Thinking with Gesture

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in new book by Annie Murphy Paul with some new ideas and data. The subtitle is The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain.

Ms. Murphy writes, “Gesture was humanity’s first language—and every human infant recapitulates this evolutionary history, becoming fluent in gestures in advance of acquiring even the rudiments of speech. Well before babies can talk, they are waving, beckoning holding up their arms in a wordless signal: Pick me up. Pointing is one of children’s first gestures, usually initiated around nine months of age; between ten and fourteen months, a more nuanced capacity for gesture begins to develop as fine-motor finger control improves. During this time, spoken language lags well behind what toddlers are able to express by moving their hands. Children can typically understand and act upon a request to point to their nose, for example, a full six months before they are able to form the spoken word ‘nose.’ And research suggests, they use gestures to elicit from their caretakers the very words they need to hear as they learn about the world. A child will point to an unfamiliar object, for example, and an adult will often obligingly supply’s the name of that thing. When a parent ‘translates’ her child’s gesture into a word this way, that word is particularly likely to enter the child’s spoken vocabulary within a few months. Amazingly enough, as one researcher puts it, ‘Young children use their hands to tell their mothers what to say.’’

As for adults, Ms. Murphy writes, “Researchers who study embodied cognition are drawing new attention to the fact that people formulate and convey their thoughts not only with words but also with the motions of their hands and the rest of the body. Gestures don’t merely echo or amplify spoken language; they carry our cognitive and communicative functions that language can’t touch. Where language is discrete and linear—one word following another—gesture is impressionistic and holistic, conveying an immediate sense of how things look and feel and move.

The special strengths of gesture are especially valuable in the effort to persuade or enlist others. Such movements visually place the gesturer at the center of the action, situating him at the locus of agency and control. When he talks, his words may describe or extol or explain—but when he gestures, he acts on the world (if only symbolically). At the same time the gesturer’s motions render an abstract idea in human-scale, embodied terms, an act of translation that makes it easier for onlookers to mentally simulate the gesturer’s point of view for themselves. Perhaps most important, gesture generates the sense that an as yet immaterial enterprise is a palpable reality in the present moment. Using gesture in this way can confer an enormous advantage in the start-up world, one group of researchers notes since ‘entrepreneurs are operating on the boundary what is real and what is yet to happen.’ That’s true for many of us, whether we’re offering projects for the next quarter presenting a proposal for a project or explaining why a change we’d like to make would be well advised. Gesture brings an uncertain future into the observable present, imbues it with a realness that we can almost touch. Research demonstrates that gesture can enhance our memory by reinforcing the spoken word with visual and motor cues. It can free up our mental resources by ‘offloading’ information onto our hands. And it can help us understand and express abstract ideas—especially those, such as spatial or relational concepts, that are inadequately expressed by words alone. Moving our hands helps our head to think more intelligently, and yet gesture is often scorned as hapless ‘handwaving, or disparaged as showy or gauche.”