When I was a child, I drew pictures of my hands. Usually my left hand, because my right held the pencil. Today, I watch my daughter and some of my students do the same. The curvature, the nails, the curious and unexpected locations of joints.

There is a fascinating book called The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture by Frank Wilson. Wilson is a neurologist and a pianist who focuses on the health and healing of this unique human organ.

His theory is that the explosive brain development we see in Homo sapiens 100,000 years ago was due in part to the novel availability of this remarkably flexible and new tool: the hand.

He walks you first through the basic anatomy, through the eyes of our ancient ancestor monkeys who walked on top of branches, to the brachiating (or hanging) apes who began to hang underneath them due to their increasing weight and size. Finally, what happened when those brachiators stood upright and freed those grasping hands when on two feet.

The anatomy alone is worth it. But the neurology is equally as fascinating, as exemplified by one simple image: the homunculus. This term can have various meanings in different historical contexts, but the modern neurological meaning of homunculus is a sort of caricature of the human body, with each organ or area (ears, nose, neck, legs, hands, etc.) drawn in proportion to the amount of nerve tissue the brain dedicates to feeling and controlling this particular area. The more nerve tissue, the larger the organ. The resulting image is basically a stick figure with an enormous head and two gloriously outsized hands.

The image is a wonder to contemplate. Consider how much of your attention goes into the organs of your head - eyes, ears, cheeks, mouth. From there it is a relative desert as you navigate down the neck, across the belly or back, and finally arrive at the sensory rich organs of the hands. We are basically giant heads with hands, attached to the minimal apparatus required to move those things around this planet earth.

Fascinating.

At school, we do a lot of handwork - knitting, drawing, crafting, farming. We engage our hands in countless and diverse ways. They get cold. They get hot. They get scratched, and they get healed. We're purposefully outside. Often, but for their tiny measure of strength, we would be plummeting sideways off canyon walls.

What we're doing is knitting the operations of the brain into the use of these crucial organs. What's fascinating about brain development is that fine-tuning one area of the brain leads to increased function in diverse and unexpected areas.

Children first learn to speak with their hands. It is only later that they develop the verbal control of phonemes and words associated with meaning. If you have ever watched a baby whose parents explicitly taught her sign language, you have likely been mystified. I sure have. Those tiny hands. They know so much. Even a pointing baby can amuse the crotchetiest of adults for hours on end.

Everyone learns and develops this hand control, of course. There's nothing that can stop it. Still, as an educator, I've come to incorporate it explicitly into our lessons. The more organized and facile our hand control, the more organized and facile our minds. It really is that simple. No further reading required.

As an adult, having recently stepped over the fulcrum and into the latter half of my life, I'm aware of the same importance in my hands. I recently taught myself to juggle, first bean bags, then clubs. The swirl and drop of those clubs is like medicine to my mind. Calming. Transfixing. Meditative. I've also taken up crochet, which ties my mind in knots till I have to just let go - my hands working like partners on a tandem bike, allowing my mind and body to glide.

Hands. To create. To speak. To grasp.

Such a blessed and unique gift.