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>> an visualise every step and turn of a journey of hundreds of miles, while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed, and do this for many different journeys.

That is nothing. Try to run through a forest chasing a deer. Your brain will be calculating paths around trees, planning each footfall based on 3d terrain scans in your peripheral vision, constantly recalculating the position and likely path of the deer, and all the while a subroutine is calculating the trajectory of the rock you are about to through at your (hopefully) future dinner. That is what the human brain evolved to do. In comparison, driving a car along a road is like watching paint dry.

Then think about what the deer brain is doing. It does all the same terrain mapping and 3d planning, but does so at double or triple the bandwidth. Deer see 300+ degrees, humans only 130ish.

What really blows my mind about driving is that with a little bit of training, we get a feel for how big the car is. You can squeeze into a tight parking lot and you won't scratch your or the other car! By feel! We can somehow transfer our feeling for how big our body is to avoid running into obstacles, to feel how big our car is.

There is nothing in the history of mankind that would need for this to be a possible skill; no conceivable evolutionary pressure lead to being able to transfer the feeling for the size of our body onto other objects, while being inside those objects. We can just do that!

I'm not so sure. Using tools is the defining specialty of our species, and knowing where the end of your tool is in 3D space seems fairly important to be able to hit that tiger with a spear.

Well for this to work you also have to “feel” how big the parking space is, which is obviously not an extension of your body.

What’s happening here is that your eyes are connected to a very highly trained model of the physical world around you. And your subjective experience of vision occurs post-processing through that model. It’s the same model you use to physically navigate the world, so it has a similar subjective feel regardless of what you’re doing.

It’s not limited to cars and tools; pitchers can “feel” the strike zone, even though it’s 60 feet away. Like driving, this takes a lot of reps to develop (lots of training data).

Maybe our monkey cousins carrying their offspring on their back? But yeah it's a very slight pressure.

We evolved to wear all sorts of clothing. And really when you think about it the brain is probably the descendant of some parasite which crawled into another organism and used the exo-organism as a puppet, so in a sense it's exactly what a brain was originally adapted for is glomming on weird new appendages.

> when you think about it the brain is probably the descendant of some parasite which crawled into another organism and used the exo-organism as a puppet

I haven't heard this claim before - any specific reading I should look for?

It's possible because the road you're driving is an abstraction that eliminates so much information.

While you're running through the woods, you have to see and account for every rock and root or you trip, fall, and get literally eaten alive. While driving on a road, you don't need to consider the road itself at all, really.

That's the technology of roads - removing all obstacles to travel. A road is literally an empty, smooth space. So now you only need to consider traffic, turns, and distance.

I'm not surprised at all that our brains that can probably remember the locations of every fruiting bush and tree in our territory can efficiently encode some turns.

> How do we do this with a brain that evolved to cope with a couple of miles of hills and forest?

That’s where your misunderstanding is. A lot of animals are migratory, including us. We _did_ evolve to understand how to cross continents.

One can tell the British background by the mix of metric ('kilo') and imperial ('mile').

Mentioning that as the way we adapt with different units, feeling natural about them, and getting defensive about them, too.

I'm not particularly "defensive" about units.

I would however point out that I am not British, I'm Scottish.

Being Scottish technically makes you British, at least until independence comes. I'd argue that, even then, it will remain the case - as long as we accept that Scotland will continue to be part of the British Isles, and in particular of the island of Britain.

Scotland and Britain are separate countries in the UK with separate histories. No-one means the island when they talk about being British, they mean the descendants of the Britons.

> The term "Great Britain" can also refer to the political territory of England, Scotland and Wales, which includes their offshore islands.[12] This territory and Northern Ireland constitute the United Kingdom.[13] The single Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the 1707 Acts of Union between the kingdoms of England (which at the time incorporated Wales) and Scotland.

Would be a nice thought, but literally nobody means the descendants of the Britons where talking about being British.

If they did, depending upon what that encompasses, then either large swathes of Scotland would be included (Glasgow is a Brythonic name!), or you'd be excluding England from the discussion.

Largely without fail, someone talking about Britain is talking of the island itself, or the current inhabitants.

You're incorrect, so have the obligatory CGP Grey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10

Thanks for the reference. Unfortunately I can’t edit the comment anymore.

The irony of a comment trying to riff on the usual "Britain isn't England" trope while getting it completely and utterly wrong, is... remarkable. You are GPT and I claim my devalued £1.

I recognise Gordonjcp's autonomy to choose their own preferred identity. Nationality is a social construct that can be perceived differently in various contexts. If someone prefers to identify as Scottish rather than British, at least in informal settings, I believe it's important to respect their perspective instead of insisting on a particular label.

Of course, they might _technically_ be British from a legal standpoint, which I'm sure Gordonjcp is aware of. It's entirely possible to be both British and not-British simultaneously in different contexts. This sort of thing isn't black and white.

> I believe it's important to respect their perspective instead of insisting on a particular label.

Absolutely, but it would be nice if people expressed their wishes in logical terms. "I prefer to describe that dog as a terrier" is logically sound, "that is a terrier, not a dog" is not. The latter tries to arbitrarily redefine what a dog is.

"I am not British, I'm Scottish." is just shorthand for that.

It's a bit like "Charlie's not a dog, he's my best friend"

Charlie's not just a dog, but he's indeed a dog.

Shorthands are fine, but this is not it. This is some weird agenda to deny the logical truth.

> "Charlie's not a dog, he's my best friend"

I'd argue that one can be damaging and we should call people out on it.

Dogs are dogs and they need to be treated like dogs. The infantilization of dogs is how you get unleashed dogs getting into dog fights when it turns out that Charlie really just is another dog and should have been leashed.

I mean, it says "United Kingdom of Great Britain" on the front of my recently-issued taking-back-control-of-Britain blue passport, printed in Poland by a French company using Spanish presses and software, Italian ink, Finnish paper, and equipped with an RFID tag made in Turkey, all of whom beat out a company in Sunderland for the contract, who have since gone bust.

Yay for Brexit.

I think I'd liken it to the fact that -I- consider myself to be European as well as British, but there are plenty of people who clearly don't, even if arguably European is technically correct as a descriptor of all of us.

I mean, "4 hour drive to get to England" also puts quite a limit on the search space.

A lot of France and Belgium is about one 4 hour drive away from England ;)

You don't drive in the Eurotunnel

Not really, but it's not very different. You just drive to the train, park on the train and drive off the train when it stops. I haven't been to England for a long time but when I did I was simply calling it driving to England.

I'd still call somewhere on the continent an 'N hour drive.' The 'drive' part indicates traveling by car the entire distance (I've never been on a eurotunnel trip where we bothered getting a cabin so we were sat in the car the entire time) and in any case it's pretty clear what you meant given the absence of pure land routes.

Threads like this always make me realize that Canada's sprawl is real.

4 hour drive and you're about half way to your parent's place, and they're in the same province.

100 miles is a long way in Europe, 100 years is a long time in America.

The impression was before reaching that point

This thought occurs to me constantly. And I apply it to the other drivers too, it's pretty crazy how we got traffic and automobiles working without crashing into each other. The brain is an amazing organ.

It's also pretty amazing on a social level too. With a few obvious exceptions (certain signage, driving on the left or right side, etc.) the whole system was standardized for every adult in the entire world in something like 50 years. Everyone wanting to "get into" driving has to play by some basic rules. (And not following them is far more likely to be a mistake than intentional, at scale.)

Then I look at bees and I realize we're really not that special.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/honeybee-mental-number-l... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230307144358.h... https://today.ucsd.edu/story/complex-learned-social-behavior...

Mentally, we seem to be able to adapt well to things that we can relate to what we 'should' know about. So roads are similar to naturally occurring tracks with landmarks.

This seems to break down when we deal with things without easily appreciated analogues e.g. black holes and quantum physics.

OTOH I don't know why we can pick up driving and cycling so easily. Some people instinctively know how to countersteer an oversteering car.

> while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed

Predators are way faster than our walking speed. And the faster road is the more gentle any turn is so going 120km/h on a highway doesn't really require that much more reflex than running on twisty forest path.

> Where I'm sitting it is a four hour drive to even get to England and yet I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford, another couple of hours further south. For that matter, it's not much more effort to visualise driving right to the south coast of England, working out where to get the ferry at Dover, and then how to drive right to Geneva from Dunkirk, and drive around there too.

That has nothing to do with cars, people travelled before them.

You might say "but it is bigger area" but it is also scaled up to car size. And with clear landmarks, hell, even signs telling you where you are and where to go.

That's significantly easier than going into dense forest, that also changes look based on seasons.

> I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford

Straight on at full speed and hope you manage to dodge the local nutters driving like maniacs en route.

(I did actually like Bradford in a bunch of ways but the drivers were still impressively aggressive, to the point where being a pedestrian in Italy was honestly quite a comfortable experience)

I mostly only went down there for Infest once a year, and the city centre isn't as terrifying as some of the suburbs which actually do like they were just LIDAR-scanned for some of the Fallout scenery.

Fucking *Wakefield*, though.

We're been selected for the more extreme events that our ancestors went through, not just the day to day.

We're a species that has navigated its way across the world.

Human tribes frequently migrated seasonally with the herds on which we depended for food and clothing.

We're very well equipped for long distance travel.

On the other hand, kids that are driven to school have a much worse mental model of their surrounding neighbourhood than kids who walk or bike. The agency and feedback matters.