Have you ever wondered why people in their advanced years drive slower on the highway? Or have you just assumed that this is owing to fewer pistons in the brain area firing? While the incidence of older people driving slowly on the roads was widely believed to be owing to the impact of age upon the brain resulting in reduced perception and slower reaction speeds, leading researchers at SSPB have uncovered an alternative explanation: feet heat.
According to Professor Pitdion, a newly-recruited researcher renowned for her somewhat radical experimental and unethical techniques in the field, the temperature of the feet is key to explaining differences in the amount of pressure applied by the foot in all sorts of activities. As she explains, her research builds upon well-established theories that the temperature of the foot is central in governing the temperature of the body:
‘A starting point for my research was simply this: think of how, on a hot day, just dipping one's feet into cold water can serve to cool us down. And think of those who are able to handle really hot things without sustaining pain. What ‘intelligence’ is happening here? As I started measuring the brain signals of very small children when assessing how the feet and the brain interacted, I found, to my amazement, that there was little additional processing activity triggered at all – rather, it seemed that the reaction of those very small children to prolonged exposure to hot (e.g. very hot coals) and cold (e.g. sub-zero substances) stimuli was almost autonomously governed by the pads on their feet.’
As Lucinda Pitdion argues, that the temperature of our feet is central to what signals the feet sends the brain in the first place also serves to overturn the idea of the brain being the centre of the body's universe.
"OUR FEET ARE... THINKING MACHINES IN THEIR OWN RIGHT"
'Rather, our bodies might be thought of as neural networks – and in this respect, our feet are not only extremely sensitive tools, but thinking machines in their own right. They send 'directive' signals to the brain to process and follow through by sending 'action/following' signals back to the muscles and ligaments. In this sense, the feet, rather than the brain, principally regulates the speed at which we walk or apply pressure to the accelerator, clutch and brake pedals of a car - in fact, any kind of activity which engages the feet first is governed first and foremost by the feet.'
So how, you might ask, does any of this relate to the incidence of old people driving slowly? Or indeed, to the incidence of younger people speeding on highways? Pitdion notes that while age is not the only factor that could influence the incidence of ‘driving slowly’, it is more likely that older people will drive more slowly given the way that the regulation of foot temperature breaks down over time. Moreover, she argues that generally, until individuals reach the age of 25 years, the overall foot temperature is constantly in ‘survival mode’ – either incredibly hot, or incredibly cold – prompting greater pressure being applied to the foot in most activities:-
‘Very hot feet – usually found in younger people – and very cold feet prompt the foot to send signals to the brain to ‘rush’ the body away from the exposure to extreme heat and cold. This is principally a needed survival mechanism which was, in times when we were exposed to all the elements, extremely useful in acting as an early warning system to prompt a person to walk faster or indeed run to find a cooler or indeed warmer location before the entire body was affected by extreme cold/heat. However, in older people, the monitors in the feet which measures temperature, break down, giving the foot the impression that the body’s temperature is okay and that no prompt action or further pressure needs to be applied by the foot.’
As Pitdion notes, ‘this is not merely an age thing’ – if there is a breakdown in the monitors in the feet this can result in problems for anyone: ‘the monitors in the foot, which measure temperature are massively susceptible to damage and correlative loses in blood supply’. However she notes that her research on older people illustrates that foot temperature problems are more marked with advanced age, with results that everyone knows about: ‘older people are more susceptible to being burnt and dehydrated in summer, suffering pneumonia in the middle of cold winters, and – as it pans out in the context of driving, the incidence of 20 mph driving everywhere. Perhaps as a result of the procreative role of a human being being over, at that point the brain and the foot simply stop talking to one another’.
So what, then, are the implications of Pitdion’s research? She argues that the implications are enormous:
‘We need to rethink not only how the whole of the body works and its relationship to the brain, but we also need to make important investments in technology that will send the needed information to the brain about the body and ambient temperature to prompt correct action. Moreover, we need to configure this with the realities of modern life and dramatically rethink activities such as driving where these ‘survival’ responses are very clearly dangerous’.
While Pitdion is currently facing criminal investigation for her research on small children, she is also currently working with firms in trainer and glove design to come up with solutions to the problems she has discovered.
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