It used to be that learning a skill required hours of painstaking practice, whereby one would attempt a feat over and over again while making fine-tuned adjustments to one’s performance. If you fell off your bike, you would climb back on. Then we were introduced to training wheels and self-balancing front wheels. Now it’s nigh impossible to stumble off your wheeled perch. Well, golf has one more tool to add to its list of products that make skill development hopefully simpler.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/27/sensor-laden-sensoglove-helps-you-make-smarter-decisions-than-ti/

It’s curious to think how precise we can get with feedback regarding skill development. At what point does the humanity cease to be important to skill execution? The human still needs to accept the feedback given and adjust performance, but I wonder how this affects the general acquisition of skills. Does acquiring skills with such a precise form of feedback, as opposed to loose guidelines regarding stance and adjusting when your ball goes flying off course, change anything about how the skill is represented or the rate at which the skill is acquired?

My general lack of abilities requiring skill doesn’t make me suited to answer that question, but it does make me curious.