The Grip That Built Civilization

[⭐ analyst75]

Hold up your hand. Wiggle your fingers.

 

You just commanded roughly 27 degrees of freedom—27 separate dials your brain can turn at once—using around 30 muscles, most of which aren't even in your hand.

 

They're up in your forearm, pulling your fingers like a puppeteer working marionette strings through tendons. That's why your forearm is thick and your fingers are thin. Evolution put the motors upstream and ran the cables down.

 

Now the even more impressive thing…

 

Your fingertips are wired with thousands of touch receptors per square inch. They can feel a bump the height of a single sheet of plastic wrap. They can tell silk from satin in the dark.

 

When you pick up a paper cup of coffee, you’re running a live physics calculation without realizing—grip it too soft and it slips, too hard and it crushes, and you solve that equation in milliseconds without a single conscious thought.

 

You can thread a needle. Crack an egg. Find your keys in a bag by feel alone. Feel a fever on a child's forehead. Type 80 words a minute. Play a piano. Tie a knot behind your back.

 

A quarter of the motor cortex of your brain—a quarter!—is devoted to running your hands. Your brain decided your hands were so important it gave them an enormous share of its real estate.

 

And we’re glad it did…

 

We built the entire human world with these things. Every cathedral, every circuit board, every surgery, every meal. And we treat them like they're nothing, because they cost us no effort.

 

That effortlessness is the illusion. Underneath it sits the most sophisticated manipulation system nature ever produced.
 

From Chris Campbell (AltucherConfidential)