Anyone watching Bill Clinton speak will be struck by the expressive way he moves those enormous hands. In fact, his hands may not be merely emphasising his words, but helping him form his thoughts.
One of the most fascinating areas of psychology at the moment is the study of "embodied cognition": the way that our mental concepts of the world are shaped by our bodies and what we do with them. Here's Andy Clark, a philosopher at Edinburgh University:
Most of us gesture (some of us more wildly than others) when we talk. For many years, it was assumed that this bodily action served at best some expressive purpose, perhaps one of emphasis or illustration. Psychologists and linguists...have lately questioned this assumption, suspecting that the bodily motions may themselves be playing some kind of active role in our thought process. In experiments where the active use of gesture is inhibited, subjects show decreased performance on various kinds of mental tasks. Now whatever is going on in these cases, the brain is obviously deeply implicated! No one thinks that the physical handwavings are all by themselves the repositories of thoughts or reasoning. But it may be that they are contributing to the thinking and reasoning, perhaps by lessening or otherwise altering the tasks that the brain must perform, and thus helping us to move our own thinking along. It is noteworthy, for example, that the use of spontaneous gesture increases when we are actively thinking a problem through, rather than simply rehearsing a known solution.
Over at the wonderful Anthropology In Practice blog, we learn that gesturing and language production seem to be intertwined in our brains and in our evolution:
Gestures are an integral part of language. Arbib, Liebal, and Pika (2008) believe that gestures, via pantomime and protosigns, may have played a large role in the emergence of vocalization (protospeech) leading to the development of protolanguage. Their hypothesis is based on the structure of the brain, specifically a mirroring of structures in the brain: near Broca's area, a region of the brain said to be involved in language production, is a region "activated for both grasping and observation of grasping". The proximity of a grasping region to a language region is intriguing.
Reading about the brain links between speaking and grasping some months ago, I suggested to a friend with a severe stutter that he try making hand movements while speaking. In just a couple of months, he has obtained almost complete control of his stutter, provided he moves his hands while speaking. The stutter returns when he keeps his hands still. He had previously noticed that he stuttered less when giving presentations - presumably because in presentations it is fine to point and gesticulate, more so than in ordinary speech (at least in anglo-saxon culture).
Posted by: peter | December 22, 2010 at 12:47 PM