COMPANION NOTES: on the persistent, the acquired, and the unknowable hand

Your hands make themselves known to you in many ways: their tip-tap choreography over your keyboard, the way they wash each other with soap and water, how they braid your hair and button your shirt. This is their physicality and dexterity in action: giving and receiving, holding and letting go.

There is also an unconscious neurological knowing of your hand in your brain that exists separately to the physical structure of bone and tendon, muscle, fat and skin. These two experiences of hand, while in a sensory-motor relationship, are not simply the same thing, which raises an unusual question: what is a hand? where does it begin? where does it end?

THE PERSISTENT HAND

In the early 1990s, Indian-American neurologist V.S. Ramachandran began working with patients who had undergone amputation and were reporting the experience of pain in the limb that had been removed. This mysterious phantom limb pain is vivid and often agonising for the patient, yet it couldn’t be relieved in conventional ways because there was no longer a physical hand to treat.

What the team at the University of California, San Diego discovered was that the removed hand continued to exist neurologically in the motor and sensory cortex, where it was still registering movement and sensation, including acute pain.

Ramachandran’s response was ingenious. It was to construct a box with a mirror running vertically down the centre and then to ask patients to place their intact hand on one side and the residual limb on the other. When the patient moved the intact hand and looked at its reflection in the mirror, their brain received visual feedback that the phantom hand was also moving. For many patients, this was enough to reduce their pain and, in some cases, to resolve it entirely. The mirror box was giving the brain new perceptual information to work with, from which it could start to remap the body.

This has direct relevance to embodiment practices where repatterning is explored in the context of a hand that has become a stranger, perhaps through injury, chronic pain, surgery, or the result of a long manual working life. A wrist that has fractured often heals in a way that feels different to the pre-injury wrist. Finger grip and mobility are changed by the presence of arthritis. Or an injury elsewhere in the limb, at the shoulder for example, can isolate or restrict the use of the dominant hand.

In each of these cases, change is happening on several levels: in the tissues, in the neurology, in usage, and in the relationship between the person and their hand. The brain’s map and the lived experience of the hand have drifted away from each other; but maps can be rewritten and new pathways can be charted through the terrain.

GUIDED PRACTICE 1

For uncompromised hands: Bring your non-dominant hand to rest in your lap, palm upwards and let your eyes look at it, as if seeing it for the first time: the lines on the palm, the creases in the finger joints, the way the fingers naturally curl.

Then, close your eyes and settle your attention on your hand noticing sensations like temperature and tension. Move your awareness around the terrain of your fingers and palm, as if you are cataloguing it.

Now consider: is this hand now fully known to you? Or does it, even now, hint at more than you can fully know?

For hands that carry a history: Bring the hand that carries history to rest in your lap in any way that is comfortable. You might close your eyes.

Be aware of the surface on which the hand is resting, the space between the fingers, the curve of the palm. Then, perhaps notice the overall shape, and weight of the hand. Let your relationship with your hand, whatever it currently is, simply be part of the experience.

Let it become present to you in its own way — no expectations, no projections.

Let go of the enquiry whenever you are ready.

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