If I Had a Hammer...Would I Know What to Do With It?

To indicate stupidity, we might sometimes have heard people described as not knowing "which end of the hammer to hold." It turns out that there may be something to that.

Of course, most people know which end to hold, but properly using hammers or other kinds of tools sometimes depends not on how smart our brains are but on how smart our hands are. Or in other words, as some studies this article in Macleans say, what our hands know how to do.

Some of the problem comes from schools forced by testing standards, liability issues and whatnot to drop shop classes and others that past generations almost all had in some small doses. It's probably been a long time since a brief tour through the wood or machine shop was mandatory as it was when I was in junior high, but apparently even the option of taking shop is disappearing from a lot of schools.

Many of us, male and female alike, learned some basic tool-using techniques messing around with them while our fathers or grandfathers worked on the car or weekend home projects. That happens less and less these days, which is probably not always dad's fault -- while I could tinker around with some of what was under the hood of my '68 Impala, I can't begin to identify half of the stuff crammed into the engine compartment of my Tacoma. Even if I could, I probably couldn't reach it without a full-scale lift and the previous pastor forgot to install one of those in the parsonage garage.

Kids and grownups alike spend a lot of time receiving entertainment rather than creating it -- watching that old villain television or its new sidekick, the internet, or wearing out their thumbs on the game controller. There may be a lot to learn from Call of Duty, but a steady diet of it and nothing else will leave you scratching your head at what do do with a a counter-clockwise threaded nut -- not to mention what in the world "clockwise" means.

Reach back even younger, according to an occupational therapist quoted in the story, and you find more reasons -- kids not put on the ground as much don't explore with their hands. That exploration is not just to make sure mom and dad's pulse rate stays artificially high, but helps babies process the mechanics of the world around them and develops the brain. We don't innately know the difference between something that's hard and something that's soft, for example, and so when we touch those things our brain learns to distinguish them. Then the prevalence of toys that involve pushing buttons doesn't involve the musculature of the whole hand, meaning a lack of dexterity as well as strength in the other parts. The therapist says they sometimes treat kids -- normal, uninjured healthy kids -- who are 13 years old who can't tie their shoes.

Human beings are smarter than other critters -- although the dogs who spend a summer afternoon on the porch while their owners glum the day away in an office might beg to differ if they woke up -- and one of the reasons is that our brains developed to handle all of the information processing that goes into what we do with our hands. Grabbing stuff doesn't take a brain -- grabbing the stuff that you want to grab, only that stuff, and then using that stuff in the manner you had in mind, on the other hand, does. If we don't learn this as babies, can we learn it later? No one knows. And, in a nicely chilling comment, one neurologist notes that research and experiments to deliberately deprive babies of this learning in order to see if it could be taught later would never get through an ethics committee, but we're happy to do it in real life homes every day.

So if you have a hammer, you might start by using it on the TV, computer and Nintendo -- not to smash it, mind you, but to gently tap the off switch.