Free Download The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture, by Frank R. Wilson
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The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture, by Frank R. Wilson
Free Download The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture, by Frank R. Wilson
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From the Inside Flap
tling argument . . . provocative . . . absorbing." --The Boston Globe"Ambitious . . . arresting . . . celebrates the importance of hands to our lives today as well as to the history of our species." --The New York Times Book ReviewThe human hand is a miracle of biomechanics, one of the most remarkable adaptations in the history of evolution. The hands of a concert pianist can elicit glorious sound and stir emotion; those of a surgeon can perform the most delicate operations; those of a rock climber allow him to scale a vertical mountain wall. Neurologist Frank R. Wilson makes the striking claim that it is because of the unique structure of the hand and its evolution in cooperation with the brain that Homo sapiens became the most intelligent, preeminent animal on the earth.        In this fascinating book, Wilson moves from a discussion of the hand's evolution--and how its intimate
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About the Author
Frank Wilson was an early contributor to the development of performing arts medicine in the United States and Europe in the 1980’s. In 1986 he was a co-founder and neurologist for the Health Program for Performing Artists at the University of California, San Francisco, where his interest focused on impaired hand control in musicians. In 1989 he moved to the University of Düsseldorf in Germany, where he held a one-year fellowship as visiting professor of neurology and was the organizer of a research team studying focal hand dystonia in musicians. Following his return to California in 1990, Dr. Wilson continued his work with performing artists; he began a trial of music-learning experiences for patients in the neurological rehabilitation program at Mt. Zion Hospital; and for two years he was the neurologist on a multidisciplinary team investigating upper extremity injuries among textile designers at the Levi Strauss Company in San Francisco. He became the medical director of the Health Program for Performing Artists in 1996, and in 2001 accepted an appointment as Clinical Professor of Neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine, joining a clinical research team at Stanford studying deep brain stimulation for patients with complex movement disorders. Wilson’s career-long interest in the neurology of human hand control is reflected in two books that explore the neurological and anthropological underpinnings of skilled hand use. The first, Tone Deaf and All Thumbs? was published by Viking-Penguin in 1986. The second, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture, was published by Pantheon Books in 1998 and was nominated that year for a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Since the publication of The Hand, he has presented his work and his ideas at national meetings of many professional organizations, and to a wide community of artists and educators who share the opinion that the human hand and brain are an anatomically and behaviorally integrated system – biology’s not-so-secret formula for individual human intelligence, creativity, and autonomy.
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Product details
Paperback: 416 pages
Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage Books Ed edition (September 14, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679740473
ISBN-13: 978-0679740476
Product Dimensions:
5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.2 out of 5 stars
29 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#623,287 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This book is organized in two major parts. The first three chapters discuss the evolution of the hand and the centrality of the hand in human evolution. The remaining chapters introduce the reader to a wide range of fascinating people that Frank Wilson has known throughout his life and who have given him insights into the amazing versatility of the hand.The three chapters on evolution are worth summarizing. They offer a significant number of insights that are not found elsewhere but are intuitively appealing.We are not the only land animals to have learned to walk on our hind legs, and not the only ones to have found other things to do with the front legs. Tyrannosaurus rex let them atrophy. Squirrels use them to hold nuts. Kangaroos put them to some use or another. But most significantly, our monkey and ape ancestors have found them increasingly useful for other purposes. Human beings are the only primates to walk exclusively on their hind legs, freeing up the front legs for other purposes.Monkeys use their hands to grab food and feed themselves. Their hands are extremely well adapted for climbing and jumping around in trees. Monkeys developed binocular color vision, a fair amount of flexibility in their arms, and brains capable of planning and executing sophisticated moves with their hands.Apes moved from the tops of branches to underneath them, swinging rather than climbing. This brachiation involved some evolution in their shoulders which has served humans well. It also let heavy bodied animals climb higher into the trees, where the food was.During this long evolution a thumb emerged distinct from the other four digits. It was different, but not yet in a position to coordinate with the other fingers to hold things. As Wilson says, apes are equipped to pick up suitcases, but they can't pick up a baseball with a thumb and fingers.The last common ancestor between human beings and our closest ape relative, the chimpanzee, appears to have lived about 7 million years ago. Since that time the world has experienced a series of ice ages. Jungle habitats shrunk repeatedly, and our ancestors were forced out onto the open savanna. Wilson uses Lucy, the Australopithecus discovered by the Leakeys, an anthropoid who lived 3.9 to 4.2 million years ago as his frame of reference. Lucy's brain was about the same size as that of the chimpanzee, but her body had changed significantly from that of apes.Most significantly, Lucy was a full-time biped. Her hands were free. Her legs had evolved significantly; she needed to move quickly to avoid predators and to catch a meal on the open savanna. Her shoulders and arms had also evolved. She was able to use an overhand motion to throw rocks. The ability to throw stones was undoubtedly useful for keeping predators at bay and killing other animals for food. She still did not, however, have a fully modern human hand. In particular her hand was not suited for wielding a club. Its musculature did not allow the thumb to be placed alongside a stick and oppose the ring and pinky finger in a powerful grip.Rock throwing is done with only one hand, and it takes a lot of practice. Wilson hypothesizes that this is the time in which handedness (favoring righties 9 to 1) came to be strongly expressed in the human genome. Tool use would drive it further, with one hand holding the work object and the other hand holding a tool to craft the object at hand.Homo erectus evolved the ability to hold tools. Oldowan stone axes date back as far as 2 ½ million years were created by people holding the stone to be formed in one hand (usually left) and chipping flakes off with another stone held in the right. It required some evolution of the musculature, and evolution of the wrist bones to endure the constant pounding. One of the strengths of the book is the generous and informative illustrations of how bones and muscles evolved to meet the new tasks they faced throughout the course of evolution.Human brains evolved quickly about the time that tools came into use. There are several different theories as to why this happened, all of which probably have some validity. The size of the communities grew, necessitating the intelligence to manage broader networks of relationships. Individuals became more specialized. Toolmaking is a craft. The brain evolved to control the increasingly useful hand and arm. There was almost certainly more cooperation in the hunt.The need for communication grew for several reasons. The increased size of the tribe, the need to coordinate more complex activities, and the need to teach culturally acquired skills. The surprise is that language did not appear until very late in the game, perhaps 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. This suggests that our anthropoid ancestors must have made extensive use of gesture, by hand and facial expression, probably accompanied by utterances that were not yet symbolic language but nonetheless useful in communication.Wilson discusses the structure of the brain, and the close relationship between the portions that control the hands and those that deal with language. Intelligent, social animals such as Homo erectus had to be able to communicate effectively in order to manage in the complex societies that they had developed. Wilson's theory is that spoken language, using audio tokens as symbols, is simply a much faster way to communicate than pantomime.To summarize the first three chapters, and the book in general, the hand has played a central role in every aspect of human evolution. The shoulder, arm and hand saw significant evolution even as the size of the brain grew very little. Then, as hands became more adept, tools came into use in society grew more complex, the brain exploded in size to its present 1.5 liters.The rest of the book focuses on the extraordinarily varied uses of the hand, and some extraordinarily talented practitioners in each of the areas mentioned. Wilson himself has a very broad range of interests and acquaintances. In his professional life he is a surgeon who deals with problems of the hand, especially those of musicians. The stories he tells of people in different professions emphasize how integral the hand is to the human animal. We are not simply creatures of intellect.One of the take-home points for this father of young children is how important it is for children to spend a lot of time creating things with their hands. Painting, sawing and nailing, cooking and so on. Even at the time this book was written, in the late 1990s, it was clear that children were succumbing more and more to the allure of computers and video entertainment. Wilson's strong advice would be not to do it. We learn by doing, and we do with our hands.Contents ====================================Character/topic1. Dawn2. The Hand-Thought-Language Nexus3. The Arm We Brought Down from the Trees4. Puppet Lessons from Alexandria and Düsseldorf ===========Puppeteer5. Hand, Eye, and Sky ============================Juggling6. The Grip of the Past ============================Rockclimbing7. The Twenty-Four-Karat Thumb =====================Goldsmith8. The Right Hand Knows What the Left Hand Just Did =========Handedness9. Bad Boys, Polyliths, and the Heterotechnic Revolution =======Dragracing10. The Articulate Hand ===========================Language11. In Tune and Evolving Prestissimo ===================Musician12. Lucy to Lulu to Rose ===========================Professional chef13. Tough, Tender, and Tenacious =====================Physical rehabilitation14. Hidden in the Hand ============================Magic15. Head for the Hands ============================Education
Informative treatise by an intellectually and professionally qualified expert. Great evidence/argument for continuation or reinstatement of high school shop classes. Should be on every shop teacher's required reading list, plus administration and school boards nationwide. Closing school shops is a crime against our nation's future and unconscionable in the minds of many. If not vocational, then at least Industrial Arts exploratory instruction must be provided of we are to continue as any type of technological world power.
I got this book because I have a sister-in love that has lost her profession in music due to the abuse she has had to put on her hands playing the piano. This Dr. specializes on the hand. Then I found out from the book how the hand probably evolved, about the anatomy of the hands and the arms that make the hands so effective. I also work in a situation where we have been covering up the hands because of my students scratching their faces due to the fact that they cannot control themselves. It has lead to my requesting more work in Occupational Therapy to get my students to using their hands. The work Dr. Wilson did shows me that the use of the hand was the beginning of communication for us as humans. Right now I am reading in this book about lifting and how the body and the structures in the arms and the hand perform these actions automatically without our even thinking about it.
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.
This book was not what I expected. It is a long and rambling book on evolution of hand. Disjointed devoid of a coherent theme, wandering from prehistoric times to present and back to prehistoric times again. Reading the book is a cure for insomnia
I haven't read this in a few years, but I found it very engaging and thought-provoking. I just ordered another copy so I can read it again. If you are a musician or someone who works with your hands, this book will be illuminating.
I recently attended a "Science Cafe" where a talk was given about Obama's new Brain-research and possible directions to take that research. Basically, the speaker was headed in the direction of "remapping" the brain electronics, without understanding it's source ... the hand. I pointed out that brain atoms were probably 30 orders of magnitude away from the hand that created this brain of ours in the first place. Now, in reading this book, I think it belongs on Obama's desk ! Seriously !
I've only gotten a little in this book, but it seems really interesting and informative! Hopefully I'll come back with an update when I'm done! :)
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