Author: Steve Scott

I had an accident when I was young that means that I am more aware than many how useful our hands are and what a nuisance it is when you can’t use them properly. I can’t easily use my right hand to pick up or hold things and often use my left to manoeuvre things into place. I have joked that I am half Primate and half not.

The story of opposable thumbs is often one part of how we explain to ourselves how clever we are. I referred to this habit in another post on Anthropomorphism.

I have recently been taking enlarged videos of the birds in our garden, so I have been looking at them more closely than usual. Birds, as you probably know, are basically evolved dinosaurs and, because of their size, only have little brains. Like with the poor Goldfish, people use terms like ‘bird brain’ as insults. In fact birds can see things that are completely invisible to us, have amazing ability to respond to visual signals with physical action at great speed and pigeons can recognise drawings and photos of trees as trees. Birds have also been shown to recognise themselves in a mirror.

So how do birds relate to opposable thumbs? Well some birds have one of the toe/fingers on each foot facing backwards. This gives them advantages in all sorts of situations related to there particular lifestyle, so we are not alone in that ability. In fact there are several species of animals that have similar adaptations.

Whilst I was staring at my hand thinking about this, I realised that the thumb is not the main problem. It is the fact that I can’t control the fingers either. On my left I can touch any one finger to any other. On my right I can’t do that and the only way I can reliably get fingers to touch their neighbour is by curling the hand up so all four touch. Relating that to watching the birds in the garden, I have watched them pick up a seed, place it between their toes, that are also holding the perch and then use their beak and tongue to remove bits of husk and eat the seed inside. I am just jealous, of the dextrous toes, the very useful beak and the ability to bend that way.

So before calling someone a bird brain (you shouldn’t be so insulting anyway), think of trying to make a birds nest. Look at one and think of the dexterity and skill needed to make it. In many ways it is likely that we have flourished because of our inabilities, that have made us have to find other ways of doing things.

I’ve been reading a book where there is much extended and slightly repetitive musing about our experience of Time. Partly because Ruth is currently in a time zone that is thirteen hours ahead of me, I had a think about it. Without getting too technical, I thought I’d put down some thoughts that might clarify for us.

First, we all experience time differently. Usually I seem to do things faster than many people. It doesn’t feel like that when I am doing something but that is often what happens. When I was a student and I was in a lecture where there were copious notes written on the board the opposite would happen. Because I am left handed, I have always written slowly, so I would constantly be trying to catch up and shaking my hand because it hurt. My experience of time varies for me and it differs from everyone else’s. We are all like that.

Second, our experience of time is different to our attempts to measure it. Measurement, naming, the making of formulae to make predictions are all things that scientists and makers use to add levels of control to our lives. Relating this to time, one unit of measurement we use is the Day. This makes sense, though if you live at the poles it is somewhat less useful. The poles are not only difference though. I live at the top of a hill. For me the sun comes up earlier and goes down later than those who live in the valley below me, so their experience is slightly different. In a hot air balloon hovering above me the difference would be even more marked. A wide open plane changes things again.

Having instinctively chosen the day as a time measure we went on to make up all sorts of different measurement units, partly to give us more understanding and control but also to help with communication. Sadly bad communication often happens when people start dreaming or arguing about those units of measurement.

The more people travelled and the more travel speeded up the more important it seemed to unify measurements a bit. Here we come to the International Date Line. This is the arbitrary point at which one day changes to the next. This is where Ruth being thirteen hours ahead comes in. The date line runs down the pacific and wobbles round the few countries it meets, because there are few countries to meet and thus only sparse populations to upset. It is useful, but is the clearest illustration between the experience of time and the measurement of it. When you add in the fact that New Zealand and the UK both change the clocks twice a year and at slightly different times of year, so that there can be 11,12 or 13 hours between us, the wobbliness of the measurement factor is highlighted.

It is also important to realise that it is still Now wherever you are. When I chat to new Zealand we are still chatting at the same time (apart from slight delays for transmission) even though the time of day is different, as is the season, the weather and whatever other experiences surround our chat.

So whether is day, minutes, years, light years, parsecs or any other measure, they are all just measures. Our experience is different to the measuring. In a similar vane, if someone tells you that a table is not actually solid, just smile wisely and say ‘Actually it is solid and thank goodness for all the random, unpredictable behaviours of those sub atomic particles that make it solid to, solid tomorrow and onwards until something changes it.

I was around 7 or 8 when a teacher showed us how to make a version of an origami dragon head. It has just occurred to me that I did pretty well to make it, as just over a year before I had an accident that has meant that I can’t use my right hand properly. That aside, origami has been with me since and the most frequently made piece has been the water bomb in the picture. Something appeals about a piece of flat folding that you then blow into and make swell.

Another trick I learned at some point in my life was to raise my arm up, bent at the elbow, so that the palm of my hand was facing upwards just behind the line of my ear. I would then balance a pile of coins on the elbow, fling my arm forward and catch all the coins in my hand. Pretty impressive eh? Actually, like most things, all that is involved is a little natural ability, understanding some ‘tricks’, and some practice.

It is tempting to say that these skills have no value whatsoever but I have entertained people (especially very young people) with them a lot. Also I have seen origami used to demonstrate all sorts of things, such as teamwork, production planning and other business practices. In one such session I noticed that someone who was not naturally skilled at the folding still provided an insight that the more speedy of us could use to get even faster. I have even managed to get a large group of flighty drama students to sit quietly working in groups of four to produce origami swans for a performance piece.

Still, when it comes down to it, these skills are still not that useful. Which brings me to the real point of this. Sadly much human reasoning, and the education practices that support it, are bit like origami. It is a set of skills that can be used in a useful way, but can also be used without real purpose and even quite destructively. One example is what I call Angels on the Head of a Pin reasoning. I don’t know if people have actually debated how many angels you can get on a the head of a pin but a lot of intellectual debate has ben underpinned by such questionable starting points. I would argue that the origami also has more value than much of that debate.

I hope that makes sense.