Thinking with your hands
One of my favorite scenes from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” is when the title characters move to Bolivia and apply to be armed guards at a (coal?) mine. The mine’s owner tells Sundance to stand and shoot a stone tossed about 10 yards away. Sundance attempts to do so, but repeatedly misses, and the owner starts walking away, clearly unimpressed.
“Can I move?” Sundance says. “I’m better when I move.” The owner, confused, ultimately grants permission for Sundance to move when he fires, and with a quickdraw, ducking action, Sundance shoots the stone repeatedly dead-on.
It’s an entertaining scene, but it also connects with newly-developing theories in cognitive psychology about the relationship between perception, action, and cognition.
Watching great speakers give presentations, whether at TED or in class, it is easy to see that action is as much a part of their thinking as the words themselves. Recent research into how gestures affect communication and learning reveal the dynamic link between physical and cognitive action, and there is a growing awareness of how such principles can be put to our advantage.
A recent article in the New York Times connects the phenomenon with a growing emphasis on bilateral processing in the brain, with the claim that society has a growing awareness and need for “right-brain” thinking to encourage creative solutions to difficult challenges. It outlines the experience of a group of Halliburton employees who were encouraged to pictorially sketch a problem that had been standing over them for some time, with the result being that they quickly arrived at an “obvious” solution. This outcome can be interpreted in several ways. The article suggests that the visualization itself was key to finding a solution - putting ideas on paper in visual (rather than semantic) form helped “connect the dots” for the participants. However, I contend that it was the physical act of drawing that most strongly contributed to finding the solution - the drawings as artifacts are (nearly) irrelevant. Drawings in invisible ink - or just gestured in the air - might sufficiently stimulate bilateral thinking.
This has a few interesting implications. First, the contralateral organization of sensory and motor processing in the brain suggests that stimulation of the right hemisphere would be most effectively done by engaging the left hand. One of Albert Sperry’s more interesting demonstrations of the behavioral effects of splitting the brain by cutting the corpus callosum was when a patient was presented with a simple object in their left visual field (processed by the right brain), they were unable to vocalize what they had seen (a generally left-brain function), but were able to draw it using their left hand, but not their right. In “normal” patients who had an intact corpus callosum (and therefore strong communication between hemispheres of the brain), of course, there was no inability to verbally identify what had been presented - the right hemisphere effectively let the left brain know how to respond.
The conceptual leap is made between knowing that sensations or muscle movements are processed in a particular hemisphere and asserting that those functions have a cascading stimulating effect on other processes in that hemisphere (such as the nebulous “creativity” in the right hemisphere or the abstract “numerical ability” in the left). Many self-help books propose that you “visualize your goals” - with the implication being that if you can see where you want to be, you’ll be able to better determine how to get there. But what if this visualization process (which loosely correlates to activity in the right hemisphere*) itself stimulates the out-of-the-box thinking that is necessary to tackle problems in a new way? Although choosing to visualize the goal may appear logical, would visualizing anything similarly stimulate creative processing? Maybe - I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
A more fundamental point is that action cannot be separated from cognitive processes - as Dr. David Kirsh recently mentioned in a conversation I had with him, “the gesture is my thinking”. Movement, particularly in the structured mode of drawing or creating something physical, broadens the scope of your thinking. It helps offload some amount of cognition onto the world outside your head - a step toward distributed cognition. It’s an effective step toward moving beyond any sort of mental block, whether you are writing an essay, setting personal goals, or organizing an event.
So if you’re stuck on a problem that you just can’t sort out, stop and doodle. Carry around a jar of Play-dough. Pick a leaf and make it into interesting shapes. Learn origami. Do something. It will have at least two positive effects: 1) stimulate creative processing in your brain, and 2) reduce the cognitive load of head-concentrated thinking. Implications for design? Get the user to move.
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* “Right brain” and “left brain” are gross generalizations about the location of function, and should be treated more metaphorically than figuratively. In fact, most left/right brain distinctions fail entirely for left-handed people, including the old stalwart of localized brain function, language. Broca’s and Wernke’s areas are nearly impossible to identify, and even emotional processing appears far more distributed in left-handed individuals. If you’re left handed, you should feel special, although it will very likely preclude you from many neuroscientific investigations. You make the data fuzzy.
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