Chapter Seven: Rethinking Hand and Brain
Within Chapter Seven Mike Rose tries to portray the idea of two types of workers in the world by stating in his book “…..define work in America: skilled versus unskilled labor, for example, or experimental knowledge versus formal (or school) knowledge, or mental versus manual activity. The master category that plays across all these-one reflects the western, Cartesian divide between body and mind-is the opposition of hand to brain.(page141)” He journeys further into this topic by discussing the comparison s between “higher statuses of work” that involve blending the mind and the body as one. Rose interviews a cognitive scientist named Roger Hall who quoted, “… that surgery is parallel to carpentry or plumbing or styling hair. (page148).” The message that he is trying to relay is not that the training and preparation for these occupations are the same, because there obviously far from similar. Only if you look at it from a level of hand, eye, and brain use are they all similar since all those occupations involve multi-tasking/knowledge.
The first example of blending the senses together would be MD Ron Tompkins. The chapter talks about him performing Laparoscopic gallbladder surgery. This position involves mind, eyes, and hand, by having a steady hand, book knowledge and using your eyes to see what looks right. The surgeon gives the idea that they learn a majority of their work from textbooks and the rest from hands on work. The surgeon quoted, “you develop an eye for what looks good and what doesn’t … you get to the point where you feel comfortable looking at something and evaluating it”. Rose compares Tompkins to Jeff Taylor by an observational quote by Jeff.
When he explains how he becomes fluent with his tools and skilled body posture. “At a certain point, upon a day, you almost become the work, a moving a cognitive part of the tool in your own hand”. He becomes apart his work like how Tompkins does. Ron lastly states that there’s nothing wrong with using your knowledge to change procedure in the middle of surgery to an open procedure because it’s all based on good judgment. That’s how he uses his brain along with his eyes and his hands in his position.
One other Occupation that uses all three scenes is a teacher. A teacher uses her eyes to observer the intake of information by the students which therefore has to user their brain to produce a way that would help the students retain that information. Stated by educational psychologist Lee Shulman as the “wisdom of practice”.
This is how Mike Rose shows how the mind at work relates to hand, mind, and brain multi tasking. From Ron Tompkins (surgeon), Jeff Taylor (carpenter), Lee Shulman (educational psychologist), and Roger Hall, Rose gives real life examples on how there are multi-tasking profession of the mind, hand, and eyes in society.
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