How to use gesture to enhance your communication

Enhance communication and memory by incorporating gestures, as suggested by Susan Goldin-Meadow in an article for Psyche.

Though most of us associate exceptional oratorical skills with passion, a facility with words and proper intonation, there’s another facet of effective communication that doesn’t garner much attention. We can emphasise a point, seed a doubt, rouse people to action and help people remember not only through words but also our gestures. In an article in the online magazine Psyche, Susan Goldin-Meadow argues that gestures “contain and convey meaning” and can be deployed to enhance our thinking and communication.

She avers that gestures involve far more than people simply waving their hands, as they chatter on excitedly. The need to gesture is possibly innate as blind children, who have never seen other people use their hands while communicating, also gesticulate while talking. In one study, Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues found that participants were better able to recall vivid scenes like a “chicken sliding to a policeman” or a “jogger bending down to touch his toes” if they gestured while describing the scenes. A possible reason for this advantage is that a person has a dual code of both words and gestures to help them remember the scenes. Goldin-Meadow suggests that people may try gesturing while memorising their shopping lists to see if that aids recall.

Additionally, Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues have found evidence that gesturing helps children with mathematical reasoning. In one study, children were asked to explain their thinking behind a Maths problem using words and gestures while another group had to use only verbal explanations. When the students were given subsequent problems, those who had gestured while explaining outperformed the verbal-only group. According to Goldin-Meadow, the former group applied “ideas represented in their earlier gestures” while tackling the new Maths problems. When trying to learn a new concept, the author suggests that, in addition to explaining it aloud to another person or even to ourselves, we may also gesture as we speak. We may be surprised to learn that new ideas may emerge when we talk with our hands.

Gesturing also leads to better comprehension. Goldin-Meadow states that pointing to bullet points while making a presentation helps the audience focus better. Using actions while speaking also aids comprehension as gestures may help people decipher meaning more intently. Moreover, gesturing comes to us ‘naturally’ if we allow ourselves to move our hands freely. Our actions will automatically mirror the “temporal and semantic” intent of our speech if we let our hands speak for themselves.

Even as we gesture more often, we may also pay closer attention to other people’s actions. At times, people may struggle to put their thoughts into words coherently. However, they may convey information with their hands if we bother to notice this form on non-verbal communication. Goldin-Meadow notes that astute clinicians observe body language, including gestures, for clues regarding their client’s internal thoughts that may or may not be vocally stated.

As a lot of our communication is online nowadays, Goldin-Meadow suggests that we continue to tap into the benefits of gesturing even during video calls. By adjusting the position of our screens so that our hands are visible, we may enhance our online communication as well. Because we appreciate the importance of body language in cognition and communication, perhaps, we can try to schedule more in-person meetings. One of the best ways to encourage our conversational partners to gesture is to use gestures ourselves. As our mirror neurons tend to mimic actions of people we’re interacting with, we may also stand to gain when we use our hands and fingers to make our exchanges more meaningful and memorable.

The writer is the author of Zero Limits: Things Every 20-Something Should Know and blogs at www.arunasankaranarayanan.com.