Loose cannon Robert Kirby
`Every millisecond of the day the brain gets signals from sensors all over the body. It stores these signals along the sensory cortex, a kind of cerebral filing- cabinet with a drawer for each finger, lip, leg or arm and so on.
“So, for example, when a finger is required to touch a key on a keyboard, it is immediately logged on the sensory cortex in the brain and a message is sent across to the motor cortex which has a similar filing system. A neuron is then fired off to move the finger.”
A little simplistic but it gets the general idea across in comprehensible metaphors – just so long as you accept the quaint notion that neurological functions may be assessed against office furniture or microchip efficiency. When people ascribe human emotions to animals, it’s called anthropomorphism. We now have Microsoftopomorphism where our cerebral accomplishment is calculated in Pentium ratios.
The passage with which this column begins is from a fascinating article in last week’s M&G. Headlined “Retrain the brain to prevent strain” the article explained, in easy-to-chew analogies, the latest thinking on a nominally fashionable workplace affliction called Repetitive Strain Injury. I say nominally because by next month it’ll be “Inductive Olfactory Syndrome” or “Periauditory Dream Dysplasticity”.
In case you didn’t read the article, RSI – or non-specific upper limb disorder as the doctors also like to call it – refers to the pain and aches which occur when people either sit at computer terminals all day or pluck chickens for a living. Tendonitis, hand numbness and pain, involuntary movements and spasms of the hand. What we schoolboys used to call Wanker’s Colic.
According to research this is caused not so much by tiring muscles and tendons but by the poor old human brain which can’t process too many requests for fast, repetitive movements. Professor Nancy Byl of the University of California describes such an overloaded brain as being like “a juggler with too many balls”. When two similar demands come surging across the cortical e-mail, the brain immediately drops its balls in fright and fires off rogue neurons. As in Nato bombing raids, these neurons often redirect themselves onto innocent manual nerve-ends cowering in the carpal tunnel. People’s hands begin to twitch.
It is quite wonderful to see how much mileage may be accumulated by this brand of research. I wonder how many laboratory rats sacrificed their puny lives in informing Professor Byl’s groundshaking theories, helping to put to flight all that traditional rubbish about how a day spent hunched over a computer keyboard or a dead chicken causes stiff necks and sore shoulders.
It’s a bit defamatory of the human brain to suggest that it cannot handle fairly simple linear functions of the fingers without “crashing”. You can’t help wondering whether Professor Byl considered what neuro-muscular coordination takes place in any competent classical musician. In bashing out the average Chopin study, a pianist would – according to RSI parameters – be spouting angry blue steam out of his ears. Dear God! Twelve hundred notes a minute! All that tempo and tone control! All those overlapping neurons! All that interpretation!
Why didn’t the pianist’s cranium implode during the several hundred hours spent practising thousands of tendon-testing scales in repetitive contrary-motion double-sixths? Why aren’t his arms drooping from Repetitious Beethoven Ague? Is his brand of RSI nothing when compared with the formidable demands made on a secretary’s brain, fingers quivering uncontrollably as focal hand dystonia overwhelms her motor cortex while it desperately struggles to coordinate all the confusing letters in “corporate repossession summarisation”? Never mind the humble poultry technician trying to get to all those fluffy little ones under the neck.
You know you are on serious medical territory when the RSI researchers give a list of “Handy Hints”, suggestions for getting the RSI sufferer’s fingers to “discriminate again”. These include deliciously ambiguous suggestions like: “Get someone to rub different objects on your hand and try to identify them” (“This one feels just as thick as yours, Henry.”); “Carry pairs of different shaped objects around in your pockets and try to match them”; “Match a shape to an opening with eyes shut”. If all those fail try playing “games requiring orientation, such as pinning the tail onto a donkey blindfolded”. The more adventurous might even try blindfolding themselves as well as the donkey.
Oh well, as long as it gives the scientists something worthwhile on which to spend all that research grant money, then RSI must be a worthwhile thing.