Opinion – Suzana Herculano-Houzel: The pleasure of producing with your own hands

I got the question over and over again, but I didn’t hazard a guess. Coloring books for kids have never gone out of style, but coloring games have always been unquestionably “kid’s stuff,” an easy and inexpensive pastime in pre-iPad times and an opportunity to learn sensorimotor coordination for developing brains. But why have adult coloring books caught on and are now even seen as relaxing therapy?

Having spent the last year producing pleasantly colored things with my hands, I think I now have an answer. Coloring books democratized what until then was the privilege of the talented, or well-trained, or rich to the point of having a garden and working in it for pure pleasure or simply having free time: I speak of the pleasure of giving oneself to a difficult manual task the enough to require concentration and exclusive dedication, but easy enough that it can be executed and completed, bringing an aesthetically pleasing result and the special pleasure of achievement that can be described by those magic words: “I did it”.

It’s been a year and a half since I learned to crochet. It was an attempt to give me a new hobby during the winter in Covid isolation, of course. I found a thick and soft pseudo-wool, of mixed colors, that would make a delicious infinite scarf in three strokes once I mastered the back-and-forth of the needle and where each finger should be. I had tried it as a child, under the tutelage of my grandmother, but the work was too delicate for my neurons at the time.

But now… the thick non-wool has given way to a less thick one. I progressed to the quilts and blankets; I adopted the finest threads, trained in shawls, and now the adventure is to invent unusual vests. This one is all concentric circles in primary colors, sewn tightly together. It looks like a book of mandalas colored by someone who only had five markers. I’ll wear it under the brooding coats of the autumn that comes here. It’s going to be my new “speaker’s uniform”, so I’ll let the audience know that the lecture is going to be fun.

Yes, I feel like that prose child of her art, which she proudly displays to every new adult that comes home. And the adult in me now has a new appreciation for coloring books, which give adults with little free time the opportunity to produce something beautiful right away with their own brains. It’s not about “coloring by numbers”, where you just follow orders stupidly. Like crocheting or painting, coloring books invite the mind to imagine what could be and put us in control, with the power of decision.

Furthermore, coloring in complex drawings requires concentration and undivided dedication, and the immersion that results means that the problems of the world will be put aside, at least for the duration of the activity. The head is empty while the brain plans something beautiful and the hands work on the execution. How can it not be nice and relaxing?