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Thinking with Your Hands
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Thinking with Your Hands

The Surprising Science Behind How Gestures Shape Our Thoughts

Susan Goldin-Meadow
Basic Books, 2023
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All people use gestures to communicate their thoughts and feelings. A deaf, nonverbal child with no prior exposure to language communicates via gestures. But language speakers also gesticulate, using body language to supplement their words. Even people who were born blind and have never seen gestures, gesture. In fact, gestures reflect and shape people’s thoughts, especially those they are unwilling or unable to codify in speech. In her erudite treatise, developmental psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow reveals the subtlety and complexity, as well as the practical applications, of gesture.

Summary

Gesturing clarifies your communications and complements your speech.

When people talk, they gesticulate. But how and why do people gesture? Gestures are physical movements. Some mimic physical actions — for example, if you were to describe how to tie a shoelace, you’d likely gesture with your hands, miming the movements involved. According to the Gesture as Simulated Action (GSA) theory, when you think or speak about doing an action, the part of your brain responsible for performing that action activates, and sometimes that simulation, or “embodied cognition,” results in a gesture. However, GSA theory fails to explain why people gesture to represent actions that the body does not perform, such as shapes, conceptual ideas, or the movement of objects.

So why do people gesture? The reasons are manifold. Complementing your speech with gestures helps you to convey your message more effectively. For example, imagine you are in a noisy bar. You might use exaggerated movements to communicate to someone out of earshot, such as, say, touching your lips with pinched fingers to indicate that you are hungry and want to order food.

Some studies suggest ...

About the Author

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the department of psychology, the department of human development, and the committee on education at the University of Chicago. She wrote Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought. 

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