If you've ever caught yourself waving your hands around while trying to explain something complicated, you're not alone, and you're not just being dramatic. According to a study by Autumn Hostetter, Martha Alibali, and Sotaro Kita in Language and Cognitive Processes, hand gestures may do some cognitive work behind the scenes. They seem to help speakers to make a jumbled idea into something that can be said, rather than just adorn what we say.
This isn't a wellness-influencer theory. It’s a real lab study, and it gives us a rather specific glimpse into why our hands seem to have a mind of their own when we’re explaining something.
What the researchers actually did
Researchers recruited 24 university students from a psychology research pool and showed them patterns of dots on a laptop screen, but only for three seconds at a time. Some patterns had faint lines connecting the dots into obvious shapes, like a square or triangle. Others were simply scattered dots with no guide, so it was up to the participants to decide on their own how to group them mentally before describing them aloud into an audio recorder, assuming another participant would later listen to the recording and attempt to redraw the pattern. In fact, no one else ever heard it, only a silent, non-looking experimenter and a hidden video camera.
