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To Establish a Brain-Body Circuit
You may think some brain-body
circuits are established without effort. You may present your experience with a
computer mouse and insist you have never experienced any difficulty. You have
forgotten any inconvenience you felt when you started to use this simple
equipment. I recommend you to have an experiment in which you use a mouse with
the other hand.
Most utensils are designed for the
right-handed people and the left-handed cannot use such utensils easily. A
computer mouse for Windows is considered to be among such utensils, because it
has two buttons side by side on the top. And it is also assumed that you should
push the right button with your index finger and the left with the middle. That
leads to the Windows’ special feature that enables you to exchange the right
and left buttons; thus the left-handed people can do the same thing as the right-handed
majority. Still some learn to switch hands in using a mouse without any special
arrangement. I am among them as I felt that a keyboard had far more keys on the
right side than on the left side: it seemed illogical to task the right hand
further with a mouse. Those effortless learners of a mouse would think that
they could handle a mouse with the other hand as effortlessly as ever. But when
actually they try, they will know the need to take some careful steps until
they do right and switch hands at will. First we have to tell ourselves ‘The
middle finger to the left, the index finger to the right’ and we have to repeat
this several times with a very good concentration. Some get used to this change
rather quickly but even they experience confusion and blunders several times.
In the end they will have to admit that it takes some time to master this
simple art. And I tell you that everyone has been through the similar
uncertainty when they first learned to use a mouse. So I insist that a
brain-body circuit is, indeed, hard to establish.
I have shown many people how to use
a computer mouse. Some of them had hard time especially when they double-click.
Their hardship is caused by the way they hold a mouse: almost without exception
they hold or pinch a mouse with a thumb and a little finger. The best way is to
hold it down lightly with your palm.
Our common sense suggests that, when
you hold something small as a mouse, you do so with a thumb and fingers. If
not, why do we have an opposable thumb? But with a mouse, you can use only the
little finger and perhaps the ring finger to oppose to the thumb. And they do
not give you a firm hold on the mouse. That is especially inconvenient when you
double-click. If the mouse moves between the first and second clicks, the
computer does not take them as a double click but as two separate clicks. So
the common sense or the instinct does not always lead us through a right path.
In this case the first error comes from the supposition that you hold a mouse;
in reality you drive a mouse and you need a good rein as well for the firm grip
as for the mobility. Your palm gives you the perfect rein here, if only you put
your palm lightly upon a mouse.
You may believe that you learn many
important skills in the childhood without conscious efforts: all you have to do
is to grow up in a certain culture. Thus many people believe that those grown
in the Far East, specifically China, Korea and Japan, learn to use chopsticks
expertly without exception. In truth less and less people there learn the art
properly: they manage to eat with the sticks anyhow but only some handle them
with ease.
Handling chopsticks is a fascinating
task. Chopsticks are the simplest of the simple tools the humanity have ever
devised: just a couple of straight sticks, with no blade to cut, no hook to
catch and no concavity to scoop. Still when you have the full control of the
two sticks you can perform several kinds of tasks quite beautifully. But how do
we accomplish the feat? The trick is that you move only one stick: you keep the
lower one stationary, and concentrate on moving the other. You need not to
handle both at the same time.
Yet it is not easy to handle one
stick if you do not have the proper rein at the beginning. As the rein for a
mouse is established with how you hold a mouse, how you attach the sticks to
your hand gives you the perfect rein here. You may find it odd that I used the
word ‘attach’ between a tool and a human body. Please know that, when you get
at ease with the stick, it has become the extension of your body and no longer
a tool. Today we are eager to see ourselves with machines or computers embedded
in our body so that we are given the extra capability; in olden days people did
not wait for a special gift given to them but they took time and effort to have
the perfect control of their tools. Chopsticks are not the exceptions but only
one among many tools our ancestors had for the extension of their body: take
carpentry, needlework, writing or farming, people took long time to train themselves
with the tools. An abacus even extends our mental ability. All they needed was
time and effort to be one with the tools. No fancy sci-fi thing was needed.
Nowadays we are too lazy and too impatient.
I am getting into detail about how
we attach the stick to our hand. Please follow my words and try to do so
yourself, if you like. Have one small stick: a new pencil makes a perfect
substitution as far as you do not actually handle food with it. Straighten the
index finger, but you needn’t do so with force. It is just a temporally thing
to give the middle finger a chance to welcome the stick properly. So we are now
keeping the index finger out of the way. Bend the middle finger at the root a
little and a little more at the next join. Leave the joint at the top as it is;
it will get slightly bent. Now you have an arch with your middle finger
continuing to your thumb. Put the stick as if to cut the arch: the stick
touches your hand at two points, one to your middle finger at about the point
between your nail and the joint to the tip, two to the root of the thumb where
the point near to the rear end of the stick touches. The stick will easily roll
off from your hand, so use your thumb to support the stick. Do not try to bend
the thumb. Put the tip of the thumb onto the stick. Let’s see how we are doing
with the finger and the thumb. The thumb is almost straight and it does not
block your sight to the middle finger. If the stick is transparent, the tip of
the thumb will appear as if to slightly touch the middle finger. With this
positioning the middle finger still can bend further. So repeat bending it and
straightening it. Your thumb is going along with the motion, and the tip of the
stick moves up and down at your will. Now get the index finger touch the stick
from above at about the same spot as the middle finger does. You are holding
the stick quite securely with the tips of the three fingers and able to move
the stick at will with considerable force.
When you have the good grip on one
stick, you can have the other which you do not move. Put it through the loop
formed with the thumb and the index finger, let it rest below the other stick
and on the tip of your ring finger at about the place between the nail and the
joint to the tip. It is kept stationary with the tip of the ring finger, the
thumb from the other side and the root of the thumb where the point near to the
rear end of the stick rests. This is all you have to do when you take a pair of
chopsticks.
The procedure might be shown with
only one picture but I needed so many words to describe it. I am sure a picture
really paints a thousand words, unfortunately it won’t speak loudly enough for
you to hear everything you should hear: you need to read things through the
picture. That is what I have just done for you, and I needed so many words and
careful phrasing. I am afraid I am still not clear in some points but I am sure
I have made a point: it is a huge task to know exactly how to do things.
The art of handling a pair of
chopsticks may excite your curiosity, and I am afraid that is all. It will
change if I say that the way to hold the mobile one of the pair is almost
identical as the way you hold a pen. I am telling the truth. It is just you do
not hold a pen at the end but near to the nib, or the pen point. If you are
well versed in dynamics or good at handling tools, you will affirm ‘it is the
lever’. With chopsticks you do not need strength while you move them because
you are only moving a light stick and doing no significant task. And what you
hold with them is only a morsel, so you do not need much strength. On the other
hand you want to move the stick widely to bundle noodles or to scoop rice: the
rice there is so sticky that you can scoop after you cut through the sticking
mass to a morsel: it may be like you lift hay with a pitchfork. With a pen you
do not need to move the tip very much, but when you move it, you need
considerable strength to keep your stroke steady. Thus you keep the working end
short, but not too short. If you grip at the tip, you cannot move it well. Then
how high at the pen should we hold? As high as your hand hovers over the
writing surface. When the side of your hand stays on the surface, you cannot
move the pen well. When it keeps distance from the surface, you can move your
hand with your wrist as the axis. Now you have two axes: one at the wrist and
the other at the point where three fingertips meet to hold the pen. Around the
axis with fingertips you can only draw a vertical line and you need the second
axis to draw horizontal, diagonal or round ones. And the wrist provides you
with this second axis. This is the reason you should keep your hand from
sticking to the writing surface. Awkward writers among Japanese children dirty
the side of their hand with graphite from their pencils. They are awkward in
writing because they stick the side of their hand to the surface to lose the
second axis. They dirty their hand because they write from top to bottom and
from right to left, thus their hand blushes the surface where they have already
written letters. It is not good for the Western way of writing, either: the
hand keeps moistening or oiling the yet-to-write surface. You cannot write well
on an oily surface.
In a Japanese tale, famous for the English narrative by Lafcadio Hearn,
a blind minstrel with a lute was haunted by warriors of ghosts who loved his
music. A Buddhist monk wrote holy texts all over his body to exorcise the poor
player. I do not believe the Westerners dare do such a thing. With the hard tip
of a pen, you have to scratch the skin and that will be quite uncomfortable.
The hardness of a pen is only one side of the story. To write with the soft tip
of a brush, the Easterners hold it in a considerably different way from a pen.
People used to keep the books or write a letter with a thin brush. They
hold such a brush at the considerable height and keep it almost vertical. It is
accomplished in the following way. Bend the wrist up nearly to its limit to
keep the palm vertical. Bend the middle finger at the root and at the joint
next to the root. Keep the thumb almost straight to cross with the middle
finger. Now you can hold a brush with the middle finger and the thumb. The
brush is vertical and parallel to the palm. Use the index finger to hold the
brush from the far side. You keep the root of the index finger almost straight
and bend it at the next joint. In this way the index finger hold the brush at
considerably higher point from the middle finger. This looks quite different
from the way you hold a pen but the basic is the same: three fingers to hold.
And now you are holding the brush almost vertically.
The verticality is to draw as thin a line as possible with the soft tip
of a brush. Your wrist hovers far above the desk top and your hand gets a
little rigid. This rigidity must give you the sense of limitation when you
write alphabets which consist not only of vertical and horizontal lines but
also of diagonal and round ones. But the Chinese characters consist mostly of
vertical and horizontal straight lines and they write considerably larger
letters than the Westerners do. On the other hand, keeping your wrist far above
the desk top has its advantage: you don’t need a desk to keep a sheet and you
can write on whichever surface stable enough. So, you can write on a human
body. To write on a human body is something they do not always do, but they
often write on something they hold with the other hand: bamboo strips before
the invention of paper, rolled paper for which the rolled part assures the
stable surface, or the strip of thick hard paper on which the Japanese write a
short poem. I have to mention that, in this way of holding a brush, you feel
far more comfortable writing text-lines vertically than horizontally, which
explains the custom of the Far East.
When you use a bolder brush to write larger letters, you hold the brush
almost at the end. The principle of the lever has some relevance here: it is
difficult to move this long stick. You don’t control the stick with your hand.
Now it is your arm that draws lines. Your hand and fingers work to add nuances
or serifs.
The order of strokes is decided to mediate between the shape of a
character and the movement of our limb. And the letters we write, the way we
hold a writing apparatus, the materials we write on: they all affect each
other. The relations among them are not simply interpreted as the cause and
effect: we’d better understand them as the web of causes and effects. It is an
extremely complicated and intricate web. Truly, the establishment of a
brain-body circuit involves almost all aspects of the laws of nature and the
styles of our culture. That is because the brain-body circuit is the bridge
between us and the world outside.
I have been talking about proper brain-body circuits, not the one that
works anyway but well. And I try my best to describe each in detail so that you
see exactly how. I hope you understand the absolute necessity to begin the
learning process with the clear knowledge of ‘how exactly’. You need a very
conscious effort in learning to do things right without any conscious control.
This is a mildly interesting and mighty important feature about the brain-body
circuit.
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