I’ll bet you can’t talk and keep your hands perfectly still. Maybe you can for a minute or so, while you really make an effort. But I bet you can’t decide, in the middle of a conversation to put your hands on your knees, or fold them in your lap and continue to participate, with your hands motionless. Even if you more or less succeed, your fingers will be twitching in protest, your shoulders might make little movements to coax your hands free. Maybe you’ll even wiggle your toes.
Gesture. Those fleeting and spontaneous movements we make with our hands when we talk. Not body language, not the stances and motions we make that are social and relational, like showing dominance or openness. Gesture. The hand-dance that always accompanies our speech when we’re in conversation.
People have made whole lifetimes and careers studying gesture. They film people communicating—in labs and in the wild—and break it down frame by frame to analyze the relationships between gesticulation and speech.
You don’t need professional credentials or recording equipment to study gesture yourself. You just have to notice what people do with their hands when they talk. It’s a fine thing to study at parties. Makes the most boring conversation fascinating.
First you notice whether the person is making gestures, and of course they are. Then you notice that the gestures never stop, they just keep coming, one gesture after another. Notice the rhythm of them. Are they all the same length, coming along with an even beat, or do the gestures come out like Morse Code in shorts and longs?
Gesture mutates the way spoken language does—we copy one another, we have favorite ones. Gestures go in and out of fashion. We modify our gestures for various social situations. And if we’re conversing, we never quit making them. Most everyone uses hand-flicks. You might ask yourself what kinds of things the person signals or announces with a quick flip or twist of the hand. In conversation, you might notice whether a person draws shapes with their hands—like squares or circles. At other times a person will mime—pouring, maybe, or running, or bringing the hands together in prayer. Does the person do something special for phrases like eradicate… calming effect… lock the car. Watch the way someone moves a hand horizontally through space in front of them—does the hand move in a straight line, a curve? Maybe it spirals from the wrist. Does the finger point? Is the palm up or down? Is the hand open or closed? You begin noticing things like that, and soon you are making connections.
Of course you can notice all these things about yourself, which I do recommend. It keeps you from getting all smug and drawing too many conclusions about other people from their involuntary gestures.
Scholars have analyzed data from filmed speech and integrated it with models of the brain and imaging records of people’s neural activity and found that words arise neurologically from areas of the brain that make us precise and analytical. Gesture, on the other hand, arises from places that produce drawing, dance and first impressions. In the split second timing of it all, both inside the brain and in the physical world, conversational speech and gesture arise so much in tandem that they seem to be aspects of a single, prior impulse. And just what would that impulse be?
I’ve been thinking about such things because I’ve been reading a book called Becoming Beside Ourselves by Brian Rotman. It’s a book about the ways that using the alphabet has shaped our brains and thought.