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lol, let's make a pianola from our body...

That is one amazing article. Not to mention vaguely disturbing! [Monica says, having read this thread shortly watching the movie, "The Adjustment Bureau," and as a result has come down with a serious case of the free will heebie-jeebies.]

Yes, but is it properly using arm weight?!

Whoa. I've heard of something like this being used for rehabilitation. I wonder if, when you've trained the hand to make the movements, even though the brain isn't causing them, is there feedback to the brain? That is, for stroke or head injury rehab, can this help to retrain the brain?

When I first saw this thread I thought maybe it was about alien hand syndrome, where one of your hands does stuff "on its own," without your conscious control and even against your will. Now, that could really mess with your playing.

Elene

This won't work to learn an instrument, because only the peripheral nervous system is being activated. However, it could certainly aid rehab of damaged limbs where movement is lacking. But as a mechanism for learning it would need to precisely manipulate the central nervous system in a insanely complex way. Specifically the Motor Cortices, Basal Ganglia, and Cerebellum, to name a few.

The improvement in timing seen by the researchers is likely explained by simple potentiation of the nerves involved in coordinating the activity. A bit like when a soccer coach has you warm up your muscles by running a few laps before you started playing any actual soccer. It is likely that had they let a day or two pass between stimulating the hand and actually attempting the test behaviour, there would be no appreciable difference between the two groups.

I prefer my familiar Matrix-inspired "play music now" brain downloads. Just slightly more invasive, the success rate it is far higher. Fortunately, I enjoy such treatment because I sided with our robot overlords (may they reign forever) early on.

Japanese people are creative!

"You might learn a fingering and be able to reproduce that performance, without necessarily being able to perform simple variants," he says.

I don't improvise so good you could notice now

Cathy