Thinking with Your Hands
The Surprising Science Behind How Gestures Shape Our Thoughts
-
- USD 17.99
-
- USD 17.99
Publisher Description
An astounding account of how gesture, long overlooked, is essential to how we learn and interact, which “changes the way you think about yourself and the people around you.” (Ethan Kross, bestselling author of Chatter)
We all know people who talk with their hands—but do they know what they’re saying with them? Our gestures can reveal and contradict us, and express thoughts we may not even know we’re thinking.
In Thinking with Your Hands, esteemed cognitive psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow argues that gesture is vital to how we think, learn, and communicate. She shows us, for instance, how the height of our gestures can reveal unconscious bias, or how the shape of a student’s gestures can track their mastery of a new concept—even when they’re still giving wrong answers. She compels us to rethink everything from how we set child development milestones, to what’s admissible in a court of law, to whether Zoom is an adequate substitute for in-person conversation.
Sweeping and ambitious, Thinking with Your Hands promises to transform the way we think about language and communication.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"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. Correction: An earlier version of this review listed an incorrect title for the book.
