Adam Taylor

Well, again, the thumb is one of our sort of superpowers, I suppose.

We've got five digits on our hand, but our thumb –

provides up to 50% of hand function.

And that's because we have really long thumbs and the way the joints are arranged, but especially to do with the muscles that move them.

And those muscles make up something called the thenar eminence, which is the bulge at your thumb's base.

And inside that bulge, there are three muscles that give the thumb its astonishing dexterity.

So this thena eminence, that bulge in our thumb, is the thing that make us what we are today.

And again, very important in evolutionary terms.

You know, our thumbs originally, our hands were essentially, you know, weight bearing.

We strode around on all fours.

When we progressed to walking on two feet, it freed up our hands and our thumbs to develop into precision instruments.

And so it allowed our thumbs and our thena eminences to become tools for building, tools for making weapons, tools to help us write.

And if you think about that, if we couldn't write, if we couldn't make weapons, if we couldn't craft tools to build things with our hands, and especially because of our thumbs and our thena eminence and the muscles in our thumb,

Again, we wouldn't have had an awful lot as humans.

All of that we have thanks to our hands and our thumbs.

And again, something we don't really appreciate, but it sets us apart from every other animal on the planet, makes us very special.

And yet, you know, it's our thumb.

We take it for granted.

Misophonia is a thing and it's increasingly recognized as a thing, you know, something people in inverted commas suffer from.

And it's not just mild irritation.