Body Language Hand Movements

Speech, of course, also reveals our thoughts; that is after all what speech is designed to do. However, as we all know, we sometimes do not say exactly what we mean, we obfuscate and deviate, we avoid the issue, we talk our way around things, we cheat and we lie, and we can do all of this because our speech is conscious and controlled. Sometimes we give the game away, usually through those bits of speech over which we have least control. When we lie, the pitch of our speech sometimes rises when we feel particularly anxious about getting found out (Streeter et al. 1977), certain pauses may lengthen as we plan our lie (Benus et al. 2006), but a lot of the time we get away with it. Hand movements can be more revealing for one very simple reason: most of them are unconsciously produced in everyday life alongside speech and contain information that we, as the speaker, are unaware is actually there. When we are gesturing we are not only unaware of the exact form and trajectory of our gestures, and what our gestures are ‘saying’, we are usually unaware of the sheer extent of the gestures, and sometimes we are even unaware of whether we are moving our hands at all.

The major challenge for us here is to start thinking afresh about the very nature of everyday communication in which people express their underlying thoughts and ideas.

The starting point of the book is really the very simple observation that when human beings talk, they make many bodily movements, but in particular they make frequent, and I suggest largely unconscious, movements of the hands and arms. They do this in every possible situation – in face-to-face communication, on the telephone, even when the hands are below a desk and thus out of sight of their interlocutor (I have many recordings of these and similar occurrences). It is as if human beings are neuro biologically programmed to make these movements whilst they talk, that these movements are so important, and they would seem to be (in evolutionary terms) a good deal more primitive than speech itself, with language evolving on the back of these visible movements (or alongside these movements according to McNeill 2012). People who have been blind from birth still gesture even though they have never actually seen gestures themselves, and they continue to gesture even when conversing with other blind people that they know are blind (Iverson and Goldin-Meadow 1997). These gestures are often imagistic in form, and the resultant images are closely integrated in time with the speech itself (on other occasions, however, the movements are simpler than this and appear to be timed with the stress points in the speech). The imagistic movements when they refer to concrete objects, events and actions are called ‘iconic gestures’ because of their mode of repre sentation; the simpler stress-timed movements are called ‘beats’. Words have an arbitrary relationship with the things they represent (and thus are ‘non-iconic’). Why do we call a particular object a ‘shoe’ or that large four-legged creature a ‘horse’? They could just as well be called something completely different (and, of course, they are called something completely different in other languages). But the unconscious imagistic gestural movements that we generate when we talk do not have this arbitrary relationship with the thing they are representing. The imagistic form of these gestures somehow captures certain aspects of the thing that they are representing (hence they are called ‘iconic’) and there is often a good deal of cross-cultural similarity in their actual form (as well as some important differences depending upon the structural features of the language).