Worship of Tools Day

What the day is

Worship of Tools Day is observed on March 11. The common remark that a familiar tool feels like part of your arm turns out to be close to literally true.

Origin and background

Neuroscientists studying body representation have found that using a tool alters the brain's map of where the body ends. After practice with a reaching tool, people behave as though their arm is longer, misjudging distances and the position of their own hand in ways consistent with the tool having been absorbed into the representation. Recordings in primates found neurons responding to the space around the hand extending their response to the space around a held rake. The sense of a tool becoming an extension of the limb is a description of what the brain is doing.

The archaeology is older than the species. Stone tools predate anatomically modern humans by well over two million years, which means toolmaking is not something humans invented so much as something humans emerged alongside. Hands, shoulders and brains developed in the company of tools rather than before them.

The practical corollary is about maintenance. A sharp edge is safer than a blunt one, because a blunt blade requires force and slips unpredictably, while a sharp one cuts where it is placed. The same logic runs through the trades: most tool injuries involve the operator compensating for a tool that is not working properly.

The other thing worth saying is that tool ownership has never been the preserve of one sort of person, whatever the older framing of this day assumed. The people who most need a working set are often the ones least likely to have inherited one.

How to take part

• Sharpen something. A sharp tool is the safe one.
• Clean and oil anything that has been sitting damp in a shed.
• Teach somebody to use a tool properly rather than doing the job for them.
• Buy the good version of the one tool you use constantly, and cheap ones for the rest.
• Donate duplicates to a repair cafe or tool library, which are usually short of them.