Marlinspiral

A marlinspike is a spike for untieing knots. It works because it is harder and slidyer than the material that the knot is tied in. I learned - from tieing and untieing a lot of knots in plastic bags - that there is a repetitive motion that, along with feedback, can be employed to untie a knot in a material automatically -- in an adaptive manner. So you can untie the knot by spacing your fingers evenly and moving your hands in figure-8 movements against eachother, and only paying attention to how much resistance you are feeling from your fingers. Then if you go in the other direction you can retie the knot.

So this idea is for an adaptive springy spiraled feedback knot untier. A Marlinspiral, or marlinhelix? The "fingers" of the tool would get thinner and thinner away from the tool, and be adaptive, like springy and bouncy, so that they couldn't fold back on them selves but soft enough to find the path of least resistance and get in the nooks and crannys of a knot. On a micro level maybe the tool fingers have little barbule spirals on them that translate a vibration into a walking-into or walking-out-of-a-knot motion.

Higher tech versions could be used first for psychiatry and then as materials develop, noosphere tuning.