Metadata →
Making crafts like knitting and crochet helps people focus and calm their minds by using their hands and senses. These activities create a special kind of attention that is connected to the body and environment, not just the brain. Crafting also builds community and gives people a sense of control and meaning in life.
Highlights
id977034946
Crochet is portable, so when the heat subsided and I could leave the house again, I brought little projects with me everywhere. I found that it helped me pay attention in conversations, talk more freely in therapy, and cope with all kinds of anxiety.
id977035472
In knitting class, as I was struggling to make loops with two pointy wooden sticks, the teacher peered over my shoulder and said: “It’s harder if you think about it too much.” By which she meant: you only learn to knit by letting your fingers figure it out. The embodied cognition researcher and ceramics artist Camilla Groth calls this ‘making sense through the hands.’ Making, for Groth, is ‘a form of thinking through actions, tools, things, and materials.’¹ Lambros Malafouris, an archeologist who studies how materials affect the mind, has a sillier name for this — he calls it ‘thinging’:
“Cognition and emotion are not realized in the brain but with a brain; that is, to think and to feel, we need more than a brain. Brain regions work in concert, but they are never alone; rather, they are always parts of broader systems extending beyond skin and skull.”
id977037145
Malafouris and Groth are working under a set of theories called 4E cognition, which considers the mind to not just be inside the brain, but embodied (thinking with the hands), embedded (limited and shaped by the environment), extended (into tools outside the body), and enacted (or, arising through action).
id977037487
If cognition is embodied, then knitting with your hands is not just helping your mind attend, it is your attention. The tactility, the shifting gaze up and down again, even the tools and the yarn, are all part of attention, extended and enacted. They create the structure and rhythm a person might need to attend.
Esto es muy bonito y poético, pero siempre me he preguntado en qué medida uno puede sustentar filosófica y empíricamente esta declaración.
id977037760
Knitting was also a kind of ‘diary’ — they could remember what they were doing and how they felt when they were making a piece, because those memories got embedded into the work, not unlike Malafouris’s ‘biographical objects.’
Interesantes relaciones con el funcionamiento de la memoria y la teoría de los dispositivos culturales.
id977038144
Knitting ‘stood for security, safety, assurance, strength, and stability.’ It was something they ‘could control in life even when other things seemed unfair and out of control.’ Crafting improved their self-efficacy — their belief that they could have an effect on the world.
Relacionable con la estructura que provee el ritual y el comportamiento obsesivo frente a la incertidumbre.
id977038245
In researching this, I came across a psychological concept called ‘life crafting’:
..the conscious efforts individuals exert to create meaning in their lives through (a) cognitively (re-)framing how they view life, (b) seeking social support systems to manage life challenges, and (c) actively seeking challenges to facilitate personal growth.
Life crafting