It is quite interesting how our brains tend to deny the role of the rest of our body in the process of thinking. After seeing Alan Kay's "Doing With Images Makes Symbols", and his TED Talk "a poweful idea about ideas", I realised how silly that line of thinking was[0].

Using the right things to fiddle with physical manifestations of an idea lets "my hands" think along the more "abstract" parts of my brain. And doing that kind of parallel work is actually very useful.

[0] https://archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987_2

[1] https://archive.org/details/AlanKay_2007