Thinking with Your Hands

March 27, 2023
“To fully communicate with others, and maybe even with ourselves, we need to understand what’s happening with our hands,” asserts Goldin-Meadow (Hearing Gesture), a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, in this comprehensive offering. Goldin-Meadow suggests that people gesture partly because language is imperfect and better at capturing some details than others, and because gesturing provides a “different modality” through which to learn or work through a problem. In addition to aiding communication, the author writes, gestures can reveal internal bias and has been shown to improve memory (researchers found that adults who gestured while describing videos of people performing “sometimes odd actions” had a stronger recollection of them several weeks later than the nongesturers). Drawing on her own studies, Goldin-Meadow explores the practical applications of better understanding gesture, such as helping parents track their children’s cognitive development; explores how gesture can reveal conversational subtext; and examines how public figures gesture both subconsciously and intentionally, such as the way National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman used choreographed gestures to bring alive her 2020 poem, “The Hill We Climb.” Though the author tends to pile on the research a bit too thickly for the nonspecialist, readers will be captivated by the nuance and depth of her analysis, which excavates a topic that’s universally relevant yet little understood by most. This fascinates. (June)Correction: An earlier version of this review listed an incorrect title for the book.