Why do we gesture when talking on the phone? The neuroscientific explanation

Have you ever walked down the street and noticed someone fidgeting, smiling and waving their hands in the air while talking on the phone? Or maybe you’re the one gesturing during a phone call, walking up and down the room. It might seem like just a bizarre habit, but in reality something much deeper is hidden behind this behavior: our brain, in a certain sense, also think with your hands. Scientific research has studied this phenomenon in depth, revealing that our gestures are not a simple “ornament” communicative. When we speak, the movement of the hands helps the brain to organize thoughts, facilitating the search for words and the construction of sentences and is a fundamental and innate of social interaction.

Gesturing with our hands when we call helps the brain find words

Common intuition suggests that we gesture exclusively to convey a message to those who are watching us. However, numerous psychological studies demonstrate that hand movements are first and foremost a cognitive tool to the advantage of the speaker. According to a theory known as the “lexical gesture process model,” moving our hands actually helps us to recover the words stored in our memory, especially the less common ones, facilitating the so-called “lexical access”.

We’ve known this for a long time. A 1996 study looked at what happens when an individual gets it physically prevented from using his hands during a speech: his elocution becomes immediately less fluidcharacterized by frequent pauses, stammers and slowdowns, in particular when it has to recall and describe spatial concepts or contents. Furthermore, it turned out that gestures help unpack and organize the complex ones mentally information visuo-spatial into simpler units, making them compatible with the sequential and linear nature of spoken language. Even when it comes to explaining complex ideas, when the words we use every day are not enough, our hands come to the rescue, significantly lightening the cognitive load on the mind. This is why, even if we are alone in a room with our smartphone to our ear, our brain “uses” our hands to think and speak better.

The invisible power of social dialogue

However, this cognitive explanation does not exhaust the mystery. Research has isolated i two main factors of communication: visibility (being able to see each other) e the dialogue (spontaneously interacting with another person). An experiment conducted by the University of Victoria divided participants into three groupsasking each person to describe a very elaborate dress: the first group spoke face to face, the second on the telephone, and the third recorded a monologue addressed to a simple voice recorder. The results unequivocally demonstrated that just being in a dialogue has a direct effect on the frequency of gesturescompletely independent of being able to look each other in the eyes. Although the lack of eye contact minimally reduces the amount of movement, people on the phone gestured at an incredibly higher rate than people talking to themselves into a microphone. Being involved in genuine social interaction automatically stimulates our body to express itself.

However, the brain very subtly adapts the type of gesture to the context. Face to facethe speakers perform broad gestures“life-size,” using one’s body to describe an object and enacting a strong mimicry interactive direct to the listener. On the phoneinstead, the mind unconsciously recognizes the visual absence of the partner: gestures become noticeably smalleralmost miniature, and the purely interactive ones drop dramatically. In short, telephone gestures are not a coincidence or a simple out-of-place habit, but a refined and very precise adaptation to a conversation devoid of visibility.

Hands that move as we speak: an innate instinct rooted in language

The profound interconnection between the words we speak and the hands that move is an inseparable trait of human nature. Just think about that people blind from birthwho have never been able to observe, let alone imitate, the gestures of others, they gesture regularly while speakingeven when they communicate with other blind individuals who will never be able to grasp their movements. This incredible fact demonstrates that gesture is not a mere learned visual cultural convention, but is biologically rooted in the very process of speech. According to scholars, as reported in a 2009 paper, gesture and speech form a single integrated system from the beginning, an indivisible unit of thought in which the visual-spatial component and the purely linguistic one proceed inextricably hand in hand, so much so that there are many clues that suggest that language was bornevolutionarily speaking, right from the gestures.