As I read news reports about the team of young engineers and computer scientists deployed by Elon Musk to take over the financial systems of the U.S. Dept. of the Treasury, I’ve been thinking a lot about my old friend Frank R. Wilson. Wilson is a neurologist, retired now, who ran a clinic for performing artists at the University of California School of Medicine where he specialized in treating disorders affecting the hands. In 1998, he published a remarkable book called The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture.
I first met Wilson because of a letter to the editor of the New York Times that I wrote, expressing reservations about the use of computers in schools and advocating more time for active, imaginative play. He read my letter and wrote to me, saying that he had similar concerns about the long-term effects of children’s increasing use of computer technology and screens. In his book, he wrote, “I am not surprised that we are so eager as a society to welcome the Internet into our public schools. I am a little surprised that we are so ready to say goodbye to the playground and the books in the school library. And I am actually stunned that we imagine that commercial sponsors of in-school computer networks will not take their lesson from the tobacco companies as they eagerly underwrite the development of more appealing ways to help children learn how to be happy and successful adults.”
The Hand makes a powerful argument for the co-evolution of the brain and hand in human development. Wilson believed that complex uses of one’s hands — the skills employed by musicians, mechanics, surgeons, chefs, and puppeteers — have a profound influence in the growth and enhancement of cognitive abilities and judgment. He worried that young people who do not tinker with, manipulate, and build things with their hands have more trouble with reading, learning, and higher-level thinking.
He saw it happening at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he was the staff neurologist. The younger engineers, who had spent their early years on computers, were terrible at understanding and solving problems compared to their older colleagues, who had spent their youths working on cars and ham radios.
Those young “Muskrats” who have turned from working for Elon at Tesla and SpaceX to shutting down and perhaps permanently dismantling the government systems that fund the nation’s science, health care, foreign aid, education, and human service programs (including many on the Outer Cape, as Paul Benson alarmingly reported last week) are no doubt happy and successful. I’m sure they are good at writing computer code — but what motivates them? What kind of judgment do they exercise, I wonder, as they follow orders to cut off payments for cancer research, disaster relief, H.I.V. medicine, and climate science — which, according to the Ministry of Truth Social, is a hoax?
What art have they admired? Have they seen a flood, or a hurricane? How many loved ones have they lost? Have they read George Orwell’s 1984?
