Hand Gestures to Enhance Workplace Thinking
Tuesday, February 8th, 2011
New psychological research shows that encouraging the use of hand gestures improves spatial visualization. When trying to mentally manipulate an object, using hands to “see” the shape and behavior of the object improves our ability to make judgments and learn.
We have known about this in science education for a while. For example, in my physics classes I always teach specific hand gestures and pencil gestures to use to think clearly about forces, fields and vectors.
This finding has clear implications for teaching in every field (e.g. design) and thinking in the workplace. Hand gestures are natural and spontaneous but are sometimes discouraged in more formal workplaces. We often teach people to minimize the use of their hands during presentations. This finding suggest it might be far more effective for both speaker and listener to learn to use topic-specific hand gestures, especially when mental or spatial visualization is required.
Interested to hear from readers that have specific hand gestures they use individually or in groups to stimulate thinking.
