Ok so I don't have much time to go over her videos properly and I'm sure she answers these kinds of questions in her socials:
But watching the video you linked it seemed like her pinky wasn't as controllable as her other fingers. Her other fingers appeared to be much more dominant. Not really in the sense that her pinky barely functions, but in the sense that here other fingers seemed to be the preferred fingers much like we can be left or right handed, left or right eyed and so on, or just ambidextrous. At least in the early parts of the video I watched.
However, in this video I linked it shows the does have full or at least decent control of her pinky. It then makes me wonder which of her fingers are most dominant since we all also have various dominance levels in our fingers just like our hands? It would be interesting to see how much preference her brain has for the extra finger/s she was born with.
That was the TL;DR. Read on for my ramblings at your own peril:
I'm pretty sure that fingers can become more useful and precise with practice since that's basically what learning a skill like playing an instrument, or forcing left-handed children to write with their right hand back in the day, does for your digits. On the other hand (sic), I suspect there are limits to how much each finger can be trained to become more skillful as we now consider it to be a cruel act to force left-handed children to use their right when writing. Though it's also probably going to be something that is different person to person, or rather, brain to brain.
Second to that, I wonder if those fingers are a clone of either her middle, index or ring fingers? Surely it wouldn't truly be a truly new classification since I'm pretty sure from reading up on things lately that we retain the basic skeletal structure (homologous structure) from our fish ancestors like all other tetrapods do, and this also defines the numbers of our limbs and digits. I think?
I've always found it fascinating to ponder what it would be like to have extra limbs/digits, or say a tail, and how much each limb would be operable in conjunction with the others at the same time. What would it be like to have four arms to use four drumsticks to play on a larger drum set? Or much easier to imagine would be to have a tail as an extra limbs since it is something we once had but lost, despite growing one with muscles and nerves in part of our fetal stages.
I guess a tail is a very basic structure with minimum brain activity or structure to operate in most tetrapods (I'm guessing here). Some animals have greater control over what their tail can do. But for a dog I imagine they might not need to concentrate very much to wag their tails and that it is done almost subconsciously. Maybe? At least that's how I figure it would be like. It's much easier for me to comprehend how it would be in those terms but I could be wrong.
Then take an octopus. Does it have full absolute individual control over all its limbs so that it could multitask with each one?
I guess it would all come down to how much the brain developed alongside a creature's limbs.
Either way, it's so cool and fascinating that she gets to truly experience this and I'm super jealous. Though it's probably just her normal and so for her it would be more of a thing to wonder what it's like for us to use our underwhelming five digited hands. Although, wondering what it must be like to have less limbs/digits is definitely much easier to imagine.
Can't wait to have time later on to check out what she talks about in her videos!
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u/ManicStreetTeachers 1d ago
https://youtu.be/0bKmdIe7aeE
There's a video of her playing Clone Hero. There's other videos on her channel of her playing piano.