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The Neuroscience of Making: Why Your Hands Matter More Than You Think

I’ve been fascinated with neuroscience for years – not in a white-coat-and-clipboard way, but in the way someone leans toward a warm fire. Ever since they started scanning people’s brains while having them do things, we could suddenly see all those connections lighting up, chemicals being released, neurons making new pathways.

And about twenty years ago, researchers started getting specific about what lit up the brain most brilliantly. What kept bits from withering and falling off as we age?

One of the answers surprised no one who’s ever picked up knitting needles or sat at a potter’s wheel: using your hands.

Not just any hand movement. The brain particularly loves it when both hands work together in a repetitive manner, ideally crossing the midline – your right hand moving to the left, your left hand to the right. Knitting. Embroidery. Kneading bread. Making felt beads. The kinds of things our grandmothers did without thinking twice about “brain health.”

The Research That Made Me Sit Up

Research from the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging found that people who engaged in crafting activities such as sewing, woodworking, and ceramics from midlife through their 80s were 45% less likely to develop mild cognitive impairment—a significantly greater protective effect than starting these activities only in later life.

Forty-five percent. That’s enormous.

Even people who only started crafting in their 70s saw a 28% reduction in cognitive decline. But those who’d been making things with their hands since midlife? Nearly half the risk.

It’s hardly surprising when you think about it. One of the things that connects us most deeply to our ancestors is the making of things. Everything would have been made by hand – no machines, no factories. Clothes, pots, tools. Everything touched by human hands before it touched human lives.

Those of us who do craft have this route back to ancestors that’s so much easier than people who do no making with their hands.

What’s Actually Happening

When you make things with your hands, multiple processes work together: bilateral hand coordination engages both brain hemispheres, repetitive rhythms activate your calming parasympathetic nervous system, and tactile feedback from wool or thread or clay helps regulate your emotional state.

And when you get deep into making – when time slips away and you look up to find an hour has passed in what feels like minutes – you’re in what researchers call “flow.” Your prefrontal cortex quiets down. That critical voice saying “you’re not good enough, you’re doing it wrong”? It takes a nap. Your practiced hands take over.

Kelly Lambert at the University of Richmond calls this approach “behavioraceuticals” – giving people activities instead of pills to modify brain chemistry naturally. Think about knitting socks: your hands working across the midline, anticipation of the finished thing releasing dopamine, the rhythmic meditative quality producing serotonin. All of it modifying your brain chemistry through your own hands, your own attention, your own making.

A Different Path Than Biohacks

We’re getting used to the idea that we can do things to improve our long-term brain health. But so much attention has gone to what I think of as bro culture things: extreme exercise, fasting, cold water immersion, expensive supplements. Lots of measuring and competing and consumerism.

And I’ve always recoiled from it.

These approaches feel like deprivation for some future goal – a bit like Scotland’s Presbyterian history of restricting yourself for the future reward of heaven. But I think what we need is to train ourselves to be joyful in a difficult world, not to welcome deprivation in it.

Leaning Into Joy Instead

What if we took a different approach? Instead of deprivation, competition, and consumerism, what if we leaned into the things we actively like?

If you like cold water swimming, lean into that. But if you like knitting and making things, lean into that. Make it regular. Appreciate it for the genuine benefits it gives your brain.

Dancing. Singing. Laughing with friends. Playing the piano. Getting out into nature and swinging your arms as you walk. All of it lights up your brain.

Be joyful. Make things. And if you need permission to prioritize the things you love – particularly if that’s making things with your hands – here it is:

If you make things with your hands, you are nearly half as likely to have cognitive decline by the time you’re 85.

That’s worth knitting socks for. Worth making felt beads for. Worth sitting down with needle and thread for.

Where Old Stories Meet Making

This is what we do in The Studio. Not because we’re chasing cognitive benefits (though they’re lovely), but because making things with our hands connects us to something older and deeper than our rushed modern world usually allows.

We work at the pace of seasons. We use both hands to transform simple materials – wool, water, plants, thread – into objects that carry meaning. We gather around the digital fire and make things together.

Some weeks you might make a dozen felt beads. Some weeks you might make one. Both are blessed. Both are lighting up your brain, regulating your nervous system, giving your hands the work they were designed to do.

If this speaks to you – if you’re hungry for a way to make that feels grounded and gentle and rooted in something real – The Studio might be your place.

[Join The Studio →]


Key Research Sources

This research informs our approach in The Studio, but we’re not scientists or medical professionals. We’re makers who’ve found that working with our hands at the pace of seasons brings something our rushed world often lacks.

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