I’m teaching myself the first trick now, and damn! I’ve always been able to do it the lazy way, but getting the pinky involved changes everything. You’re right, it’s as much a problem solving exercise as a physical one.

Something else I used to do when I was bored, and still occasionally do, is solo hacky-sacking. First, keep score of how many hits you get without dropping it and continually try to beat your score. Then, because you’re ‘competing’ with yourself, you’ll do that thing of going for the easiest, most efficient moves, habitually, so that adds a new area of challenge. I noticed a high percentage of my hits were with my dominant leg, so to up the challenge I started forcing myself to use my non-dominant leg as much as possible. I also went for awhile trying not to use my knees (because that’s so easy it’s almost cheating, in terms of getting many hits in a row).

Learning the drums, of course, is an awesome way to increase your hand-eye-brain-hemisphere coordination. There are so many aspects to it - rhythms, patterns, fills.. variations in tempo, intensity, complexity, etc. etc.

Speaking of that, there’s also drumstick spinning. Rock-and-roll version of the pencil spin.

What do you see as the difference between the two in terms of habits and thinking patterns, Tim?

I feel like i gain more insights fine tuning motor skills.

I also meant to write about this someplace: I wonder if one of the reasons Rave culture got so big had to do with proprioceptive awareness gained through a combination of Ecstasy and dance…

I only bring it up because it took some practice to get my gimpy fingers to hold those positions.

Looks like you are standardizing this stuff to make it reproducible. cool.

Here is what I am working on-I am not sure where this is headed but it seems related. I am designingt a map of myself. I have these different anatomy books, that show a guy standing palms forward, and then there are different systems on other pages inside the outline of his body. Bones, muscles, organs, circulatory system etc.

So I photographed myself with my hands the same way in the same pose and then i uploaded it on my computer and then I traced it on a piece of paper over the screen. Its pretty cool because I can really tell its me. It has all my porportions and everything. Then I traced the guy in the book for a comparison of how I am unique compared to average.

I plan to sketch my self realistically and then go through all the organ systems and sketch them by location, bones, nerves everything, until I have a really good map. Then if I have some ailment, or if I want to develop some part of my physique through exercise, I have a really good map to create a visualization of how I occupy 3 d space.

I have diabetes, so one thing I want to do is map my pancrese and so forth, circulatory system to visualize my organs healing themselves and doing what they are supposed to.

The musculature map will help me with my bodybuilding training.

This is related to proprioceptive awareness because there is some phylogenetic map we have in our brains of how everything is supposed to be. that is why people have phantom limb sybdrom and so forth. Because the map in their brain coresponds with the missing limb. The more I can be conscuous of this neurological map the more I can bring my body and health under conscious control.

A couple things that might work better would be sculpting myself in clay starting with bones then organs then muscles, then skin, in perfect scale model, or perhaps getting animation software and doing it on a computer.

One I was a teenager and sketching several hours everyday, i really developed proprioceptive awareness of whatever I was drawing. People animals, it freaked me out because I developed proprioceptive awareness of the bodies of the people around me and animals too. I gained a lot of insight into shape shifting. But then I just got too freaked out about it. But now I want to get back into it now that I have applications for it.

I love your breakdown of how learning new habits can transform or break the hold of older ones. Sort of like diversifying your investments, and how all other investments stand to benefit.

One thing I never liked was in many old RPGs, many of the fringe character classes (bard, tinker, etc) could never seem to compete with the brute force of the barbarian or wizard. In a way I think this is a bullshit notion (especially in a fantasy world, for goodness sakes) that one might wield just as much power through a trivial act like juggling as they might in wielding a battle axe.

The baoding balls sound ideal for the time I spend each day commuting to work… anyone else have any recommendations for in-car exercises?