Expert tips on using gestures to think and talk more effectively

Need to know

You’ve probably noticed yourself moving your hands when you talk, and seen other people doing it too. The more excited you are about what you’re saying, I bet the more likely you are to move your hands – to gesture. Everybody gestures, although some of us do it much more than others; I’ve even met people who believe they can’t talk without moving their hands. Most of us know on some level that our hands and mouths work together to communicate, yet few people give gesturing the attention it deserves.

The first time I realised that I was ignoring gesture was when I watched a certain video for the umpteenth time. It showed children trying to explain that the number of checkers in a row changes when the checkers are spread out (of course it doesn’t – but the children didn’t know that yet). I’d watched that video so many times because for years I’d played it to my developmental psychology class. But then one day it dawned on me that all the children gestured as they gave their explanations. Once I paid attention to their gestures, I discovered something surprising – the children’s hand movements conveyed meaning and, at times, they expressed a correct idea about the checkers with their gestures (pointing back and forth between the corresponding checkers in the two rows) and a different, incorrect idea with their speech.

Looking closely at this video changed my research life. I began seeing gesture everywhere, even where we least expect it. For instance, people who are blind from birth move their hands when they talk – even though they have never seen anyone gesture. I also began thinking hard about what we can learn about our minds from gesture, and I discovered that gesture isn’t just hand-waving. Your waving hands reflect, and change, thinking – yours and other people’s. You have a powerful tool for thinking at your fingertips. Why not put it to good use?

What to do

Use gestures to boost your memory

Your gestures can give you a mental boost. If you gesture as you describe a scene, you will be able to remember the scene better than if you don’t gesture. For example, in one study I co-authored, we asked participants to describe and remember a series of odd scenes, such as: a chicken sliding to a policeman; a dove flying into a wheelbarrow; a jogger bending down to touch his toes. Whether participants gestured spontaneously while describing the scenes (using, for example, a beak gesture to represent the chicken) or we instructed them to gesture, we found they subsequently remembered the scenes better than if they had described them without gesturing. In short, gesturing while talking about something seems to lead to more robust memories compared with just talking about it. We don’t yet know why but it could be because you are encapsulating the memory, not only in your words, but also in your hands.

In the same study, we showed that gesturing helps you remember things better even if you are describing more typical events, such as a man blowing a whistle, flattening a piece of clay or rolling a pencil. You could exploit this effect in everyday life. Imagine you have a shopping list to remember – try saying the list out loud and producing a gesture for each item. If you are like the people in our studies, you will remember more if you gesture than if you recite the list without gesturing.

Use gestures to help yourself think

The gestures that you produce can change how you think, by putting your thoughts out in physical space. The best example of this comes from a study in which we asked children to reason about a moral dilemma, such as whether it is worse to steal or to cheat. If we told the children to gesture while they talked about this dilemma, they placed their gesturing hands in different locations in space as though laying out multiple perspectives. Crucially, they also started taking perspectives other than their own in their speech, and this more advanced moral reasoning lasted into later discussions. The same wasn’t true for those children whom we’d told, earlier on, not to gesture. Findings like these suggest that, by using gesture to externalise your thoughts, you ground your ideas in space, which has the potential to expand those ideas.

In other studies we’ve conducted, we’ve shown that this benefit of gesturing applies to learning maths too. For instance, we compared the effects of giving children an explanation to recite as they solved a maths problem versus reciting the explanation and performing complementary gestures at the same time. Later on, the learners who performed the verbal explanation plus gestures made more progress on related maths problems compared with the learners who hadn’t gestured – and that’s because they incorporated ideas represented in their earlier gestures into their problem-solving. These findings suggest that gestures support learning by helping us process existing ideas and generate new ones.

Our studies suggest that when you’re having trouble thinking something through, the best approach may be to talk out loud and let yourself gesture at the same time. It might be better to do this while talking to another person, but talking to yourself could work too. You may find that new insights are on your fingertips.

Use gestures to communicate more effectively

Your own gestures can do good things for you. But they can also do good things for others. When you point at a series of bullet points as you give a work presentation, it’s no surprise that your listeners will be better at following your words than if you hadn’t pointed. But gesturing is about more than directing people’s attention – your listeners will get more out of your words when they see your gestures than when they don’t.

A meta-analysis of 38 studies involving more than 2,000 participants confirmed that gestures enhance listeners’ comprehension, especially when they convey additional concrete information (such as information about movement) that’s not present in speech. Seeing gesture not only helps listeners look in the right place – it helps them get meaning from that place in relation to the words you are saying. This could have real-world implications. Consider a study led by Emlyon Business School in France that found entrepreneurs attracted more investment when they included gestures in their sales pitches.

Gesturing comes naturally, particularly if you are trying to explain something. But if you notice that you’re not gesturing and you’d like to help your listener(s), you can put your hands in the air. You will naturally move them in temporal and semantic synchrony with your speech – reinforcing, elaborating or adding to the message you want to convey.

Use other people’s gestures to be a better teacher and listener

Your gestures reveal your thoughts, so it’s not surprising that other people’s gestures reveal their thoughts. What this means is that you can use gestures to read other people’s minds and adjust your responses accordingly. One context where this is relevant is in supporting a child’s language development.

Imagine you have a 12-month-old who can say only one word at a time. Usually when she points at your hat, she says the word ‘hat’. But this time, she says ‘momma’. She isn’t confusing you for a hat – she is saying that the object she is pointing at is your hat. Taking gesture and speech together, she is producing a short sentence, ‘momma hat’, at a time when she cannot put two words together. Three months later, the child will start to produce two-word sentences – a linguistic milestone predicted by her gestures. Importantly, you can support her language growth by noticing her gesture-speech combinations and ‘translating’ them into speech – responding to her with ‘Yes, that’s momma’s hat.’ This is a teachable moment for your child – a moment when input from you can be most useful. You can take advantage of this moment, but only if you pay attention to your child’s gesture.

I mentioned earlier how young children can convey understanding in their gestures that they haven’t fully absorbed or expressed in their speech. This phenomenon is not unique to children. Consider an adult, trying to learn about stereoisomers in organic chemistry. When asked to explain a stereoisomer problem, the student gives an explanation in speech that leaves out the key element of the problem – rotation of the molecule. But he knows that rotation is relevant – he produces a rotation gesture while giving a non-rotation explanation in speech. His gestures tell the world that he knows rotation is important to this problem.

A teacher attuned to gesture will pick up on this information and choose this moment to teach him about rotation. But if the student pays attention to his own gestures, perhaps he could see the rotation idea in his hands. He might then (on his own) apply the idea to the problem. Not only can you support others by paying attention to their gestures, but perhaps you can get insights into your own thoughts by paying attention to your gestures.

Other people’s gestures can provide information about many things. For example, clinicians use their clients’ gestures to get at their hidden thoughts. The client says that their marriage is very solid while, at the same time, abruptly separating their two hands, mimicking an explosion. Having more of these hidden insights might be useful not only in a clinical setting, but also in a friendly conversation, a teaching situation, or even in a business transaction.

Since other people’s gestures offer insight into what they are really thinking, you might want to encourage others to gesture. But how? If you’re in a teaching situation, you could ask your students to gesture (I’ve seen firsthand that this does work!), but you probably wouldn’t want to make that request in a friendly conversation or in a business meeting. It’s easy to encourage gesturing though – all you need to do is gesture yourself. People are likely to follow your lead and begin to move their hands as they speak.

Links & books