An expert reveals the secret language of “Thinking With Your Hands”

When I was in high school, my history teacher tried an experiment with a classmate known for her enthusiastic and expressive communication style. The girl had raised her hand to answer a question, and the teacher challenged her to reply while keeping her hands folded in her lap. I’ve never forgotten the sight of her struggling to get her words out while her hands were restrained.

We all, to some extent or another, talk with our hands. It’s part of how we communicate. But as author, University of Chicago professor and psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow explains in her newest book, that’s just the beginning. 

In “Thinking With Your Hands: The Surprising Science Behind How Gestures Shape Our Thoughts,” Goldin-Meadow, whose previous books have similarly explored the hand and mind connection, posits that “Focusing exclusively on language as the foundation of communication is wrong.” In her deep and pioneering research on deaf children who were not taught sign language, she’s explored the intricate ways in which communication emerges independent of what we typically regard as language.

What’s she discovered are an astonishing number of ways in which our hands not only help us to emphasize (or sometimes contradict) our spoken words, but how they also play a vital role in how we form our ideas. As Goldin-Meadow shows, even people blind from birth use gesture. People who don’t have arms will experience a phantom feeling they are gesturing. We gesture when who we’re talking to can’t see us, such as on the phone. We gesture when we’re all alone, trying to compose an email. We need to gesture to make sense of the world.

I talked to Goldin-Meadow recently via Zoom about the intimate power of our gestures, how gestures can help us tap into ideas, and why she says that “Gesture and language really are a single integrated system. It’s just not a system that linguists study.”

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I want to ask you why this matters. You say early on that focusing exclusively on language isn’t sufficient. Maybe that’s a semantic issue itself, because what is language? 

The way I’m defining language is the way linguists have always found it. There are people now who will say, gestures are part of language, and it’s part of the whole system. That may be true, but then it’s a different kind of system. If you’re interested in the messages that get across, and in how we influence one another and learn about ourselves and learn about things, we need to look at gesture as well as words or signs.

There’s so much information that isn’t captured by our words, and by all of the conventional things that we learn from language. For that purpose, certainly as a psychologist, I think it’s very important to take these kinds of things seriously.

In the book, you distinguish between gestures, which are what we think of when we think of talking with our hands, and emblems, which are more regional and cultural signals like a thumbs up or “okay” sign. Why is it important for us, when we’re thinking of this language of gestures, to understand those differences?

Emblems are conventional. It’s a kind of symbol, so you can do it wrong. There’s a way to do it. They’re like words; I can do it and everybody will know [its meaning]. 

They’re perfectly legitimate to study and they’re interesting, but the reason I’m less interested in them is because they’re conventionalized. You have to do them in a particular way. The spontaneous gestures that we produce, we are very much less aware of. They capture things that we’re thinking that we’re not always aware of thinking. Producing an emblem, I don’t just subconsciously produce it, I know when I’m doing it. But you can subconsciously talk about other kinds of things when you’re doing your spontaneous gestures. 

When you look at the title of this book, you are geographically speaking of one particular part of the body. Yet when I think of gesture, I also think about my face, I think about my whole body. What do we learn when we isolate just the hands?

There’s a huge literature on body language. It really does convey lots of things — attitude perspective, sense of self, more. Most of it is about how we feel, and our perception of our interaction. What the hands contribute — and the face can do this, too — is not just our attitudes about the conversation, but the content of the conversation.

That’s something that whole field of body language really ignored for a long time. It wasn’t until [University of Chicago professor] David McNeill and [University of Cambridge anthropologist] Adam Kendon that they started taking these gestures really seriously as conveying thoughts, not just feelings. That’s what I’m after. There are other ways of doing it, but I stuck with the hands because, first of all, it’s a lot to code, and you’ve got to start somewhere.

You talk in the book so much about this concept of homesigning, gestures that profoundly deaf children create when they have not been exposed to sign language, and what you’ve been able to learn from that about the ways in which our brains work, the ways in which we communicate. That was my first encounter with that phrase.

This is how I often start lectures about this phenomenon. If language were absolutely wiped out right now, no spoken language, no sign language, no written language, but everything else remained the same, would you imagine that it would be reinvented? If it were reinvented, would it be reinvented in the same way, or would it look different? Depending upon what you think we bring to the situation, if you think that language has been handed down from generation to generation to generation, and is the way it is because of its historical path, it might not be reinvented, and it might look really, really different.

But if you think that language is the way it is, in part, at least, because of what we bring to language, it’s likely to be reinvented and at least some parts of it will be there again. That’s what I think homesign does. It shows you what will be reinvented, can be reinvented by any kid, any time. But not all of language. It’ll be parts of life. That’s the part of homesign that I’m most interested in, because it’s your mind just coming out. 

Homesigners are not so easy to find in America anymore. They’re deaf kids whose hearing losses are profound, and they cannot learn how to speak with cochlear implants or hearing aids. They were born to hearing parents, so they weren’t exposed to a sign language. In a sense, they don’t have a linguistic input that they can make use of. Nonetheless, they communicate and they use their hands to do it. 

This happens rarely now in the United States, because kids are given cochlear implants very, very early. That changes the whole nature of things. You can find them all around the world because there are lots of different situations where deaf kids are born to hearing parents. And there’s no sign language to learn.

You use that example in the book of what you’ve been able to glean from Nicaraguan sign language.

Right, Nicaraguan sign language is one example now of a current day sign language that’s growing up. But all sign languages grew up that way. They all started from homesign, and then they evolved. There are little ones starting all over [the world.]

On the other side of that, when you’re looking at the gestures that people learn and develop with language, I was fascinated to learn that people who were born blind gesture. 

That I think is amazing. At some level, it really, really means that this spoken system and even sign system that we do needs the mimetic system that we create when we gesture. It really needs it. And even if you have not been taught it, or never seen it, you just do it spontaneously.

And people who are were worn without hands still think with their hands.

And the more they embody, the more they think about the prosthesis as their own, the more they gesture.

You talk about what any of us as parents or as educators can learn from paying attention and observing children’s gestures. What are some of the things we can encourage? What are some things that maybe we need to be looking at as an indication of some delays or some other issues?

There are signals from kids’ gestures that they’re moving forward, and they’re interested in something. Kids and parents do this naturally. The kid points at the dog and the mother goes, “Yes, that’s a dog.” It’s the perfect time to tell the kid that the word is dog, because that’s uppermost in the kid’s mind at the time. It’s a precursor to what’s next.

There are little sentences that kids produce, pointing at the hat and saying “Mommy” to really indicate it’s mommy’s hat. If parents pick up on that, they can join the kid’s conversation in a way that if they just listened, they wouldn’t necessarily be on the same page. If the kid says, “Mommy,” and you don’t know what the kid is indicating, the point of the hat indicates that we want to go down this conversation. It can just make you have a better conversation with your kid.

And if you’re trying to give encouragement, that’s a good thing to do. I think if kids don’t do that in a timely fashion, it’s possible that there will be [developmental] delay. Not inevitable, but I would want to bring my kid in and have somebody look. 

It also feels to me part and parcel of something that we are all dealing with right now. Our phones are an obstacle between us and looking at each other. How are we going to look at our kids and, and pay attention to what they’re doing? What are we missing when maybe we’re in a meeting? We’re listening but we’re not really catching what the person is also communicating.

That matters a lot, actually, for certain kinds of communication. Our communication is being narrowed, and these phones aren’t so good for us. For many reasons, not just gesture. 

You also talk about culture and gesture, and these ideas that you need to communicate with your hands, but not too much. 

Flailing about is not something that mothers and grandmothers want their children to do. But in fact, gesture really is very helpful. We haven’t done these studies, but I’m pretty sure it’s true that if you are a monotone, you’re very not likely to gesture. When you’re flat, you’re flat throughout, both your gestures and your voice. I think when you make somebody not gesture, you may be flattening their whole affect, and then flattening their expression, and making it harder for them to really engage in the conversation and get your attention. So I don’t find it a useful thing to do to tell people not to gesture.

When you talk about how intentional Amanda Gorman was with gesture at President Joe Biden’s inauguration that is something that we can use in our lives. How can we think about using our hands to enhance understanding to enhance our likelihood of making sure there’s no miscommunication? What is the power that we can we can harness, when we’re really intentional about how we use our hands? 

The worry I have is that if you get too intentional, you’ll bollocks yourself up, and you won’t be able to do it. It’s a little bit like, if you think about how to breathe, you can’t really breathe. You just need to let it let it flow by itself. But some intention is good. I find for myself that if I’m not gesturing, I’m not so into it. When I get into it, gestures come out now. So I welcome them, because it makes me feel like, “Oh, good. You’re thinking now.”

Gestures, to me, feel like such a social thing. It’s obviously external. Yet I will sit by myself trying to think of a word, and making these gestures to lead me to the word. Do we gesture for ourselves?

We do gesture for ourselves. We talk on the phone and we gesture. Blind people do gesture, and they’re not gesturing for somebody else. They’re definitely gesturing for themselves. There are a lot of functions that gesture serves for you. Those gestures may be helpful to somebody else, too. They may be multi-functional, but they do help us think and flesh out ideas. 

We’ve started to call these gestures when you’re sitting there and thinking something through co-thought gestures, co-speech gestures. I’d love to study those a bit more and to see whether they’re the same as your co-speech gestures. That could be the key to people who say they don’t think in words — maybe they’re just thinking in gestures. But maybe the people who think in words are thinking in co speech gestures. 

There is a theory that gesture is trying to help you retrieve the word, and then it helps you speak better. The evidence for that is a little complex. I’m not sure that’s that it’s correct. There’s evidence for it, there’s evidence against it. It may do it at times, when you’re looking for a screwdriver or something like that.

But it’s not gestures only function. It’s retrieving words, but also bigger ideas. One of the things that gesture does is it doesn’t map neatly onto words. It goes across words, sentences, paragraphs, things like that. It maps on to a bigger unit of analysis, of bigger ideas.