Hand-made Minds and Mind-Made Hands:  A Mini-Fable for Design Enthusiasts

The goal of the talk is to frame a constructive review of an unusual design challenge recently presented to students at SVA. We start with the question “Does the human hand have anything to do with cognitive and behavioral specializations of humans?” We next ask “How do professionals (that’s all of us!) avoid being overrun by new technologies?” Against that background we look at a scientific challenge that seems so specialized and daunting that we assume no one but an expert would dare approach it: “How well are the wants and needs of hand/arm amputees met by ongoing prosthetic research, design, and development?” If it can be shown that non-experts have something to offer to the development of upper limb prosthetics, shouldn’t we wonder (generally) how well society decides who gets to work on big, hard, messy problems?

About the Speaker

Dr. Frank Wilson was an early contributor to the development of performing arts medicine in the United States and Europe in the 1980s. In 1986 he was a cofounder and neurologist for the Health Program for Performing Artists at the University of California, San Francisco, where his interest focused on impaired hand control in musicians.

In 1989 he moved to the University of Düsseldorf in Germany, where he held a one-year fellowship as visiting professor of neurology and was the organizer of a research team studying focal hand dystonia in musicians.

Following his return to California in 1990, Dr. Wilson continued his work with performing artists. He began a trial of music-learning experiences for patients in the neurological rehabilitation program at Mt. Zion Hospital, and for two years he was the neurologist on a multidisciplinary team investigating upper-extremity injuries among textile designers at Levi Strauss Company in San Francisco.

He became the medical director of the Health Program for Performing Artists in 1996, and in 2001 accepted an appointment as clinical professor of neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine, joining a clinical research team that studied deep brain stimulation for patients with complex movement disorders.

Dr. Wilson’s career-long interest in the neurology of human hand control is reflected in two books that explore the neurological and anthropological underpinnings of skilled hand use: Tone Deaf and All Thumbs? (Viking-Penguin, 1986) and The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (Pantheon Books, 1998), which was nominated that year for a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.