Within the text you will see a reference to Lev Vygotsky, whose constructivist theory is a main pillar of approaches in early childhood and especially for those who engage in facilitative learning vs instructional learning for young children.
Frank Wilson wrote:
Frank Wilson's Talk
Frank Wilson: Thank you very much, Ed. And welcome to you all. It is a great pleasure and an honor for me to be here this evening.
The title of the talk that you came to hear this evening is "Neurobehavioral Implications for Hominids Related to Morphologic Transformation of the Hamate Metacarpal Articulation since the Pliocene." [Audience laughter.] However, I think, "Handmade Minds" works for the title, so if you want to hear either of those talks, I welcome you to stay.
Let me begin by telling you what I guess is the important take-home message that came to me after the years that I worked on this book. Ed's right: one of the reasons that I feel so strongly about this message is because I think something is happening in our education system that misses the point and the lesson of biology in learning.
There are something like 25 million years of experience and engineering behind whatever the processes were that are unknowable, but were profoundly important in shaping hominid life, and another five million years or so of experience specifically related to life in the upright posture. And as Darwin said, we have the opportunity, with the hands freed from the need to bear body weight and the need to support the body in locomotion, to do something else with the hands. I've always had it in my head as I've thought about this that a couple of things might have happened to the early hominids. They might have come down from the trees, and the upper limbs could have turned into something like the kangaroo paw. They might have turned into the upper limb of the gorilla, which is architecturally a magnificent structure, but relatively indolent in terms of its activities. Gorillas, for example, have never been known to use tools.
What was different about the experience of our earliest ancestors was that they weren't large or aggressive animals, as far as we know, but they got big and fat in the trees and fell out. And after that, they had to learn to do something in order to survive. The story of the evolution of the human brain and human body is really, I think, the story of the solution that was found in that process over some millions of years.
So here's the bullet: for the hominids who started an experimental life about five million years ago, evolution favored specializations of hand anatomy and specialized operations in the brain to control the movements of the hands, and to give it a central role in the creation of a new domain of cognition. And that's what our life really is.
Steven Pinker, the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, refers to language as an instinct. I don't quite agree with him, but let's say I agree that the compulsion to learn languages is very strong. For me, the same term, "compulsion to learn," applies to humans in relation to the hand. That is that we have acquired a species level-a heritable trait, a compulsion to create a smart hand, a knowing, inventive, and articulate hand, a part of the body with a privileged role in action, cognition, and communication. And I do think that the Robertson Davies quote from his book, What's Bred in the Bone, is appropriate: "The hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand."
The important corollary, and one reason I am happy to be speaking to you today, is that I believe that we have an opportunity now, and perhaps an obligation, to understand that for the better part of the first 10 years of human life there are processes that are critical for a child's development that are related to the use of the hand, just as the first four to five years are critical for the development of language functioning and capability.
Charles Bell, a hero of mine, wrote a book called The Hand in 1833 in which he talked about the developmental process in which hand movements become linked to vision and to understanding and learning during the first year of life.
Lev Vygotsky wrote about the same process 60-70 years ago--the development of language and cognition in relation to the handling and labeling of objects. We now have a growing body of research coming from a number of quarters, including the work of Patricia Greenfield at UCLA, who has been studying children in object manipulation and puzzle-solving. Other researchers have been looking at what are called "exploratory procedures," movements that children use to touch and manipulate objects that are quite specific and which are essential movements in the development of handling and precision handling, exploratory handling, of objects.
There's also the work of Hans Forssberg in Sweden, who has found that the simple process of reliably holding a glass of milk-a big task for a child-takes almost four years. Something profoundly important is going on as the child begins to learn to manipulate real objects in the real world. And that process, in my estimation, is one we need to understand much better than we do now. We particularly need to understand it now because of this insane rush to replace these experiences with supposedly information-loaded experiences, which are considered somehow better for children, for reasons that I do not understand-actually I'm afraid that I do understand them, but we won't spend time talking about that.
Now, let me just give you a quick tour of where I hope to go tonight. I'm first going to talk a little bit about my experience with musicians then I'm going to tell you about my experience in Düsseldorf, where I met a young man who made me realize that musicians are not the only people who are passionate about what they do. The next thing I want to talk about is a short tour that I made through anthropology. I made the mistake about a year before The Hand was done-or when I thought it would be done-of reading Donald Johanson's book, Lucy. A couple of questions occurred to me, and after I made some phone calls I ended up at Arizona State University with a woman named Mary Marzke, who has spent something like 10 years looking at the evolution of the hominid wrist. She set me back a couple of years.
After getting the anthropology story down, I spent some time learning a little about grips. And we'll talk about grips, because that's something that's really very important in understanding why the human brain has become the way it is, and why it takes so long for us to become adept at using our hands in skilled action.
Then I want to talk a bit about the implications of this newer evolutionary model for understanding the human developmental process, human ontogeny. I'm going to introduce you to someone whose name I hope will become familiar to you if it is not already, a British psychologist named Henry Plotkin. Finally, I will talk about ideas in relation to movement.
The beginning for me, as Ed said, was in my years working with musicians, which started an I became interested in my daughter's capabilities, in what it is about the brain that makes it possible for the fingers to move the way they do. That was in the late 1970s, the early 1980s, when a lot of work was being done in neurophysiology, tracking sensory-motor processes in skilled movement. So, it was a good time to be interested in that question.
I decided I couldn't really understand it unless I took piano lessons myself, so I did. And it was a horrible experience for my family, but it was a good experience for me. I even wrote a book about it called Tone Deaf and All Thumbs?.
In the process of doing this work, it became known around our area that there was a doctor who knew something about music, so if you had a hand problem he would be a good guy to talk to. And I started seeing musicians as patients.
I became interested in what we now call the Graffman-Fleischer problem. In 1982 pianists Gary Graffman and Leon Fleischer went public with their hand problems. It turned out they both had something called focal dystonia and had lost the ability to control their hands. I started taking films of musicians with the problem and showing these video clips. At one of the talks I gave, a man in the audience, a guitar player, fainted. I thought, This is odd. We're just watching somebody moving their fingers across a keyboard, and this person reacted as if it was an ax murder. Then it happened a second time, and a third time.
I eventually realized that I didn't understand what it meant to be someone who lived a life in music, to see and to be in the presence of someone who was tortured in the process of trying to do that-that there was some emotional connection that had developed in relation to the act of music-making that was so deep that I could witness it. I couldn't actually understand it.
It was that emotional connection, the process of being a musician, that I wanted to understand. The questions were, Are musicians just professional emoters? Are they emotional about everything? If something goes wrong, do they simply fall over in a dead faint? Or is there something about using the hand as a primary tool of expression and development that over a lifetime forges something inside, an emotional connection with work, an emotional basis for learning, that really transforms people?
At that point I met Anton Bachleitner. When he was eight years old he saw a puppet show in a little town in southern Germany called Bad Tölz. And he knew instantly that that was what he was going to do with his life. He went to the guy who owned the theater and said, "I'm going to be a puppeteer." And, in fact, he has spent the rest of his life doing exactly that.
It isn't just a matter of his being enchanted with children and doing shows. First of all, marionette theater in Europe is a big deal. It's very serious theater not simply children's theater. Bachleitner's father was a carpenter and he thought being a puppeteer was a very bad idea because you can't make money carving wood. But Bachleitner became a master wood carver. He carved the puppets, he trained himself to be a marionetteer, he developed a company, he began to select plays, and the story goes on and on. He's now in his forties. His own son is now 12 and is doing the same thing.
It's an extraordinary experience to see [Bachleitner's performance of] The Magic Flute. There are, I think, eight puppets flying around on the stage. To see how this happens and to trace this back through all the years of his own childhood and his development tells us a story about how these kinds of passions and skills evolve over a lifetime. [One can] get a sense of what it's like to be a non-musician who has developed a highly personal expression through the hands.
I want to talk a bit about the deep history of this ability. Let me tell you the story about Lucy-I'm sure plenty of you here know that story. Donald Johanson was a graduate student in anthropology, and in the early 1970s he and a group of people on a fellowship went to the Afar region of Ethiopia. It's just north of the area where Louis and Mary Leakey had been working since the 1930s.
When the Leakeys were working the Rift Valley, they were working on a hunch that an early ancestor of homo-species would be found not in Asia, but in Africa. And, against all odds, they expected to find an early pre-homo hominid.
And, in fact, in about 1960, Mary Leakey did find the first African homo-species, Homo-Habilis. But Johanson found the second Australopithecine, the first pre-homo-species. The Leakeys had been working in the Rift Valley looking for this human ancestor for well over 30 years. And Johanson, this upstart graduate student, on the last day of his first field expedition, right after he got his his Ph.D., saw this bit of arm bone sticking up out of the dirt, looked at it, and began digging. And before the end of the day, they had this skeleton and they knew that because of the structure of the pelvis and the knee joint that this was a habitual biped. That night in their camp they were listening to the Beatles, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." And so this became Lucy.
One of the remarkable things about this skeleton is that there's so much of it. Paleo-anthropology typically turns out to be a corner of one tooth or a corner of part of the mandible. But to have this much is almost unheard of. And, indeed, to have parts of the hand present is also almost unheard of. There are very, very few fossil remains of hand bones. I guess they make good hors-d'oeuvres for hyenas. I'm not sure. But they don't last.
Within a few years they had recovered almost 20 more individuals or parts of individuals, and had actually collected this many bones from the hands of the Australopithecines, which were now called Australopithecus afarensis, Afar-- the region of afarensis being the region of Afar. And Australopithecus was the name assigned to this, meaning "southern ape."
When Mary Marzke began to work with this hand, she was struck, as I had been, by a comment made by one of the anthropologists who looked at it that the hand was really not like a chimp hand. It was sort of modern. What was modern about the hand was on the radial or the thumb side of the hand; the thumb itself was actually considerably longer than a chimp thumb in relation to the rest of the fingers.
What Marzke described was that the fingers could actually be pulled apart and rotated around the axis. With the long thumb, Lucy and her family would have been capable of what she called a "three jaw chuck," a special grip that would have allowed the grasping of a regular-sized stone. And because of other features of the skeleton, Lucy would have been capable of doing pretty much everything that a pitcher on a baseball mound can do. Because she had a fully brachiating arm-that is, she was capable of throwing overhead-she had full range of this movement: pronation and supernation. And she also had musculature and attachments in her pelvis that would have allowed axial swiveling, so that an acceleration and deceleration movement would have been possible.
So, it was quite possible that Lucy could have had, as a new behavior that would have been valuable, the ability to throw stones. Now we don't know how much of this was done. Some of you may know William Calvin's book, The Throwing Madonna, which postulates that the beginning of hemispheric specialization came with over-arm throwing and hunting.
The neurologic side is that in order to throw accurately, you have to be able to control the timing of release. So this behavior that was important to the animal and had real survival value also required something very special: the ability to control, at the millisecond level, the exact muscular responses that would allow accurate placement of an over-arm thrown stone. This was really the beginning of this process.
But one of the things that Lucy did not have was the ability to move the pinky side of the hand toward the thumb. We've all been trained and conditioned to think of ourselves as having a hand that's unique because we have an opposable thumb. Well, in fact, we are not remotely the first species to have an opposable thumb. What we do have that no other hominid has is an opposable pinky and ring finger.
So you have essentially the capability of forming an extremely mobile, sculpted form that can adapt itself to almost any shape. But there's something else. The fourth and fifth fingers in the human hand actually rotate toward the base of the thumb, and the thumb is really quite long compared to that of a chimp.
The other thing that we gain with this is a whole series of what are called precision handling movements. I don't know when we started handling textiles and manufacturing thread, but this, along with many other tasks, was made physically possible because of the biomechanics of the hand, which developed over literally millions of years of human life.
I think one has to say that the hand and brain must have co-evolved as a system. What skills were built into this system really depended upon, and were in fact created out of, countless interactions between people and their environment, natural materials and objects, over literally millions of years.
So, you can say I think, that the hand built the brain as much as the brain built the hand. We know that both statements are equally true, according to the principle of co-evolution, which was actually first stated by Sherwood Washburn in 1960:
The structure of modern man must be the result of change in terms of natural selection that came with the tool using way of life. From the evolutionary point of view, behavior and structure form an interacting complex with each change in one affecting the other. Man began when populations of apes, about a million years ago, started the bi-pedal, tool-using way of life.
The other thing that has happened is we've manufactured objects that exist in a dazzling array and variety for our own use. We have manufactured tools, we have manufactured entertainment devices, we have manufactured a technology that is based upon our understanding of what the hand can do.
I've spent maybe 20 years trying to understand the relationship of the hand to this instrument, the piano. Homer Smith wrote a book called From Fist to Philosopher, in which he talked about pianists. He said that the pianist is the summit of mammalian evolution, and he talked about the number of muscular contractions that must be possible in a pianist who's playing the Schumann "C Major Tacata." I don't know how he calculated that, but he guessed that it was something like 400 individual muscle contractions per second. What was the evolutionary or selection pressure that created the need to be able to articulate these movements with this degree of precision?
My answer to this question is that it was the control of movements in gestural communication, such as that used in sign language, that probably predisposed us to be able to develop the kind of physiological control of rapid, precise movements with a communicative intent, which we now see represented in the skilled movements of the musician.
When I went to England to talk to Henry Plotkin, I went because he'd written a book, Darwin, Machines, and the Nature of Knowledge. It is an extraordinary book, and there had been no book like it in cognitive psychology. The book became important to me because I had come to wonder what it is that we owe to, or what it is that we gain from, the history of hand/brain co-evolution. There can be no doubt that our hominid past left its mark on all of us in the form of extremely powerful rules that define the unfolding of individually distinctive perceptual motor skills and intelligence. Each of us begins life crying to see the world, to learn from it, and to forge our own personal strategies for surviving in it in rather particular ways.
The human genome dictates that at the species level we are all the same, while at the individual level we are all different. How does that work? Plotkin says it's done with what he calls heuristics. By that he means inherent, individually specific physical and mental capacities by which we tune into and react to important conditions or events in the environment. He uses the term heuristic because he wants us to understand that we are not only equipped to survive physiologically, but also to learn how to survive behaviorally in the face of both certain and uncertain dangers.
Since heuristics is an uncommonly stubborn word for people to cozy up to, I will tell you that Plotkin also adds what his notion of knowledge is. He says knowledge is any state in the organism that bears a relationship to the world. A bullfighter's knowledge is the sum of multiple integrations of joint angles, muscular attachments at the hip, in the spine and the knees, the ankles and the feet, all transformed into poised synergies of movement.
This knowledge also includes a thirst for adrenaline, a capacity for total concentration, and just in case the bull is unimpressed, the flawless chemistry of clotting factors and antibodies in the blood. The bullfighter's heuristic, in other words, provides for advanced preparedness not only of the hand and the eye, but also for a wide range of arousal and protective mechanisms reaching down to the cellular level.
And the bullfighter who has been gored by a bull has knowledge that goes even deeper. Not only does he or she have the words el toro in the head and a memory and powerful emotions connected with that incident informing his or her own internal representation of the animal, but a scar on the chest wall as well. And that scar represents the bull. It's a registration on and in the body of the bullfighter, a permanent reference to and a symbol of an encounter with it.
There's a great book by a Canadian named Kieran Egan, The Educated Mind, in which Egan talks about what he calls "the romantic stage of learning." This is a period in pre-adolescence when a child suddenly becomes aware of the larger world. And I don't mean just the world outside. I mean the word writ large. It's a time when kids see someone doing something and they say, "I could do that."
This is a biologic time. It's a sort of burgeoning moment of consciousness about adult life, and it has all of the power of youthful sexuality. There's no way of predicting where it's going to go, any more than you can predict where a crush is going to go. But when it happens, it's a big deal.
Serge Percelly was the son of two Belgian circus performers; he's the fifth generation of performers. I met him when his parents allowed him to come on a trip for the first time, when he was about 13. He said this was the first time he'd seen a juggling act:
I saw one of these jugglers, and I was just fascinated. I was amazed by it. And I knew it was something that I wanted to do. I was hypnotized. It wouldn't go out of my head. I didn't know if I had the talent. But after I saw him, before even trying, I knew that that was what I wanted to do, and I knew it without knowing if I actually could do it.
And he said, "I didn't even wait to buy balls. I started with stones." That's interesting, the genetics of seeing that stones and throwing stones was something was naturally available.
Then he said something else to me. I'd asked him how he, as a juggler, developed the ideas that he used in his act, and he replied:
Well, you know, nobody ever really invented juggling. Most of it comes by just practicing. But as you do it more, you get little ideas that just come with the practicing. When you practice seven hours a day, like I used to, you get to a certain state of mind where you just do whatever goes through your head. You just try anything. You really don't care what goes where. You just try things; you experiment.
I think that there is something about the process of involving oneself in learning with the hand that generates what we call ideas.
I want you to think about the complexity of Plotkin's idea of heuristics-that we have a mind and a body that we grow up with, and what we do with this physical structure, and what we do with the culture in which we are embedded, and what we do with the technology, which we spend our lives adapting to, turns out to be a very personal journey for all of us. It's subject to remarkable misinterpretation, and it's also a subject of wonder.