Video: Intelligence of the Hands

“The more you work with your hands, I think the more respect you have for your hands,” says NBSS President Miguel Gómez-Ibáñez CF ’99. He reflects, “I think that people who don’t work with their hands might not understand exactly how hands learn, but hands do learn.”

Watch this video of Miguel describing how the hands and mind work together when honing your craft.

In this video Miguel says, “The more you work with your hands, I think the more respect you have for your hands. I think that people who don’t work with their hands might not understand exactly how hands learn, but hands do learn.

“And if I were to try to give you an example, I’d say, ‘tie your shoes without looking.’ I bet you can do it. And that’s because your fingers know how to do it. It’s not your brain telling them, they’re just doing it.

“So when you work with your hands, and you have that sort of experience of tying your shoelaces without looking, but you’re doing it all day; you’re picking up a tool and you’re feeling it instead of looking at it; and you’re cutting a piece of wood, and you’re not looking at the saw, you’re looking ahead [to] where you want the saw to go – all of those skills are hand skills and they have to do with the intelligence of the hands.

“The hands are doing what they know how to do, your brain is not having to stress about what your hands are doing, your brain is off trying to see what’s next, and what your hands are going to do next. So, that’s my version of ‘the intelligence of the hands.’ They actually think for themselves.”