I’ve always been fascinated by the Homunculus, the artistic representation of our body based upon the amount of neural real estate in the brain allocated to different parts. You can see what one looks like on cognitive neuroscientist, Kevin Allan’s web page here. Looking at this artistic rendition, there’s little doubt about which body parts our brain thinks are most important to allocate resources to.
The Hands Have It
There’s also a famous experiment (Tranel, et al, 2000) by noted neuroscience researchers Daniel Tranel, Antoine Bechara and Antonio Damasio that is interesting for associated reasons. Using the “stacked” decks popularized in the Iowa Gambling Task decision-making experiments, they wired the hands of participants with electrodes to measure Galvanic Skin Response. At some point in the Gambling Task participants become consciously aware that two of the four decks they are playing with are stacked in their favor and two are stacked against them. However, what the Iowa researchers discovered is that GSR measurements indicated that a participant’s hands signaled which decks were stacked long before their conscious minds realized it! This would be a good awareness for professional card players to develop, I suspect. But it also has lots of implications for educating our children as well. How might we model early education to take optimal advantage of the “brains in our hands?”
Talk to the Hand
Neurologist Frank Wilson thought this question worthwhile enough to devote his whole career to answering it. He does a very comprehensive job in his book simply entitled The Hand. In graduate school, Arthur Hastings, my clinical hypnosis professor, introduced me to Applied Kinesiology and an elegant decision-making method that begins to make use of the wisdom in our hands. It works like this: in the moment, you designate one hand to represent “Yes” and the other to represent “No.” Next, you form a circle or “link” by touching each thumb and index finger together. After that, you form a two-link chain by inserting one thumb-index finger circle inside the other. Finally, you pose a Yes-No Question to your hands. For example, “Should I make the move to Whidbey Island?” Then you simply pull your fingers apart. The thumb-index fingers that remain connected – that is, that don’t give way in response – indicates your answer. Might this very simple method be one example we can use to begin teaching our kids to cultivate the wisdom in their own hands?
Handy Analysis
My friends, Elizabeth Bothwell and Todd Zimmerman have more advanced things that kids could begin learning early. They both are experts in hand analysis. As Elizabeth describes it “Hand analysis is an exploration of all aspects of the hand — shape, lines, fingers, and especially fingerprints — for the purpose of discerning human character, temperament, gifts, and individual life purpose. In our hands we see the imprint of our brains’ neural pathways and energies accumulated during a lifetime of experiences. Hand analysis is not predictive.” If you ever have Elizabeth or someone who has studied and deeply understands the “language” embodied in our hands give you a reading, you cannot help but come away convinced there is intelligence encoded there. Hand analysis, too, is something we can expose our children to and educate them about early. Might doing so begin to make even greater use of the neural real estate our Homunculus is already devoting to this resource? And who knows, one day Harvard psychologist, Howard Gardner might add this as yet one more of his multiple intelligences; in which case, I’d have to hand it to him.
Tranel, D., Bechara, A., & Damasio, A.R. (2000). Decision making and the somatic marker hypothesis. In M. S. Gazzaniga (Ed.) The new cognitive neurosciences, Second Edition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Mark,
So, in my mind, there is a very simple explanation for all of this. Our soul is an extension of God. Our soul and God are always aware of us and what we are wanting. This innate knowlege of our bodies is actually our soul giving us the answers to what we seek – since God and our soul know all.
I love reading your research, because I can always hold it up to this explanation and see you finding scientific evidence of this that I believe.
I do not speak of an anthropomorphic Christian God or Catholic God or Muslim God. I speak of the source of everything. “All that is”, Abraham of abraham-hicks calls it.
I think that we would model early education to take advantage of the ‘brain in our hands’ and body by not breaking those bonds to begin with. Our culture tells children they do not know – we adults know. From the very earliest age we caution and protect them and drill out of them this sense that they are connected to broader, wiser things via their body and spirit and that small, still voice within.
I am just learning many of these things, but the way I try to cultivate or foster this knowledge in my 5-yr-old son is by saying things to him like “listen to your body” or “what does your heart tell you?” and then I always try to place full trust on whatever answer he gives me and go from there.
Lisa
As I am learning EEG Neural feedback and biofeedback, measuring the GSR of the hands will become an interesting place for both my client and I to focus our attention.
I believe we will soon find there are other places in our bodies that speak to us if we would only listen carefully. Our minds are full of wonderful wisdom, yet we know that wisdom can get clouded by a highjacked limbic system. Might there be other parts of our glorious bodies that continue to hold the “right wisdom” even when we are limbically dominant? I think you are correct in that we need to hand it to our hands. Perhaps they continue to “know” even when we are beseiged by fear and doubt. Thank you Mark for another insightful blog.
Hi Mark,
Thanks for sharing Arthur’s example of applying kinesiology to the hands. What a simple elegant way to listen to body knowing. Your column always inspires me and I am reminded of a wonderful teen quote that a colleague of mine, John McCluskey, often shares. He asked a student how she would describe what makes a great teacher and she replied, “Oh that’s easy, John. It is when the teacher holds my heart in their hands.”
Mark, You could mention the pendulum here as well. It is an extension of the hand…and bodies intuition. Toni
Just read a powerful book that really goes into applied kinesiology– “Power vs. Force” by David Hawkins. I’ve been using the hand tool for a week now and find it fascinatingly helpful. Every sentence, paragraph, page, etc. was calibrated using applied kinesiology in his book. I’ve been using this calibration to “test” my own writing for Masters thesis. (Probably shouldn’t have admitted that…Mark’s expectations of my work have just been raised, I’m sure!)
Hawkins also goes into more detailed explanation of using this tool and how responses can be influenced by all kinds of things. Also, for some questions it may be best to first ask if this an appropriate question to ask. So, I suggest beginners read a little more into it before giving it full credence.
Hi Guys,
Unfortunately, someone misunderstood Damasio’s paper big time. I happen to be a neuroscience researcher at the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at U.Penn (with Dr. Newberg, we do brainscan studies of people during meditation and prayer), and the article does not say that the hands recognize the difference before the brain. It says that nonconscious parts of the brain (in specific, the ventral medial prefontal cortex) recognize the difference before it reaches consciousness. Here’s a comment from Damasio/Tranel:
“The somatic marker hypothesis and the Iowa Gambling task hypothesis (SMH) was developed to address the problems of decision-making encountered in patients with certain kinds of prefrontal damage and with compromised emotions. ‘Somatic markers (SM) are a special instance of feelings generated from secondary emotions. Those emotions and feelings have been connected by learning to predicted future outcomes of certain scenarios. When a negative SM is juxtaposed to a particular future outcome the combination functions as an alarm bell. When a positive SM is juxtaposed instead, it becomes a beacon of incentive. This is the essence of the SMH. On occasion SMs may operate covertly (without coming to consciousness) and may utilize an ‘as-if-loop’. The centrality of emotion to the SMH is evident from these and other texts, before and after, as is the notion that SMs are emotion-related
signals, which are either conscious or unconscious. However, to be conscious of a SM is a very different issue from being conscious of the knowledge of facts, options, outcomes and strategies involved in deciding.Patients with
lesions in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC) failed to generate anticipatory SCRs, and played deficiently. Even after several of them realized which decks were bad, they still made the wrong choices. …. We concluded that conscious knowledge of the situation alone is not sufficient for implementing advantageous decisions, and that its absence does not preclude them.”
If you think I’ve overlooked something, please email me with the passage from the paper at markwaldman @ sbcglobal.net.
Hi Mark,
Thanks for adding your voice to the mix.
The link I provided for the Iowa Gambling Task highlights some of the controversy with this research. But what do you think is meant by this assertion that I’ve taken directly from that entry:
“Concurrent measurement of galvanic skin response shows that healthy participants show a “stress” reaction to hovering over the bad decks after only 10 trials, long before conscious sensation that the decks are bad. By contrast, patients with OFC dysfunction never develop this physiological reaction to impending punishment. Bechara and his colleagues explain this in terms of the somatic marker hypothesis. The Iowa gambling task is currently being used by a number of research groups using fMRI to investigate which brain regions are activated by the task in healthy volunteers as well as clinical groups with conditions such as schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder.”
Sincerely,
Mark B.
Hi Mark,
GSR responses are mediated by different parts of the brain. The trigger mechanism is visual/cognitive. This sends a signal to the hands, which is then registered by the GSR.
Best,
Mark W.
From Mark B: So does this mean that the hands DON’T get the signal before the conscious mind? Or does it mean that ANY part of the body that was being measured for GSR would indicate a “pre-cognitive” awareness? What would happen if this study was re-designed to be done by blind subjects somehow? – Regards, Mark B.
From Mark W: That’s a good question. The study didn’t measure this, so this would be my assumption: The eyes perceive the difference between the decks unconsciously. The visual information is sent to different areas of the prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate, and limbic emotional areas. When “seeing” the unfavorable deck, the brain simultaneously sends a neural signal down through the body, where it is registered by the gsr, and to areas where consciousness is created (most likely, working memory). The brain/body signal is slow, so the information reaches consciousness first. Thus, the nonconscious brain knows what’s going on first, the conscious brain knows a second later, but the body itself is more like a zombie carrying out the will of the unconscious brain. Damasio’s work shows that all sensory stimuli is responded to prior to us being consciously aware of it. Of course, one second later, the nonconscious brain responds to the input from consciousness.
If blind subjects had same results, then you could say that something other than vision was responsible, but you’d have to be careful not to assume what that something is. This is the mistake that Intelligent Design/creationists make: if there’s a hole in the knowledge, it must be the work of God.
[...] We turn children away from their inner guidance, from what their body knows, from the wisdom in their souls and hearts and minds. We teach them that we know better, the [...]