Thinking with your hands. A link between gesturing and intelligence

[xchrom]

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/sociedad/Thinking/with/your/hands/link/between/gesturing/and/intelligence/elpepusoc/20110722elpepusoc_13/Tes

When people talk, they often gesture with their hands. Even when their conversational partners cannot see them, people still gesture - when talking on the telephone, for example, or when blind people talk to each other. Young children gesture when they are trying to learn or explain a task or concept.

These hand gestures not only communicate a message to the listener, but also reflect the thoughts of the person who is gesturing. But, while gestures may reflect an individual's thoughts or knowledge, we still don't know exactly why people gesture. Nor do we know why some people gesture more frequently than others.

My colleagues at Germany's Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Potsdam University and I have discovered differences between people who gesture frequently and those who only gesture rarely. Our study shows that gesturing may be a function of and may even contribute to brain development.

In a recent investigation, we selected fifty-one 11th grade students at three Berlin high schools that specialized in mathematics and natural sciences. The students were given intelligence tests and assigned to one of two groups, according to their scores. They were then asked to solve a visual analogy task in which they had to decide whether two chessboard-like patterns on the left side of a computer screen were mirrored on the same axis as two patterns on the right side of the screen.

[snagglepuss]

1. Well you have made my day. I rotate both my hands wildly when I talk.

I always thought it indicated insanity so what a nice surprise. :woohoo:

[unblock]

6. Well, they're not saying that it's NOT linked to insanity....

In fact, intelligence and insanity are correlated (along with homosexuality, autoimmune disorders, and left-handedness).
Draw your own conclusions....

[EFerrari]

10. At least it's too late for me to be left handed.

LOL

[marmar]

2. I gesture a lot........

:)

[xchrom]

3. ...

:spray:

[canoeist52]

4. it's why I worry about exclusive communication using phone and texting.

"One study at UCLA indicated that up to 93 percent of communication effectiveness is determined by nonverbal cues. Another study indicated that the impact of a performance was determined 7 percent by the words used, 38 percent by voice quality, and 55 percent by the nonverbal communication."
http://humanresources.about.com/od/interpersonalcommunicatio1/a/nonverbal_com.htm

I've seen my 20-something daughter's friends go off in a tizzy over something someone said on facebook or in a text. I

tell them wait and talk face-to-face with the person. It's usually a misunderstanding.

[Pooka Fey]

8. + 1000

[Igel]

13. Often "nonverbal" includes intonation and phrase breaks.

It depends on how expansive their definition of "grammar" is. Mine's quite expansive: I put phrasing, intonation, creak and fry, even coherence relations and volume (when not constrained by background noise) into "grammar". Most linguists have tended to view my definition of "grammar" as a kind of garbage pail because a lot of my "grammar" can't be put--yet--into formal principles or isn't honored as grammar by tradition.

Then again, when dysfluencies are apparently interpreted accurately and meaningfully by listeners and, quite possibly, often produced intentionally by speakers, they're arguably rule- or constraint-governed and suddenly become "grammar."

Anyway, one important part of learning academic English--or Russian or Chinese--is have a standard set of assumptions in writing that you count on being shared with other literate speakers of your language, knowing that everything else must be made explicit in the prose and being aware of how to make it explicit.

Good speakers who know that they're being recorded or that the listeners don't already know what they're going to say do likewise. It usually sounds pedantic when you write like that in informal settings. Ahem.

Interestingly, it's always fun to listen to or read some of the sound bites and snippets that are bandied about to embarrass politicians. Often they contain clues in the syntax or the anaphoric relations that tell you they actually mean something other or more than what they're being touted as meaning. Always fun, that, if you have ears for the subtleties of linguistic coherence.

I've talked to Navajo scholars who complain about this wrt Navajo, actually: Navajo is so verby and context-dependent since most native speakers lack any academic training or tradition that calls for decontextualizing their speech that a lot of utterances are far too ambiguous when transcribed and read later. You write down a dialog between two native speakers and ask somebody to read it and very often the reader has no clue what they meant; sometimes if you describe the location the conversation occurred in the meaning comes into focus, other times you have to say what they were doing at the time, and sometimes nothing helps.

[beac]

5. Interesting article.

I wonder if I am more intelligent when I'm speaking Italian? I am already a pretty gesture-heavy speaker but, just like those of native Italians, my hands are flying quando parlato in italiano! ;)

[LaurenG]

7. I don't gesture much

Oh well. :)

[susanr516]

9. I'll have to show this to my husband

He has often said that if someone tied my hands to my body, I wouldn't be able to talk. Funny thing, I don't even notice my hands moving unless someone points it out.

[madmom]

11. People always tease me about using my hands so much when I

talk, even when I was a kid my grandfather would hold my hands to see if I could talk without them.

[EFerrari]

12. I noticed a long time ago that when I paint

I take a mini dry run with my brush. Somehow it helps me spatialize the 2D, something that is normally hard for me.

[Igel]

14. Too variable.

I gestured far more in French than I ever would in English, just as when I speak Russian I curse more and stand much closer to my interlocutor than when I speak English. Presumably my IQ doesn't alter even as I adjust some of my behaviors.

In English I can be discussing something very complicated but which lacks good spatial referents. For example, anaphoric relations in Russian, or historical changes in Common Slavic and reflexes of protosegments in a variety of languages with their conditions and likely phonetic progressions. My hands will lie still. They're a distraction from the very much abstract representations I'm trying to create, and even if there are actual physical referents I'm only going to move my hands when the listeners are likely to realize how hand motions and shapes correlate with the referents. For instance, showing retroflexion or palatalization, or perhaps talking about shifts in vowel space. That's sort of a hard thing to make them understand, so I don't move my hands when talking linguistics. (Or literature, or history.)

But I can try to explain something about magnetic fields to my kid, and I'm all right-hand-rule using my hands and arms to sketch fields in 3-space, showing direction of force vectors and lines of force and sort of moving around as though the abstract things I'm talking about are actually there. Or I'll try to describe how he should set up his Hot Wheels track--again, something with spatial reference and my hands will be trying to describe the mental representation I want my son to reproduce. I took a science test last week and actually caused the test taker at the next station a bit of concern, silently sitting there and gesticulating to work out the mental representations in order to double check my math.

Too many variables. At least they controlled one, and I assume that the science folk were a bit more circumspect in their conclusions than the apparently more insightful reporter.