Name: Upgrade Your Hand With This Extra Thumb
Uploaded: 2025-07-22T17:20:15.000Z
Duration: 8 min 14 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The second conditional

Well the amazing things you would be able to do, like play the guitar faster, or eat a bag of chips with one hand.  Well we went to the University of Cambridge to find out what amazing things we could do with it.

The third thumb is a 3D printed extra thumb for your hand that's controlled with your toes.

I was really trying to investigate that relationship between the wearer and a prosthetic.

I wanted to feel what it was like to be in control of something that I was wearing, but that had kind of this proportional control that was responding to my movements.

What I really envisioned for the third thumb is more specific workplaces that then you do a slight redesign.

So for example I've spoken with a shoulder surgeon and he was really interested in being able to hold his multiple tools at the same time rather than collaborate with an assistant.

So how did Dani start working on the third thumb?

I've always been interested in designing for the body.

I think that's so much more interesting as a product designer and then it wasn't until my Masters at the Royal College of Art that I really started exploring prosthetics.

I'm not a medical professional working in prosthetics in the medical field.

I'm working in this more exploratory field.

We're trying to split it off into prosthetic versus augmentation and I just kind of see it all in the same movement.

An amputee is completely different to a congenital one-hander yet societal perception is that they just have one arm and so they're missing something and that's not true.

And so if we start to try to silo this technology like this is for augmentation and this is for prosthetics, it's the same technology.

We're just talking about how you feel about that person and also they might not feel about that themselves.

Or is it augmentation for someone with two thumbs?

It's both or it's either or it totally depends on the wearer.

Dani's invention went viral online which meant her master's project turned into much more than just that.

When it went viral online I thought that's kind of where it would live in this online space that people could go, uh, or uh, you know, and really kind of spark these discussions and I would have thousands of comments on videos and stuff like that of people going either way or also emailing me and letting me know their feelings about it as well.

And that's where I thought it would live but now it's in a whole different space.

Yes, absolutely your crew member can try one.

Cool, we're putting a third thumb on you today.

So we're going to go through this one first and then through there and then just going to turn on your ankles.

Your left foot is going to control the kind of up and back and your right foot is the kind of dominant foot, it's going to control the across and back.

So this is still like first minute of use.

I can hold up four oranges in my hand with the third thumb.

So just so you know, we're going to have to put you in an MRI scanner later.

And they actually did test my brain, so that the activity inside it when I was using the third thumb could be studied by Professor Tamar Makin.

My name is Tamar Makin and I'm a professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and my role is to run the lab that we call the Plasticity Lab in Cambridge University.

I got this big grant meant to help me start establishing the first frontiers of human augmentation, specifically allowing people to have extra body parts.

A colleague of mine told me he just watched this video of this extra robotic thumb that just looks amazing.

I've asked my student who was running the project at the time if she can try to hunt down this person, Danny Claude, and that's how we started working together.

The interesting thing about the body and the brain is that you can't change one without the other.

When we're thinking about adding extra body parts or replacing body parts, we are immediately implicating the brain.

If we could harness this technology in a thoughtful and responsible way, we could really offer an incredible new opportunity for humanity to improve productivity.

Since coming to Cambridge University, how much has Danny's vision of the third thumb changed?

The fundamentals from the first prototype are definitely the same.

I certainly didn't think it would be so similar, which I'm quite impressed with and managed to make it good the first time.

When the neuroscientists started collaborating with me on it, I thought that they'd get rid of the foot control pretty quickly, but it has lasted because it works so well.

We had almost 600 participants come and try the third thumb for the first time and then we asked them to do a task within a minute. 98% of people could use the third thumb within the first minute, which is really important for pieces of technology like this.

So how's my brain activity looking tomorrow?

My clever students have processed the information that the machine has gathered.

We can look and see what happens when Stu uses the thumb, and what we find is that the brain areas that control the foot and control the hand, they light up once he's using his third thumb.

Over a longer period of time, we might start seeing changes where the brain reconfigurates the representation of the hand, the representation of the foot, in order to allow for the thumb to grow in a different way.

Was it hard to find Stu's brain activity?

He has a beautiful activity in the right place to the right amount.

I work with so many gifted people, so smart, so talented.

Dani is all of that, but she's also able to combine wonderful creativity with practicality, which is a very complex combination to achieve.

I don't think I'd be doing this if I only collaborated with other designers.

I'm collaborating with neuroscientists and anthropologists and engineers and artists, and that's what makes this work so dynamic.

I'm constantly surprised that I'm still working on the third thumb.

I'm amazed that this thing that I made during my Master's degree is now being used for PhDs in neuroscience at Cambridge University.

That's so mad to me and so inspiring and keeps pushing me forward to make it better.

Do you feel the synapses firing in your mind?

I did feel like the synapses were popping in my mind.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Upgrade Your Hand With This Extra Thumb

cognitive

process

combination

viral