The Hand : How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for those interested in cognition of the hand
Review: As a neuroscientist, educator, and a Deaf person, I thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Wilson's insights into how the hand shapes our lives and our brains. He raises a lot of questions yet to be investigated about how crucial the manipulation of the hands are to cognitive learning. It will be interesting to see the outcome of the questions he's raised both for normal people and those of us who use manual language over speech, and whether those choices in means of communication cause the brain to be mapped differently. Dr. Wilson writes with humor and gives fascinating insights into the worlds of people whose advocations depend upon their hands. This long neglected part of our body should now receive the attention it deserves in shaping our minds.

Rating:
Summary: An Inspiring Book
Review: Perhaps the thing I liked the best about this book is the tone of reverence that Dr. Wilson has for the subject of his life's work - the hand. Clearly there is a lot at stake for the author in his work - it comes through in everything in this book - and that's the thing that I found inspiring about it. If only we could all (or at last many of us!) feel the same way about the focus of our work.

I "dinged" it one star for two reasons - I would have liked to have seen more attention played to the concept of how "the hand shapes the mind." A lot of the book seemed like a very well written elaboration on the standard neurologic model of "motor programs" and the brain's role in controlling the hand, etc. The idea that the "history" and "education" of the hand has a reciprocal role in shaping the mind is a very exciting concept, and I would have liked to have seen it explored in more depth.

Second, I thought the book rambled at times. Dr. Wilson tended to bounce around a lot between neurology, anthropology, educational policy, etc. and it wasn't always clear what was driving the transitions from one area to the other.

On the whole, this is an excellent book offering a very unique perspective on the mind and human nature through the investigation of the miraculous but little appreciated hand.

Rating:
Summary: Hand in Hand
Review: We routinely speak of "grasping" ideas, or "holding principles dear" or examining concepts "within our reach." For Frank Wilson, a neurologist who specializes in the bizarre and tragic affliction "musicians cramp," these turns of phrase are not accidental. Integrating brain, mind, and body - forging a psychology of the normal - animates Frank Wilson's study of the human hand.

He marshals evidence from anthropology, philosophy, psychology, anatomy and medicine, linguistics and engineering to discuss the co-evolution of hand and brain within human and human-antecedent societies. Leaving the trees for the savanna set in motion an enormous number of changes for our australopithicine ancestors - the most significant of them the bipedal gait that freed those pre-human hands. We call one of our distant ancestors homo habilis - handyman, and the intelligence built into our remarkable hands over time gave the evolving human species great advantages in meeting uncertain futures. (Unhappily hands are preserved less well than skulls, so anthropologists naturally skew their investigations.) Wilson describes the mechanics of what we can do that our primate ancestors and cousins couldn't and cant. It is impossible to read these descriptions of the repertoires of hand and arm movements without replicating them. Because chimpanzees' fingers point straight down and ours angle toward the thumb, they are unable to bring thumb to meet pinky. A chimp can't power-grip a screwdriver, throw a baseball, or play a guitar. And neither can he use his fingers in a cluster that makes the three way "chuck" that lets us hold a pen or a brush.

Hand, brain, and eye co-evolved to track a target - hapless gazelle, thick browed foe, or catcher's mitt are all the same in this long view of hand coordinating with eye.One anthropologist calls us "the lop-sided ape." Nine out of ten of us are right-handed. Wilson presents us with an evolutionary parable in this regard. We throw with our right hands. Our left-brain largely controls that movement. Our right brain, and hence our dominant left eye, processes broad fields of visual information. So a right handed stone-tosser, an ancient spear-chucker, or a major league pitcher all divide their attention naturally and efficiently.

Our built-in capacity for language, the most singular human quality, is connected with our hands, too. Deep instinctual structures are revealed when speaking is decoupled from sound and when signing is teased apart from gesture. Deaf people who articulate with their hands activate the same areas of the brain as ordinary speakers. (Oliver Sacks has wondered if sign-users linguisticize space the way the rest of us spatialize language.) I've occasionally watched young hands-on museum-goers scribble, draw, and write - and their tongues often loll purposefully at the corners of their mouths, as if to help along their fingers. Wilson discovers something tyrannical in the celebration of multiple intelligences once we've slain "the dragon of General Intelligence" - we're likely to recruit skills from among the multiple intelligences for our specific purposes, and so snub the others. Culture divides and directs human intelligence, specializing some of us early as athletes, others as musicians, or readers. For Wilson, becoming "handy" is an antidote to specialization and its discontents. Most of us need a hobby, and whether we paint sonnets on grains of rice for fun, climb a sheer rock face, or spoon applesauce with a backhoe, our respite is likely to come hand-delivered.