Susan Goldin-Meadow is a professor in the department of psychology and comparative human development at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Thinking with Your Hands: The Surprising Science Behind How Gestures Shape Our Thoughts.
We all move our hands when we talk. We do it in all cultures, when we’re young and when we’re old. Individuals who are blind from birth also move their hands when they talk even though they have never seen anyone gesture, and do it even when they are talking with other blind individuals. Most people think these movements are meaningless handwaving, or at best accentuate messages conveyed in speech. But sometimes gesture goes beyond speech and takes on a life of its own.
It’s at these times that I’m reminded of Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, a 1964 satirical black comedy about an unhinged United States Air Force general who orders a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Mr. Sellers is Dr. Strangelove, an ex-Nazi scientist advising the U.S. president. The relevant moment is when Dr. Strangelove’s right hand uncontrollably rises into a Nazi salute. He tries to control his right hand with his left but can’t. His right hand seems to be acting on its own, without his having conscious control over the movement.
Although not as dramatic or menacing as Dr. Strangelove’s unbidden gesture, we all, at times, convey thoughts with our hands that we are not aware of having expressed.
Consider a friend who is arguing forcefully that men and women are equally good leaders. When he talks about men, he gestures at eye level. But when he talks about women, he gestures at chin level. His words say he is convinced of the equality of male and female leadership skills. The placement of his hands suggests otherwise.
This friend’s gestures resemble Dr. Strangelove’s in that they are expressing an idea found not in his words but in his hands. In fact, it is an idea that he doesn’t seem to realize he holds. These “mismatches” between hand and mouth happen at all ages and often in tasks where the speaker is on the brink of change.
But the friend’s gestures also differ from Dr. Strangelove’s in some respects. His gesture is a spontaneous movement created on the spot – it therefore has the potential to capture his fleeting thoughts. Dr. Strangelove’s gesture is a conventional symbol (called an emblem), which doesn’t change from context to context or from person to person. And Dr. Strangelove sees what his right hand is doing and tries to control it. The friend seems unaware of having gestured differently about male and female leadership potential.
The spontaneous gestures we produce when we talk differ from Dr. Strangelove’s in another respect: They are useful. The many experimental studies I have done over the past 40 years have convinced me that our gestures not only reveal our thoughts but also change those thoughts. We can encourage children to gesture just by asking them to use their hands the next time they explain how they solved a math problem. When later given instruction, these children are more likely to learn how to solve the math problem than children who are not encouraged to gesture. Gesturing helps learning at all stages of life – toddlers learning words, schoolchildren learning math, even adults learning chemistry.
Take a six-year-old child who sees two rows of checkers and notes that the rows have the same number of pieces. An adult spreads out the checkers in one row and asks, “Do the two rows still have the same number of checkers?” The child confidently (and incorrectly) says, “No, it’s a different number because you moved them.” But, at the same time, he moves his pointing finger between the first checker in Row 1 and the first checker in Row 2, then the second checker in Row 1 and the second checker in Row 2, and so on. His hands seem to understand the one-to-one correspondence between the checkers in the two rows, but his words haven’t caught up yet.
Most children gesture before they speak and those gestures are a harbinger of things to come. Imagine that a toddler, who can produce only one word at a time, says “Daddy” and points at a plant that her father just put in the ground. She is not calling her father a plant, but instead is conveying a sentence-like idea: Daddy planted that. She is ready to produce sentences and in fact will soon start doing so in speech.
But parents can move the process along if they translate their children’s gestures into words – saying “yes, Daddy planted that” in response to the child’s gesture and word. This response is timely, delivered at just the moment the child is trying to communicate her thoughts about Daddy and the plant. Parents can help their children learn language by paying attention to their gestures and turning them into words.
Children with unilateral brain injury are often delayed in producing words. Some will continue to be delayed, but some will pull out of it and begin producing words at a typical rate. Gesture can tell us who will be delayed and who will get back on track. At 18 months when all of the children with brain injury in one of my studies were at the low end of the distribution for word production, some were producing gestures at a typical rate and others were not. The children whose gestures were in the typical range at 18 months produced words at a typical rate at 30 months – they had caught up. The children whose gestures were below the typical range did not. Gesture allows for the early diagnosis of language delay, well before the signs are there in speech. Gesture opens up the possibility of timely intervention for children who are going to need it.
Gestures are ubiquitous. Our challenge is to harness them so that we can better understand what others are thinking, and even what we ourselves are thinking.