Thinking with the Hands

Abstract

In chapter 1 the theory has been developed that invention, like any other creative art, requires the working together of a man’s three brains. The need for its use of the physical brain or ‘thinking with the hands’ is not nearly so widely appreciated as is the use of the intellectual brain. Even Archimedes, who seems to have suffered from the Greek contempt for the mechanical arts, used his own experimental observation that when he got into a full bath the water overflowed, together with his reasoning that the amount displaced had a volume equal to that of the displacing body, to invent a solution to the problem of determining the density of the metal of a complex shaped crown. His emotional brain was clearly involved which is why he rushed home out of the bath shouting ‘Eureka’.