder apraxia with damage to the motor areas of the brain could be due to an impairment of the brain to make physical judgments.
This physics engine has its limitations, that is to classical physics, the world we live in and experience. Making sense of an unreality we don't live in, like quantum "physics", is not something we can easily make sense of. A better understanding of this innate capacity could design better robots in the future as well.
Test Your Brain's "Physics Engine"
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