by DougD » Wed Sep 30, 2015 10:50 am
That experiment, while interesting, doesn't really map to Diana's instructions for refining PMTS tipping.
In the experiment, subjects were inactive, blindfolded and touched by another person. The touches occurred on random fingers and toes, in random order and at random time intervals. They had no other sensory or motor nerve inputs to correlate with the touch. The base conditions amounted to sensory deprivation... touches coming out of nowhere. This makes the task far more difficult and it is not what we experience while skiing and tipping.
When skiing and tipping, our eyes are open. Our feet and bodies are active. We know in advance which toe(s) we intend to pressure, in what order and at what times. This makes the task of identifying which toes are actually being pressured much easier.
By analogy, that experiment was like hitting a random piano key and asking a blindfolded subject, "What note was that?" Only a tiny minority of people (having what's called absolute perfect pitch) can answer correctly and reliably. My mother could, usually, but it's a rare ability even among professional musicians. It also has little relevance for playing real music.
OTOH, if you play a familiar series of piano notes (Do... Re... Mi...) and ask people to whistle or hum the next note, most people get it right. They'll even get it right if you change keys or play the series in reverse order. This widespread ability is much closer to Diana's tipping adjustments than identifying a random note (or a random toe).