zlacker

"The distance from brain to leg is too long, for example, to accurately control motion from "central command"

As a dancer, I have been fascinated by that fact. It means that dancers do not dance to the beat as they hear it - it takes too much time for the sound to be transformed by the ear/brain into an electrical pulse that reaches your leg. Instead, all dancers have a mental model of the music they dance to that is learnt by practice/repetition.

Dancing is just syncronizing that mental model to the actual rhythm that is heard. When I explained that to a bellydancer friend she finally understood the switch that she had made from being a beginning dancer to an experienced dancer who 'dances in their head'

>>AareyB+(OP)
I guess the same must apply to a soccer player, except instead the mental model is about the trajectory of the ball.

>>AareyB+(OP)
You can clap your hands to a calibrated delay from the previous beat that you heard (predicting the next beat before you hear it). This is analogous to the principle of a phase-locked loop, which gradually adjusts an internal oscillator until it matches an external frequency. That internal oscillator can emit a beat just before the real one, offset just enough to cancel all the delays in the processing path.

This only works if the beat you're hearing is sufficiently stable.

>>AareyB+(OP)
Yeah, you often send commands several beats in advance. And then there's some lag too, because muscles are fairly viscous and take a bit of time to start up. You're basically dancing in the future, because you are behind. I think we just run pre-baked programs (from a lot of practice) and adjust their timings on the fly every few beats or a bar.