Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought Book

Human thought is a kind of storytelling, the cognitive scientist Jerome Bruner has argued, an evolving narrative that we constantly and unconsciously construct in order to make sense of the world around us. One expression of that interior storytelling--namely language--was given to us, said the sardonic French philosopher Talleyrand, so that we can disguise those very thoughts, hide them from others behind a mask of words.

David McNeill suggests that another component of storytelling/thinking is a kind of parallel language, one that is far more revealing of what's going on inside our heads. That language is made up of gestures--those fingered jabs and sweeps into the air, locating us and our actors in the imaginary space of stories. When we relate what happened in a movie we've just seen, McNeill writes, we retrace the plot gesturally; our shrugs and symbols betray our opinions, and a skilled observer can literally read our minds from our movements.

Whereas most human languages have their grammars and dictionaries, McNeill continues, linguists have paid little attention to gestural language over the years. This may be, he suggests, because gestures are "idiosyncratic and not subject to a system of standards." They are, however, remarkably similar from person to person, and even from culture to culture. His endlessly interesting book hints at a new avenue of research, at new mysteries of the mind to explore. --Gregory McNamee