Ana Yael
THE 1960 US presidential election saw the first public debates between Republican and Democrat nominees. In a series of four meetings, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy duked it out live on television and radio. The upshot was intriguing. Among people who had listened to the debates, Nixon was generally thought to have come out on top. But viewers had Kennedy down as the winner. How could that be?
The answer lies beyond what the two men said. We tend to consider language as the only medium through which we communicate, but there is another channel hidden in our hands: gesture. Even if we are unaware of our gestures, they are visible to anyone who can see us talking. What’s more, they seem to have a special hold on the truth. Gestures often give people a window into our thoughts that words don’t – which might help explain why Kennedy went on to win the US presidency.
But gestures don’t just let other people read our minds. I have spent five decades studying how we communicate with our hands and, together with other researchers, I have discovered the surprising power of gestures to shape our thoughts.
What we have come to realise is that gestures are not mere movements. They are a special kind of thinking that is revealed through the hands. Most people so undervalue them that they often don’t realise they are gesturing. Yet the wide range of abilities that gesturing entails makes it a sort of superpower. Understand gesture and you can maximise its benefits to boost learning and memory, communicate more effectively and build deeper social…
