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How the "invisible hand" of the nervous system makes the human hand such an evolutionary success. The hand has a central role in both human evolution and cultural development--in our descent and in our ascent. It is, Immanuel Kant said, "the visible part of the brain." It is the invisible that concerns Matthew Longo in The hand has been the focus of an enormous amount of research from a dizzying range of disciplines, from anatomy, psychology, and neuroscience to evolutionary biology and archaeology. With the concept of the invisible hand, Longo integrates and contextualizes the findings from these disparate fields to show how the neurocognitive mechanisms that comprise the invisible hand are central to understanding a wide array of phenomena, including basic sensory and motor function, space perception, gesture, and even the self. More generally, he contends that the extraordinary abilities of the hand arise precisely from the complementary nature and tight integration of the visible and invisible hands--a proposition that leads deep into topics as diverse as haptics, tool use, handedness, phantom limbs, and evolution. His work elucidates and significantly expands a key chapter of the story of human evolution and culture as manifested in the human hand.
List of contents
Preface: The Visible and Invisible Hands
Acknowledgments
List of Acronyms Used
1 The Visible Hand
2 The Sensing Hand
3 The Moving Hand
4 The Acting Hand
5 The Exploring Hand
6 The Embodied Hand
7 The Hand in Space
8 The Expert Hand
9 The Diseased Hand
10 The Extended Hand
11 The Evolving Hand
12 The Developing Hand
13 The Bilateral Hand
14 The Dominant and Non-Dominant Hands
15 The Communicating Hand
Epilogue: The Future of the Invisible Hand
Notes
References
Index
About the author
Matthew R. Longo is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Birkbeck, University of London, where he directs the Body Representation Laboratory.
