Читать книгу Power Cues - Nick Morgan - Страница 25

What Goldin-Meadow was noticing was that gesture and speech were different, and things were being said by the children with their gestures that they didn’t say with their speech. As she notes, “It’s hard even to think about gestures separately from speech. We (coded) them separately. So we’d code the speech without the picture, and then we’d turn the sound off and code the gesture.” The accidental result was that Goldin-Meadow and her fellow researchers noticed that speech and gesture were not the same.

You don’t normally notice this phenomenon in ordinary communication. As Goldin-Meadow says, “That’s not how our brains process it. Our brains just glom it all together and integrate it.” So it took an expert to notice that our gestures have meaning, and meaning different from what we’re saying.

You don’t notice this phenomenon consciously, but your unconscious mind is keeping track of it. Goldin-Meadow says, “We did some brain imaging studies that show that when there’s different sets of information, we do pick up on it … We’re just beginning to look at how people process those differences. We’ve got evidence that people will respond to a mismatch differently, because we’re seeing different brain patterns for matches and mismatches” between words and gestures.

So our gestures sometimes convey different information from our words, and our unconscious minds take note of those differences and process them. If you think about it from your personal awareness of the world, it makes perfect sense. We’ve all had the experience of conversing with someone who says one thing but gestures another, and we get what they mean from the gesture.

Goldin-Meadow worked out a very elegant, simple test for this. She had subjects listen to a story that involved a stairway. The researchers made the gesture for a spiral staircase, but didn’t verbalize that idea. Yet when they tested the subjects, they got the spiral staircase idea.

In another study Goldin-Meadow conducted, children whose teachers produced “grouping” gestures while explaining an algebra problem were more likely to talk about that idea later, even though the teacher hadn’t discussed it at all. Concepts introduced via gesture are picked up by the unconscious mind and can be vocalized later even if the speakers are not aware of the concepts consciously.

But Goldin-Meadow is honing in on a further aspect of gesture and speech, one that has fascinating implications for why we gesture. As she puts it, “If you gesture, it lightens your cognitive load.” By that, she means that it takes less mental effort to speak while gesturing. She goes on, “We don’t really know why that is. We just know that it is.”

It’s a mystery, but the implications are important. You need to gesture. If you don’t, you’re making your brain work much harder. So those power gestures you’ve been taught, where you in effect limit your natural gesturing to some spider-doing-pushups-in-a-mirror gesture because some coach told you that makes you look intimidating, actually make it harder for you to think on your feet—leading to a less intimidating you.

Goldin-Meadow sums it up: “Gesture isn’t just a reflection of speech.” One theory is that gesture predated speech in our evolution. We spoke with our gestures before we learned to vocalize. But whether that’s true or not, those gestures are important to our thought processes, to helping us communicate.