Research shows that we all engage in such “gestural foreshadowing,” in which our hands anticipate what we’re about to say. When we realize we’ve said something in error and we pause to go back to correct it, for example, we stop gesturing a couple of hundred milliseconds before we stop speaking. Such sequences suggest the startling notion that our hands “know” what we’re going to say before our conscious minds do, and in fact this is often the case.
