“We often see the rapidity with which a task needs to be completed as a good thing, and I’m not at all sure that that’s the case.”

Frank Wilson is a neurologist who has been an internationally respected authority on the neurological basis of skilled hand use for over two decades. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. Now retired from clinical and teaching positions at the University of California, San Francisco, and at Stanford University School of Medicine, he writes, lectures, and consults on a range of issues concerning the relationship of hand use to human cognitive and artistic development.

Q+A/

Frank R. Wilson, M.D. / neurologist; author, The Hand Portland, Oregon

Q In The Hand, you describe showing a film of formerly virtuosic musicians struggling to play their instruments to a group of similarly afflicted musicians, and your shock as you witnessed many of them fainting. What is the neurological basis for these physical repercussions brought on, at least partially, by emotional turmoil?

A That’s a really interesting area, and one that I’ve been looking at a lot lately. V.S. Ramachandran touches on this topic in his book A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness. It’s a very, very big subject right now. When you get into how the human body and brain work, you quickly become humbled by the complexity of this stuff, and how the nervous and neuromuscular systems and thought and emotion are profoundly interrelated and interdependent. The more interesting question to me is, why is it that working with the hand creates all these emotional dependencies? People who really think about themselves physically, and really use and train their body, have something else that has been activated, or, to use the jargon of psychologists, “unpacked.” When we pay attention to what the body is doing and monitor it closely, we get into a domain of Zen thought and it all starts getting ineffable. But I think it’s absolutely real.
     Artists, dancers, and musicians sort of get lost in time as they use their body to create something, and when that happens I think they are simply experiencing one of the many consciousness potentials we have. So it may be the thing about the hand that is so specific to the creative process is that, although we really do have an extraordinary amount of control over the hand, it takes a lot of time. While that might be seen as a disadvantage in an efficiency-obsessed world, the fact that it takes so much time means everything else has to be excluded from consciousness. This is why sketching works, because it’s a meditative process in which the nervous system is using the body as a way of re-experiencing relationships in the world.

Q I know you’re concerned about the education system, and the frenzy to bring computers into schools, and its attendant decrease in the teaching of hand-based skills.

A I was at the Haystack Mountain School of Craft in Maine, and met an older couple who both taught at Harvard in the architectural school. The woman was talking about all the young architects who come and work for them, who are all trained to produce drawings on CAD systems. She said—and I’m not making this up—when they finished a drawing she needed to trace over every line with a pencil, because neither she nor the students had any idea if it’d work or not, and it’s only if you go over everything by hand that you see if the machine has invented something that isn’t real. There’s something profoundly important about that.

Q When I see student work, it’s often hard to peel back that outer shell and see past the level of finish to get to the thinking behind it. And in my own work, increasingly tight deadlines often don’t allow me to properly ingest the information and I’m tempted to move straight into the final execution.

A The element of time is really critical. It’s an issue we don’t think about seriously. We often see the rapidity with which a task needs to be completed as a good thing, and I’m not at all sure that that’s the case. In a certain sense, the body, responding to impulse and intention, acts as a governor on thinking. It links it to the physical word. Milton Glaser and I gave a talk together a few years ago, and he spoke about this very issue. He said, you have this idea, and then you have the finished product, and in between the two is this messy space. And he said, “The computer makes that messy space go away, but I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Q I have a terrible memory for names and often use that trick of repeating a person’s name immediately after being introduced. The Hand referred to the Russian psychologist Vygotsky’s belief that “experience with the body . . . . establishes meaning or intellectual understanding.” Why does using the muscles in your hands to draw allow you a greater degree of investment in what you’re working on?

A For me, it’s still a very unsettled question about these devices that operate and create a second interface between simple objects that used to be manipulated in the hand and the hand itself. A modern example of that is the robotic surgical device. There are certain kinds of microsurgery—say, reattaching a finger to a baby’s hand under a microscope—that even a surgeon with a very steady hand is almost completely defeated by. But a hand tremor can be eliminated if you use a robotic device that damps the tremor out, and now with minimally invasive surgery using endoscopic techniques they’ve got robotic systems doing coronary artery bypass surgery.
     A few years ago, I met with a group of cardiologists who do this kind of surgery. They all agreed it’s a lot faster, there’s much more mobility, and the results are great—but the surgeons miss putting their hand on the beating heart.

Q On a similar note, my friend and old employer, Vaughan Oliver, has waxed nostalgic about placing a piece of type with the tip of a scalpel and about missing “having physically done a day’s work at the end of the day.”¹³

A It’s probably an experiential and generational thing. I used to work with textile workers in San Francisco, some of whom were from the generation trained to work with real materials and who were then retrained to work on CAD systems. The computer could now design patterns on particular materials, and they never had to feel what it was like, they never had to touch the stuff, and as a result they felt disassociated from what they were doing.
     The more significant problem was that other people could more easily interfere with them; a marketing person could now come in and say, “Why don’t you use more red?” At some point they crossed a line where they realized they were no longer designers, they were computer operators using design software. And when they crossed that line, the whole thing dried up for them. I was involved in treating them for injuries that wouldn’t go away, and it became apparent to me that the problem wasn’t that they had thoracic outlet syndrome or an ulnar neuropathy or carpal tunnel syndrome—their problem was that the job sucked.
     You have to be very careful about saying “Aha, this is what went wrong, you should never use CAD systems,” but there are complexities in how these traditional ways of doing things established themselves, and we are often blind to the history of how people decided this was a good way of doing it. Some of that comes back to bite us when we find a machine that will do it another way.

Q In his Five Essays on Design, Christopher Rose said, “The hand concentrates for you” while you manage the majority of sensory input to the body subconsciously.

A It takes time to sum up the implications, and that’s part of what’s going on. When you work on things manually, it happens at a pace that allows summing up, and the movement itself is evocative. There is something about doodling in which you are making small gestures that are indicative of something that’s going on in a different way as you’re thinking about something; you’re sort of trying out possibilities.
     A year after The Hand was published, I was invited by Woodie Flowers, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, to give a seminar. He said that one of the problems they were having was that a lot of the students they have coming in who have been raised on computers have problems with certain aspects of problem solving. For example, they’d give engineering students a problem from ordinary classical physics, along the lines of “If a 30 kg man walked up a 10-degree hill, how many calories would he expend?” Apparently you can’t get into MIT if you can’t solve that problem. They found that if they gave these kids four numbers and said “What’s the answer?” the kids were all over the map. They’re good at picking which formula is going to give them the answer, but they have no in-the-body sense of how much energy is going to be required, there’s no out-in-the-world sense of it being harder to cut down a tree than a fencepost, no real-life experiential references on which they can draw in order to guess at the answer. They’re lousy at guessing! And they called this an estimating problem. The way they now teach them to estimate is they give them hammers, saws, nuts, and bolts and have them build things.
     I’ve been told they do something similar at the University of Colorado School of Engineering; they give remedial classes to all the freshman students. They send them out to Habitat for Humanity so they can figure out why things hold together and stand up and don’t fall down, because they’ve never had the experience of doing any of that.

Q On some level, you might learn more about construction from building a house of cards then you would from designing a massive building on a CAD system.

A You certainly learn something by physically doing it, though nobody really knows what that something is. You learn some rules about how the physical world works. It’s like a skateboard—it doesn’t matter if you’ve read the manual; at some point, you have to get on the damned thing.

The Hand: How its use shapes the brain, language, and human culture, by Frank R. Wilson, M.D. Published by Vintage.