快猫短视频

THE 1960 US presidential election saw the first public debates between Republican and Democrat nominees. In a series of four meetings, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy duked it out live on television and radio. The upshot was intriguing. Among people who had listened to the debates, Nixon was generally thought to have come out on top. But viewers had Kennedy down as the winner. How could that be?

The answer lies beyond what the two men said. We tend to consider language as the only medium through which we communicate, but there is another channel hidden in our hands: gesture. Even if we are unaware of our gestures, they are visible to anyone who can see us talking. What鈥檚 more, they seem to have a special hold on the truth. Gestures often give people a window into our thoughts that words don鈥檛 鈥� which might help explain why Kennedy went on to win the US presidency.

But gestures don鈥檛 just let other people read our minds. I have spent five decades studying how we communicate with our hands and, together with other researchers, I have discovered the surprising power of gestures to shape our thoughts.

What we have come to realise is that gestures are not mere movements. They are a special kind of thinking that is revealed through the hands. Most people so undervalue them that they often don鈥檛 realise they are gesturing. Yet the wide range of abilities that gesturing entails makes it a sort of superpower. Understand gesture and you can maximise its benefits to boost learning and memory, communicate more effectively and build deeper social connections.

First, though, what do I mean by gestures? I don鈥檛 mean the hand signals that everyone agrees on in a particular culture, such as a thumbs-up that means 鈥渢hings are good鈥� in the US and UK. These so-called emblems are like words in a dictionary. They always take the same form, so don鈥檛 reveal much about the thoughts of the person using them. Instead, I am interested in spontaneous gestures, movements that we produce with our hands when we speak.

People in all cultures gesture. And you don鈥檛 need to have seen it done to do it: people who are born blind move their hands when they talk, just as sighted people do. People also gesture alongside using sign language.

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An indication of just how deep-rooted gesturing is comes from the intriguing . As a result of nerve damage caused by illness, he became unable to control his movements. With great effort, IW learned to move his arms and legs, but only when he could see them and visually guide them. He couldn鈥檛 move or manipulate objects in the dark, yet he could still gesture when he talked 鈥� in the light or dark.

IW鈥檚 experience highlights that gestures aren鈥檛 like our other movements, and raises the question of what is going on inside our brains when we gesture. The truth is that we aren鈥檛 sure. However, we do know that learning with the aid of gesture , just as learning by manipulating physical objects does. Also, when someone simply talks about an action, such as tying their shoelaces, the same areas of the brain are involved as when they actually perform that action. These observations led and , both then at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to propose that the brain simulates actions when we speak about them, and that when a certain threshold of brain activity is reached, . The threshold may differ from person to person, creating differences in how much people gesture in various contexts.

This would explain why we gesture more when describing things we have done than things we have only seen. But even if this action simulation idea is correct, there must be more going on in the brain because gestures aren鈥檛 just about our own actions. We use them to represent many other things, including shapes (for example, moving your hand in a circle to represent a ball), the actions of objects (moving your hand upwards to represent a rocket taking off) and ideas (moving your hand forwards to represent the future). Clearly, there is still much we don鈥檛 know about the neuroscience of gestures.

The question that really intrigues me, however, is why we gesture when we talk. The Nixon/Kennedy debates suggest one possible benefit of this arm gymnastics. Even if viewers don鈥檛 consciously attend to gestures, they do subconsciously interpret them to glean more information than from speech alone. A recent study suggests that speakers intuitively know this. James Trujillo at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands and his colleagues wanted to see what happens to gestures when we try to communicate in a noisy environment. They found that, just as we tend to raise our voices, . In fact, speakers put more effort into exaggerating their gestures than adjusting the volume of their speech.

Boosting learning and memory

So, we alter our gestures to help people understand us. But this can鈥檛 be the whole story, otherwise why would we use our hands when talking on the phone and in other situations where people can鈥檛 see us? One long-standing idea is that gesturing helps us retrieve tip-of-the-tongue words. You might find yourself rotating your hand as you try to remember the word 鈥渟crewdriver鈥�, for example. It sounds plausible and some researchers believe it, but .

Nevertheless, a slew of experiments convincingly show that gesturing helps our thinking in other ways. For example, in one study, my colleagues and I used eye trackers to watch where children looked during maths lessons in which the teacher either used gestures or avoided using them. When her gestures pointed out the numbers she was talking about, children were more likely to look at these numbers. That isn鈥檛 too surprising. However, when we homed in on all the children whose gaze followed these numbers 鈥� even those taught without gestures 鈥� we found that . So a teacher鈥檚 gestures don鈥檛 just help learners focus on what is important, they also help them get more meaning from what they attend to.

Making our own gestures has an even more powerful effect on learning. One experiment found that who pointed at numbers while counting became more accurate counters than children of the same age who only watched a puppet point at the numbers. In addition, gesturing also , which is essential for acquiring new knowledge. For example, 4 and 5-year-olds taught the invented word 鈥渢iffing鈥� 鈥� meaning to squeeze the round part of a toy 鈥� were more likely to extend this knowledge to other squeezable toys if they had learned the word while using a squeezing gesture than if they had learned it while physically squeezing a particular toy. It seems that gesturing helps us abstract away from the details of a problem and think more deeply about how to solve it.

As well as helping us learn and understand, gesturing also aids memory directly. My colleagues and I showed adult volunteers videos of people, animals and toys performing various actions before testing their memory immediately afterwards and again a few weeks later. In the long term, they while describing them afterwards than when they had used words alone.

You might expect that moving your hands and talking at the same time would require more brainpower than talking on its own since doing the two together improves memory. In fact, it seems to do the opposite. We conducted an experiment where adults had to multitask by simultaneously explaining how they solved a maths problem while remembering a sequence of letters. They , not fewer, letters when they used gestures along with words in their maths explanations than when they used words alone. Instead of adding to our cognitive load, , making thinking easier.

One possible explanation for this might be that gesture externalises ideas and puts them in a spatial setting. This is a bit like a memory strategy called the 鈥渕ethod of loci鈥� where you mentally place each item on a list in a different location and take an imaginary journey around these locations to aid recall. Gesture might work like this too, an intriguing idea that has yet to be tested.

A method of thinking

What is clear, however, is that gesture provides an additional mode of thought 鈥� more visual than speech and more active than pictures. As such, it can fill gaps left by speech. It is particularly suited to capturing ideas visually 鈥� outlining shapes, recreating movements and displaying transformations. And it can communicate information that is implicit in a picture but difficult to express in words. For instance, when at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her colleagues showed people diagrams of mechanical systems and asked them to work out how different parts moved, . Most of these gestures portrayed mechanical motions not described in their words and not obvious from the diagrams. In this way, gesture provides an extra way of thinking and communicating ideas that speech struggles with.

It is tempting to think that the cognitive power of gesture might lie in the fact that it allows us to use two methods 鈥� hand and mouth 鈥� at once. But it isn鈥檛 that simple. My colleagues and I discovered this when we taught a maths concept to hearing children, who used their hands to gesture and their mouths to speak, and to deaf children, who used their hands to gesture and to produce American Sign Language. The result was the same in both groups: children who produced gestures that conveyed different information from their language were than those whose gestures conveyed the same information as their language.

Revealed: What your thoughts look like and how they compare to others鈥�

We finally have a grasp on the many different ways of thinking and how your inner mindscape affects your experience of reality

Nevertheless, the fact that gesturing brings the body into thinking does seem to be important. We know that our movements can have an impact on our thinking. For example, if you learn a new dance while blindfolded, you will subsequently be able to . Like other movements, our gestures are a with the power to shape our thoughts.

The wide range of functions that gesturing serves make it a multi-purpose cognitive tool. But be warned: today鈥檚 technologies are interfering with our ability to make the best use of it. When you are holding your phone or Zooming in to a meeting or lesson, the rich language of gesture may be partially blocked or missing entirely. On the other hand, when you recognise that gesturing occurs in all contexts, from parenting to your professional and social interactions, then you can take advantage of the benefits it offers (see 鈥淭uning in to gestures鈥�).

Understand and embrace its power and I assure you it will fundamentally change how effectively you communicate, for the better.

Susan Goldin-Meadow is a聽professor of psychology at聽the University of Chicago