On Haptic Thinking: How our Hands Shape our Thoughts
“Only that which bears the fingerprints of our doings can be inherited; almost everything else is doomed to be forgotten.” – Zdravko Radman
Photo and words by Anna Rosa Krau
Language is a powerful “tool”. Let’s pause here for a second and listen carefully. Isn’t a tool something that we use with our hands rather than with our brain, let alone our mouth? Our language is often more precise than we expect – there is evolutionary wisdom in this short sentence. A new movement in behavioural psychology is looking back at the moment in time (some 2 million years ago) when we stepped down from the trees and started to use tools. The more skills we developed by making those tools, the more evolutionary stress was put onto our brains to create larger brain capacity. This, in turn, demanded more energy which then had to be compensated for with more food for which we had to hunt, and for which we again had to invent even more tools. A continuous cycle was put into motion. We now know that the brain and the hands worked hand-in-hand in evolution and that it was the development of our multi-skilled thumb that first led the way to our astonishing brain capacity.
But back to the trees. Shortly after we came down, we raised ourselves. This was only possible because the connection between our spine and skull was separated, thus enabling us to move our heads freely. Following our erect posture and the repositioning of our eyes to the front of the skull, our spatial vision was born, consequently kickstarting humanity’s life as a toolmaker. In turn, this development freed up physical space in our brains and the prefrontal cortex could develop – an area of the brain where most of our touch sensations are located and our language processing capacities also reside. We don’t exactly know how our spoken language developed but there is strong evidence to show that tool-making made it necessary to communicate skills and that spoken words were established as a way to simplify instructions and to initiate exact repetitions in hunting and tool-making routines. Through these first primitive forms of language, families and tribes were able to organise themselves in sequential processes thus creating another larger and more powerful tool: the group. This “human-machine” worked together more efficiently by directing previously instinct-driven actions towards a group aim and producing primal cooperative results.
Hands demonstrate their excellence in the skilled use of tools, such as in pottery, mastering an instrument, jewellery making, or carving. Now the question is: Are our hands a tool of the mind or is the mind rather a tool of our hands? The ancient Greek philosophers already wondered about this ambiguity. In his work on biology, Aristotle pointed out that humans possess hands because they are intelligent, whereas Anaxagoras responded in his work Fragments that “human beings possess intelligence because they have hands” and added in On Nature “that human beings think because they have hands”. The thinking hand is a dialectical process. For hand and brain have propelled each other’s ingenuity over millions of years. “The [simple] fact that human hands are involved in both tool crafting AND in sign language leads to a natural coupling of these skills.” It is the very union of the two and the dialectical exchange that has formed the outstanding foundation to our birth as feeling and thinking beings. As Frank R. Wilson, one of the most highly regarded researchers on the topic of the hand, states in his book The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture: “If the hand and brain learn to speak to each other intimately and harmoniously, something that humans seem to prize greatly, which we call autonomy, begins to take shape.”
In today’s time of quarantine and social distancing, I would like to remind ourselves of the intuitive power of our hands and the immediate healing remedy of touch that a warm palm can radiate when placed on a (fore)head. It is one of the most powerful gestures that mothers, fathers, and to an extent even the church have used to demonstrate peace of mind and harmony for centuries. But let’s turn back to language once more. When we listen closely, we come across an astonishing factor that proves to be true in all languages around the world: Our emotional vocabulary is peppered with sensual and haptic expressions. When we talk of our inner lives, we express things that move us and thereby touch our feelings or simply engage in an act of grasping a thought that informs our communication and maneuvers our conversation along. It’s the recognition that our bodies and, particularly, our hands play a huge role in how we think as well as experience our surroundings. Physical acts are a way of working out our thoughts and feelings. Like Kant said, “The hand is the window to the mind”. Psychologists are only now beginning to recognise something that “artists have intuitively always known: We think with our hands as much as our brains.” (Rod Judkins, Psychology Today)
As we thoughtfully twist and turn ideas in our heads I wonder how much manual wisdom is involved in making or crafting. How is it that I can comprehend complex thoughts while I am working with my hands whilst I am otherwise unable to perform multi-tasking skills? According to the neuroscientist and philosopher Zdravko Radman, one explanation could be: The hand as a sole organ has a direct sensual link to the prefrontal cortex, making touch the one sense that has an autonomous intuitive response. Scientists who compared spoken language with sign language discovered that both are comprehended in the same place in our brain – the prefrontal cortex. This indicates also that sign language is best compared to another spoken foreign language – consisting of comparable grammatical structures. In reverse, the same scientists have investigated diseases (like aphasia) linked to neuron failures rooted in the cortex area. They have shown that these limitations produce an impaired use of gestures which also leads to a false comprehension of gesture recognition and, ultimately, a profound lack of understanding, “which makes it very likely that TOUCH (not vision) is the foundation of human cognition.”
Professor Susan Goldin-Meadow of the Psychology Department of the University of Chicago, an expert on gestures, takes this discovery even further. She recently wrote in the Journal of Cognitive Science: “We change our minds by moving our hands.” I would love to expand on this thought by adding the following: By changing our minds, we move our hearts. Therefore, crafting and making have direct access to our souls. The traces of our hands are marks of life itself. They make soulfully crafted objects timeless and, ultimately, immortal.
Further Reading:
Zdravko Radman (ed.), The Hand, an Organ of the Mind: What the Manual Tells the Mental. The MIT Press, 2013.
Frank R. Wilson, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. Pantheon Books, 1998.
Susan Goldin-Meadow, Hearing Gesture. How our Hands Help us Think. Belknap Press, 2005.
Richard Senett, The Craftsmen. Penguin 2009.
David Linden, Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind. Penguin 2015.
Wehr, Marco; Weinmann, Martin (ed.), Die Hand. Werkzeug des Geistes. Spektrum Akademischer Verlag 2009.
Examples of Haptic Thinking:
Alice Coltrane, Harp Solo
Mike Dodd, Potter: Short Film Into His Life and Work.
Tribute to Jacqueline du Pré by Allegro Films.