Someone told me to try this. Stick your leg out and with your foot draw a circle in the air clockwise. Then once you do this stick your arm out and with your finger draw a circle in the air counter-clockwise. Of course I couldn’t do it.
It must be some sort of brain wiring thing. What is the scientific explinaton why I can’t do this? Or can it be done with practice?
I can do it. You have to think of it in intersections. The two circles intersecting on the bottom and on the top. Drawing is easy.
Drawing with your foot at the same time as you draw with your hand, however, is not.
-FrL-
I can’t do it for very long, but I bet it can be learned. My dad used to bug me with a similar trick when I was a kid and I eventually learned to do it and can do it with no problem now: Point your index fingers at each other in front if you and then try to trace a forward circle (imagine a wheel rolling away from you) with one and a backward circle with the other, so they meet at the top and bottom.
ETA: I can only do the trick I mentioned with my right hand going “forward” and my left hand going “backward”. If I try to do it the other way around, I get tripped up just like the first time I ever tried it when I was a kid.
Absolutely it can be learned. Robert Masters has a whole slew of these exercises he developed for a system called “Psychophysical Method Exercises”. I studied it in massage school, and it’s amazing stuff. You can not only learn to do fun party tricks like this to win bar bets, but you can use non-stretching exercises to increase range of motion completely painlessly. It’s about retraining the nervous system instead of focusing on the muscles and ligaments directly.
Hmm… I can do it jsut fine, maybe it’s because of my drum major training in which I had to thoroughly seperate my right and left arms so i could keep a beat with my right and do any numbe rof crazy things with my left (after a while they’re disjoined enough that your left side can look like it’s trying to extinguish fire off itself while teh right is calmly chugging along). Also… conducting in three with your left arms while conducting four with your right is tough, but I wouldn’t advise anyone to lose sleep over it, I only learned it so i could be the life of music geek parties.
OK so it can be done, I can’t do it… LOL
But is there a reason why it’s so hard. Must be the way the brain is wired right?
Yep. In a nutshell, when we’re babies, we move all over - arms go in and out and up and back and forth, as do legs and even the head, if it’s unsupported. When we’re toddlers, we learn that doesn’t work so well - we’ve got to limit our movement to get things accomplished, like walking and sitting down. Young children are still pretty darn flexible, as a whole, though. And as we get older and older our movement gets more restricted - not because our muscles can’t make those movements, but because our brain forgets how. Just like infants can make any sound from any language, but by the time we’re in high school we struggle to approximate sounds that aren’t in our own language, we “forget” how to make movements that aren’t part of our daily lives.
Look at most elderly people walking across the street. Very rigid, very limited in their movements. Often it’s not because of their bodies exactly, it’s because of their minds.
Retrain the brain, and it can learn to let the body make new movements. Did I mention it’s really cool? It was probably my favorite class.
I never thought of that WhyNot, very interesting.
I guess it’d be similar to trying to type with a dvorak keyboard, if you learned with QWERTY, it would be a matter of retraining
Thanks everyone
I was able to do this pretty easily however using a hand and foot on the same side of the body was noticeably more difficult than hand & foot from opposite sides. That is, right hand & left foot = easy, left hand & left foot = not as easy.
Oh yeah? Well, try twiddling your thumbs in opposite directions, then.
If I understand you properly, I did it with no problem.
I do wonder about these things, though. How can a pianist play triple time with one hand and duple with the other, for instance?
Got that too! 
My brother the drummer taught me basic poly-rhythms a while ago. This probably helped.
Ah, that’s 'cause you can come into or go out from your midline with both limbs if you’re using opposing limbs. We do that when walking all the time. Same side but opposite circles is harder for most of us. (I can do it, but it’s wobbly for the first few circles, and I have to start with my foot and then add the hand, I can’t quite manage to start them both at the same time like I used to.)
Got the opposite thumb twiddles, too, but they’re not as smooth as when I used to do these things all the time! Must practice more.
I have no idea why I can do these things, while other people can’t. But it takes me longer than usual to learn dance steps. Both, at least for me, have to do with mental visualization.
I bet Neil Peart can do it. I bet pretty much any professional drummer could learn it inside two minutes. A major part of their skill is limb independence.
I find that easier than any of the above exercises - it’s just a case of relative timing. In other words, if you know when one finger/hand is meant to be hitting the keys you can time the other one relative to that.
I play the drums (not professionally, in fact some way from professionally!) and it only took me a couple of attempts to get it down. The easiest way is to stop thinking of circles and instead think of moving your foot right, then down, then left, then up, more like a square. Then move your finger left while your foot is going right, and vice versa. Once you’ve got used to that, you can round the circles off and do it at will.
(I’m aware that this is not “true” independence, but then as a drummer I usually start off by taking advantage of “cheats” like this, e.g. when learning to play straight quarter notes with my right hand and triplets with my left, I would break it down to find how the beats fit together with each hand…
|R-----------R-----------R-----------R-----------|R-----------R-----------R-----------R-----------|
|L---------------L---------------L---------------|L---------------L---------------L---------------|
Once you get the feel for where the beats fall in relation to one another you can start working on making each hand “smoother”.)
Drummers, you may want to youtube “Akira Jimbo” for a quick lesson on interdependence. That dude is ridiculous.
Actually, don’t, because it will depress you and make you want to burn your drumsticks and cut off your arms because you will never be even slightly close to beginning to approach being that good.