Grasping mind
Piano tuning, carburetor tuning, and the cognitive shapes of the hand and skin. Where is our mind, anyway? Part one of a two-part exploration.
Read time: about 8 minutes. This week: A first part of a two-part dive into mind and matter. It used to be that we thought we had our minds in our heads. People aren’t so sure anymore. When I was restoring a car and writing about it, I ran into the issue of head and hand. It changed the way I think about “thinking.” I’m revisiting the topic after I read Marcel Mauss’ “Techniques of the body” [French here], a lecture he delivered in 1934. Next week: Like you, I am captivated by the news from Ukraine, and I have wondered whether the work I do is, well, justified in light of the horror and outlook. Can we think of anything else? Is there something that I should be doing instead? That’s the topic I’ll consider. I don’t know where it’ll go, actually.
Again, I beseech you, if you haven’t already . . .
Eugene Russell, a piano tuner interviewed by Studs Terkel in Working, said with satisfaction that the computer wouldn’t be replacing him anytime soon, even though he mentioned using electronic devices in his work. “An assist,” he called them. Eugene’s wife Natalie wasn’t so sure. “Anyone in the world can tune a piano with it,” she said of the devices. “You can actually have a tin ear like a night club boss.” The conversation between Terkel and Eugene and Natalie Russell mixes beauty and satisfaction with the technical complexity of piano tuning. Eugene says,
There’s so much beauty comes out of music. So much beauty comes out of piano tuning. I start working at chord progressions . . . I know enough chords to get the sounds I want to hear our of it. I was tuning a piano for a trombone player who once played for Jan Savitt. As I was tuning, I played around with Savitt’s theme song, “Out of Space.” I got those big augmented eleventh chords progressing down in ninths. It’s a beautiful thing. He came dashing in the room. “Where did you hear that? How did you know it?” I hear great big fat augmented chords that you don’t hear in music today. I came home one day and said, “I just heard a diminished chord today!”
I have a mood of triumph. I was sitting one day tuning a piano in a hotel ballroom. There was a symposium of computer manufacturers. One of these men came up and tapped me on the shoulder. “Someday we’re going to get your job.” I laughed. By the time you isolate an infinite number of harmonics, you’re going to use up a couple billion dollars worth of equipment to get down to the basic fundamental that I work with my ear.” He said, “You know something? You’re right. We’ll never touch your job.”
It’s good to remember that Working appeared in 1974, and there’s been a half-century of work in computing and artificial intelligence.
It’s also good to remember that tuning is practiced and felt, hardly reducible to formulae, perhaps because it is one of those things in life that’s approximated, but not achieved. Tuning a piano is, at best a compromise, a matter of tuner’s judgment: “The nature of equal temperament makes it impossible to really put a piano in tune,” Eugene explained. “The system is out of tune with itself. But it’s so close to in tune that it’s compatible.”
Carburetors are also crap to tune and other philosophical observations
I read this chapter from Working when I was struggling to tune the three SU (Skinners Union) carburetors on my car, a process that involved setting screws (each carb has multiple) to a certain position and adjusting them one by one as seems to make sense. You do this over and over and over and over. At least, that was the gist of the process according to the car’s old shop manual.
I remember smiling, already half defeated, when I read that among the tools to use in tuning was a length of hose. How very analogue and quaint! You stick one end near your ear and the other near the intakes so that you can listen to the rush of air as the engine runs. Just balance the hiss, one carb to the next, the manual said.
Easy peasy.
(Side note: The SUs also have carefully shaped “needles” that rise and fall inside the carb as the engine runs, too. Independently in each of the three SU carbs, the vacuum created by the engine controls the needle movements, and their constant and automatic adjustment makes the chore of tuning a test in mastering chaos.)
I came to realize that something akin to equal temperment makes it nearly impossible to really put three SU carburetors in tune. The carbs aren’t at odds with each other in the same way as, say, piano strings and guitar strings are, but constant adjustment of the three SUs knocks the whole set slightly off. At least one carb suddenly hisses out of tune. Only something magical can apprehend an infinity of harmonics to tease out a perfect balance. As Eugene said, “The system is out of tune with itself. But it’s so close to in tune that it’s compatible.” I took that to mean that carb tuning is at best actually just “good enough.”
The shop manual that guided the restoration of my old car only appears to describe the mechanics of the car. More profoundly, the manual sets minds, hands, and tools in relation to the car’s many serviceable parts, leaving motions and actions a mystery for the mechanic to discover. We call these books of tips and ordered instructions manuals — a word derived from the Latin word manus, meaning “hand.” Certainly we hold a manual in the hand as a “handbook,” but over the course of the years the old shop manual reprinted by the Bentley Press has actually guided my hand, as if the word manual was inching toward its adjectival use. The shop manual’s words and drawings modify my graspings.
My shop manual is in many senses a book “of or belonging to the hand.” The knowledge and directions it provides do not make me an expert in any sense; expert tuning and the like grow from practice and wisdom gathered from engagement with materials and acquired habits that are sometimes barely explicable except by trial, error, watching gestures, learning a dance of motion.
Through the first decade of work on my car, I struggled with this “handy” knowledge — the kind of knowledge like Eugene Russell’s and the wizened (and now rare and grey-haired) masters of SU carburetors. Theirs is knowledge grasped by the hand, felt and “known” by the hand, and sometimes communicated by gesture.
My struggles with my old car, I am now convinced, have begun to teach me a meaning — maybe even the core meaning — of my restoration. They’re teaching a way of grasping and comprehending experience, and I am beginning to discern how our bodies, our material environment, and, maybe most importantly, our work shape our so-called “inner” lives.
Eugene Russell’s piano tuning and my own adventures of SU carburetor tuning both required a certain “feel,” a familiarity and memory of bodily movement and touch. In both of these activities, the hand shapes cognitive experience — I can’t really call it “intellectual” — and in this sense plays a role in thinking and judging when the tune is good enough, when a satisfaction and a compromise has been reached — or what comes next to get there. It could be that the hand constitutes a cognitive asset.
You master tuning by getting a feel for it. That amounts to carefully listening to the hand as it balances and manipulates both a material — a set screw, a piano tuning wrench — and a stream of aural sensation. Eugene Russell’s tuning devices and my length of rubber hose augmented our senses, but the hand . . . well, the hand “grasps” both the thought and the action. The hand somehow couples or maybe extends body and brain.
Frank R. Wilson, a neurologist, put it nicely in The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture:
The brain does not live inside the head, even though that is its formal habitat. It reaches out to the body, and with the body it reaches out to the world. We can say that the brain “ends” at the spinal cord, and that the spinal cord “ends” at the peripheral nerve, and the peripheral nerve “ends” at the neuromuscular junction, and on and on down to the quarks, but brain is hand and hand is brain, and their interdependence includes everything else right down to the quarks.
Territory of the mind. A little place? A wide landscape?
I’ve worked in academe, and if there is one place where the “life of the mind” is revered, it’s at a university. But universities also tend to shrink the territory of the mind, so to speak. Simply put, academics often believe the mind is contained in thought of things and about things. Its boundary — its utmost edge — is the skin, if not the brain cozily settled in a skull. The assumption could very well be wrong.
Lambros Malafouris, a professor at Oxford University, points to a “common assumption that the mental phenomena that occupy the subject matter of psychology can only be ‘of’ or ‘about’ things. This ‘aboutness,’ or intentionality, gives our thinking direction and reference to content; it is also what separates minds from the material world.” In other words, a lazy separation of the mind inside and the material world outside has helped scientists analyze thinking processes and represent them. But Malafouris cautions us: Don’t mistake a useful analytical framework for the way things really are. “Closed boundaries and units of analysis are sometimes useful analytical means, but they should not be taken for granted or perceived as natural.”
He and others want us to think about things with thought and mind, and to see and avoid the blindspots that analysis stealthily brings.
Of course, this feels very much like a topic that only philosophers might want to discuss, and they have done so with some vigor especially over the past twenty-or-so years. Matters of body and mind have been philosophical topics ever since there’s been philosophical discussion. The recent discussions got going after Andy Clark and David Chalmers published “The Extended Mind” in 1998. “If, as we confront some task,” they wrote, “a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive process. Cognitive processes ain’t (all) in the head!” (emphasis in the original). In other words, we can use things in the world to think, and Clark and Chalmers also argue that the line between the self and the world is similarly fuzzy.
Ever used your fingers to help with a challenging math problem? Ever doodled to see if you could understand a complex argument? Tetris — how about Tetris? Have you flipped around a shape to check whether it’d fit in a slot? Citing other’s research on the cognitive effort in Tetris, Clark and Chalmers note that in Tetris “physical rotation is used not just to position a shape ready to fit a slot, but often to help determine whether the shape and the slot are compatible.”
Your Tetris game is a cognitive assist. One could say it’s making you think faster, but, no, actually it’s thinking faster for you.
[End of part one. I’ll return to the topic and explore the “extended mind” in a future post.]
Tags: hand, feel, intuition, body movement, mind, cognition, philosophy, body
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
You don’t need to read it cover-to-cover. Snippets will do nicely: Terkel, Studs. Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974.
Challenging the edges of mind: Malafouris, Lambros. “Thinking as ‘Thinging’: Psychology With Things.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 29, no. 1 (February 2020): 3–8. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721419873349.
A neurologist thinks about the hand and its role in thinking: Wilson, Frank R. The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.
Gesture actually might precede your uttered word: Okrent, Arika. “Body Language.” Lapham’s Quarterly 5, no. 2 (Spring 2012). http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/communication/body-language.
I can’t get my guitar tuned, ever: “Equal Temperament Tuning, or ‘Why Your Guitar Never Sounds 100% in Tune,’” October 21, 2015. https://www.freyaguitars.ie/equal-temperament-tuning-or-why-a-guitar-never-sounds-100-in-tune/.
For philosopher prose, this one’s actually readable — Tetris, Filofax, Inga, and Otto: Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis 58, no. 1 (January 1, 1998): 7–19. https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/58.1.7.