Thinking Tools: Gestures Change Thought About Time

Abstract

Our earliest tools are our bodies. Our hands raise and turn and toss and carry and push and pull, our legs walk and climb and kick allowing us to move and act in the world and to create the multitude of artifacts that improve our lives. The list of actions made by our hands and feet and other parts of our bodies is long. What is more remarkable is we turn those actions in the world into actions on thought through gestures, language, and graphics, thereby creating cognitive tools that expand the mind. The focus here is gesture; gestures transform actions on perceptible objects to actions on imagined thoughts, carrying meaning with them rapidly, precisely, and directly. We review evidence showing that gestures enhance our own thinking and change the thought of others. We illustrate the power of gestures in studies showing that gestures uniquely change conceptions of time, from sequential to simultaneous, from sequential to cyclical, and from a perspective embedded in a timeline to an external perspective looking on a timeline, and by so doing obviate the ambiguities of an embedded perspective. We draw parallels between representations in gesture and in graphics; both use marks or actions arrayed in space to communicate more immediately than symbolic language.

Editors' Introduction to Tasks, Tools, and Techniques

“…One group of contributors is dismayed by the state‐of‐the‐art in research on animal tool use and propose a very interesting reboot of that field (Colbourne, Auersperg, Lambert, Huber, & Volter, 2021). Another targets her report on “gestures as thinking tools” (Tversky, 2021). Lastly at the ultimate end of this list, the last paper we introduce here argues that our bodies are the ultimate tool (Rosenbaum, 2021) and that the key to understanding our use of more physical tools is to study the brain's control of the body.…”

Putting it Together, Together

“…Sketching thought benefits designers as they work (e.g., Goel, 1995; Goldschmidt, 2014; Tversky & Suwa, 2009) and students as they learn (Bobek & Tversky, 2016). Gestures share qualities with sketches, and they, too, have shown benefits to learning, thinking, and communicating both for those who make them and for those who see them in a broad range of situations (e.g., Bucciarelli, Mackiewicz, Khemlani, & Johnson‐Laird, 2016); Goldin‐Meadow, 2005, 2023; Jamalian, Giardino, & Tversky, 2013; Kang & Tversky, 2016; Tversky & Jamalian, 2021; Tversky & Kessell, 2014). For the most part, however, this work has been on individuals, not on people as they work together.…”

“They must have seen it, you know.” Body talk, extension talk, and action talk: A qualitative study on how palliative care patients and their significant others express experiencing these nonverbal cues

“…People sense and interpret both verbal and nonverbal expressions in their relationships with others, and when the two forms of expression are consistent, trust, clarity, and rapport increase [ 7 ]. Sometimes, nonverbal communication even represents our thoughts and emotions more effectively than verbal language, but they can also occur completely unconsciously and/or subliminally [ 14 , 15 ].…”

“…People sense and interpret both verbal and nonverbal expressions in their relationships with others, and when the two forms of expression are consistent, trust, clarity, and rapport increase [7]. Sometimes, nonverbal communication even represents our thoughts and emotions more effectively than verbal language, but they can also occur completely unconsciously and/or subliminally [14,15]. Some studies discuss nonverbal communication in healthcare contexts, but these primarily relate to communication between professionals and patients, where nonverbal communication has been found to play an important role in whether patients feel satisfied with their dialogue with hospital staff [3,6,9].…”