Bibloquet appears impossibly difficult, I posted recently. Yet people become very good at it, no doubt through huge amounts of practice. Why?
Now and then I hear about somebody getting very good at a physical skill: A basketball player is very good at free-throw shooting, for example. No doubt the reason is lots of practice. I’m not surprised because explanation is easy: He played a lot of basketball (social, fun to move around), he wanted to be a pro (aspiration). Professional musicians have practiced a lot — sure, music sounds good, it’s their job. Most cases of extreme practice that I know of have plausible common-sense explanations.
Bibloquet skill does not. It leads nowhere, is completely useless (I suspect), isn’t social, and isn’t promoted by the environment (there are no bilboquet rooms, for example). Some people spend a huge amount of time playing video games (also useless, etc.), but video games are complicated. Bibloquet is simple. You can see this in the price. A video game might cost $40, not counting the price of the computer it runs on. My bibloquet probably cost about $1. No computer needed. For that $1 I am going to get a huge amount of enjoyment. Hard to think of something else for $1 that would provide so much pleasure.
As Michel Cabanac has argued many times, our brains use pleasure to guide our actions: What we should do is more pleasant than what we shouldn’t do. Sometimes this system misfires because something man-made resembles what we should be seeking. If your iron level is very low you may suffer from pagophagia — too much ice chewing. Ice chewing brings persons with pagophagia great pleasure. I’m sure that the evolutionary reason is that ice chewing is producing the same sensations as bone crunching. Bone crunching would be a good source of iron because bone marrow is iron-rich. The mechanism that causes pagophagia evolved because it promoted bone crunching. Chewing ice resembles bone crunching. What biologically-useful activity does playing bibloquet resemble?
My guess is that bilboquet is addictive because:
1. Success is sharply defined. You catch the ball (success) or not (failure). Other addictive games have this feature. Tetris: you fit the falling shape into the pile at the bottom. Sudoku: You fill in all the squares correctly.
2. Success is not easy. We like a challenge. Most video games, such as Tetris, get harder and harder.
3. Hand-eye coordination is involved.
At the core of human evolution is occupational specialization and diversification. It started with hobbies. To get diversity of hobbies you need diversity of reward; a wide range of skilled activities must be rewarding. Rather than evolve a separate mechanism for each hobby, this was accomplished with a mechanism that is quite flexible and can operate with lots of different activities. Thus the reward system can be transferred to something completely useless, such as bibloquet. The not-too-easy feature caused hobbyists to become more and more skilled because only by continually challenging themselves could they keep enjoying it. Hand-eye coordination was required because the goal was to get people to make things. Why success had to be sharply defined I’m not so sure. (In art, a similar human activity, success is not sharply defined.) Maybe it serves to focus effort.
The lesson for me is that if I want to produce a task that will measure how well my brain is working and be so much fun it’s addictive, it should involve hand-eye coordination. (It will be easier to make the many measurements my omega-3 research requires if I have such a task.) This is consistent with what I’ve observed so far: None of the tasks I’ve used have been addictively fun. The balance task had a fairly sharp and difficult measure of success (staying balanced for more than a few seconds) and was physical but didn’t involve hand-eye coordination. The digit-span task had a sharp measure of success (perfect recall) and could be made more and more difficult but didn’t involve hand-eye coordination. Three other tasks I’ve used had less sharply-defined success and didn’t involve hand-eye coordination.
Addendum. A Japanese website. In Japan bilboquet is kendama. Thanks to Pearl Alexander.
“success is sharply defined” … that’s why I moved from being a graphic/web designer (limited to visual presentation) to being a developer/programmer. I get a much bigger kick out of making a piece of code work — difficult to do sometimes, but when you get it right, you KNOW it. Design involves subjective value judgments, and “success” is in the eye of the beholder.
I had to look up bilboquet. I had thought it might be “ball in cup” but it’s “spike in ball”. Female vs. male? ; )
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientists-discover-way-to-reverse-loss-of-memory-775586.html
You might find that interesting, an intersection of brain function and obesity research.
Video games are very social, if mostly only between males. You might imagine it’s a way to establish a hierarchy like hunting is for the Ache, even though it’s not necessary anymore.
Sounds like bibloquet would be useful if anything as party trick, like solving the Rubik’s cube, playing the harmonica (these days), or other things kids routinely and amazingly master in their spare time.
I don’t see why you should want a particularly fun game, that would encourage you to want to improve personally. You want something where it’s very clear what your limitation is, and not personal technique. Something that takes the data for you, so that you aren’t able to bias the value, sure. The few you list sound fine, if they reflect something. Really, it seems like with most games/tests you’re screwed, because of learning.
Maybe it’s best to have a game you’ve reached a near permanent plateau with, so that transitory omega-3 status shows clearly against the residual learning background.
“Stacks” is very popular in my house, where you stack up these cups and then unstack them.
NE1, I want a particularly fun test to make it easier to collect the data.
My morning routine includes:
1 – 20 minutes of a driving game, Burnout Revenge, an XBox video game, using a Kilowatt game controller (https://kotaku.com/gaming/live-blogging/kilowatt-kills-my-girly-muscles-110058.php)
This meets your criteria in spades – hard, fast paced, visual. Wakes me up physically, gets blood flowing to the brain.
2 – Mindhabits, https://mindhabits.com/ . The goal is to click on smiling faces. Hand-eye coordination…and a tie-in with your faces in the morning idea. It’s shown to reduce cortisol (paper – https://selfesteemgames.mcgill.ca/research/dandeneau_etal_07.pdf) Mindhabits meets your 3 criteria.. though I don’t obsess over score. I do it because it’s fun and improves my outlook.
3 – Typing practice: recently switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout so I practice 15 minutes a day. The software tracks speed and error rate.
All 3 are electronic games which record results. They’re fun and get me “warmed up” for the day.
You keep saying it’s hard to do, but it isn’t once you know the trick.
Both the cup-and-ball and the spike-and-ball have a trick that let anyone with a little eye-hand skills do it successfully.
cup-and-ball:
When you throw the ball in the air (by tugging on the cup) it forms an arc. You want to catch the ball as it approaches the apex (top) of the arc. If you catch it too far below the apex it bounces and won’t stay in the cup. Ideally, you get the cup right under it as it hits the apex.
spike-and-ball:
Take the ball and set it spinning at the end of the string. Then do the same thing as with the cup-and-ball. The spinning keeps the hole pointed downwards. It’s actually easier because you have more “bounce” room because the spike is so tall.
Ciao!
If you’re still doing the kendama, let me know. I’ll send you an official one, licensed by a nonprofit that certifies them. They have patents and design patents on the particular design used in competitions, and three companies currently make them.
Spinning the ball isn’t necessary. You just need to jerk the ball straight up from a dead hang when it is still and not jiggling so that the hole stays on the bottom. Spinning accomplishes that by making the ball a little gyroscope, but you can just stop the wobbling with your hand also.
When catching the ball in the cup, you put the cup under the ball at its apex, but you should pull it straight up, not in an arc, although the arc version is also one of the tricks you can do. There are over 100 tricks.
There are kyu and dan levels, just like in karate. This page has the tricks for all the kyu levels of kendama. Check out the “lighthouse” if you really want to see something that seems impossible (but is not so hard if you blow several hours practicing it).