The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. - Brief Article - Review - book reviews

The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture Frank R. Wilson. Pantheon, 1998, $30.

A few years ago neurologist Frank Wilson showed a group of his patients an informational video. It was "not the sort of grotesque display one sometimes sees in medical movies," he writes, in his introduction to The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. Instead it was a "brief clinical-musical medley of hands that had either been injured or had mysteriously lost their former skill; formerly graceful, lithe, dazzlingly fast hands [that] could barely limp through the notes they sought to draw out of pianos, guitars, flutes, and violins."

But "grotesque display" is in the eye of the beholder, and his audience, mostly musicians plagued by hand cramps, had its own definition. A few minutes in, a guitarist fainted. Wilson showed the film to a different group; another musician passed out. A third time; same phenomenon. Here was a film about stiff fingers, and the audience was behaving like seminarians at The Night of the Living Dead. What was going on?

Wilson surmised that some extraordinary link must exist between musicians' hands and their minds; he soon expanded this hypothesis to include other manual adepts--surgeons, jugglers, magicians. The Hand is an account of his effort to find the evolutionary, neurological, and cultural reasons for that connection.

WILSON BEGINS THE HAND WITH A dose of paleoanthropology, observing that hominid tool manufacture, so essential to the evolutionary success of our newly terrestrial ancestors, depended on the unique combination of precision and power grip possessed by the hominid hand. He then moves to the brain-hand connection, exploring the implications of the discovery, now clear from decades of brain mapping, that much of our expanded cerebral real estate is dedicated to increasing manual dexterity. In an evolutionary sense our species' increasing reliance on the hand has shaped the brain as much as the brain directs the hand. And now that neuroscience has shown the brain to be a plastic organ--use it or lose it, as the saying goes--Wilson wonders if we all might have capacities unrealized in a technological age for getting to that mystical place where "movement, thought, and feeling fuse." To support this idea, he leavens The Hand with transcripts from interviews with the scores of handy people--rock climbers, magicians, crane operators--whom he buttonholed over his years of research.

I use the word leavens advisedly because except for the first, person accounts, this melange of anatomy, paleoanthropology, and cognitive neuroscience never really takes off. Partly that's because the material Wilson covers has been thoroughly mined by such elegant stylists and formidable intellects as Oliver Sacks and Steven Pinker. And Wilson seems unsure whom he's writing for. He loads on detail (five pages on shoulder anatomy) yet scatters esoteric references without explanation ("Terrence Deacon's remarkable seal, Hoover" is hardly a household name). And he makes the usual errors to be expected from someone sufficiently brave, or foolhardy, to explore disciplines outside his own. (Stephen Jay Gould, for example, would be surprised to learn that he is, according to Wilson, a paleoanthropologist.)

Yet Wilson does extract some lessons about learning from this inquiry into how our hands and minds acquire skill. For starters, we should abandon the metaphor of the "learning curve." Jugglers, musicians, and magicians experience breakthroughs, not the smooth improvements that curve implies. After months of struggle with a three-toss routine, for instance, a student juggler may suddenly complete 11 tosses. "Trial-to-trial variations of 1,000 percent are frequently observed," reports one juggling researcher--an MIT doctoral candidate, no less.

Wilson also discovers that practice doesn't make perfect, nor is it supposed to; practice is about increasing your repertoire of ways to recover from mistakes. I can vouch for this: a seasoned neurosurgeon of my acquaintance once confided, "I'm not any slicker with my hands than the younger guys; I'm just better at getting out of trouble."

And finally, Wilson makes a plea for the culture to accord "hand knowledge" --musical talent, fix-it skills--as much respect as the more traditionally rewarded "symbolic knowledge," or book learning. But I can't help thinking that the culture is way ahead of him on this one. Show me the person who doesn't think a decent mechanic, competent building super, or surgeon is the equal of a medieval historian, and I'll show you a person living in the nineteenth century. The more technologically advanced we become, it seems, the more we value the handy, and the handmade.

JO ANN C. GUTIN (Book Review, page 108)is an anthropologist, a science writer, and the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

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