The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

The special strengths of gesture are especially valuable in the effort to persuade or enlist others. Such movements visually place the gesturer at the center of the action, situating him at the locus of agency and control. When he talks, his words may describe or extol or explain—but when he gestures, he acts on the world (if only symbolically). At the same time, the gesturer’s motions render an abstract idea in human-scale, embodied terms, an act of translation that makes it easier for onlookers to mentally simulate the gesturer’s point of view for themselves. Perhaps most important, gesture generates the sense that an as yet immaterial enterprise is a palpable reality in the present moment. Using gesture in this way can confer an enormous advantage in the start-up world, one group of researchers notes, since “entrepreneurs are operating on the boundary of what is real and what is yet to happen.” That’s true for many of us, whether we’re offering projections for the next quarter, presenting a proposal for a project, or explaining why a change we’d like to make would be well advised. Gesture brings an uncertain future into the observable present, imbues it with a realness that we can almost touch.