Have you noticed that sometimes it is practically impossible to speak without simultaneously making hand gestures? A study from the University of Chicago (USA) suggests that, far from being an unimportant detail, these gestures give us a visual image of our own thoughts and can even change our way of thinking and help us solve problems faster . Specifically, the work, published in the journal Psychological Science , revealed that "when we gesture to explain an action we have to create an abstraction to explain it and represent it through movements of our hands."
In other words, according to the researchers, hand gestures make our thinking concrete , providing movement to the activity that occurs inside our heads. And that helps us better understand the concepts and modifies our way of thinking.
