I'm Alan Olga and this is Clear In Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

Gesturing actually lightens your cognitive load. So if you gesture while expressing something

while doing a task, you actually have more effort left over to do the task than if you don't gesture.

So it's not at all clear to me. It's bad for you. I think it is cognitively quite good for you.

And it's certainly good for your listener, because it tells the listener all kinds of things about you.

That's Susan Golden Meadow. She spent decades studying the way we use our hands when we talk.

And she's made what to me is a surprising discovery that not only do gestures help our listeners understand us.

Gestures help us understand ourselves. They help us think. And as children, they even help us to learn.

This is really interesting to be talking with you because we've done a couple of hundred shows more.

And we've talked about communication so much. But this is an area of communication we haven't touched on.

And what gesture brings to it. And it turns out that it brings more than communication.

I love the story that you started early in the book with about Princess Diana.

I think it was getting lessons on how not to gesture. What was the point of that?

Well, I mean, she was really the gestureer. And she was going to tell her tale with her hands.

And her advisor just literally tied up her hands so she couldn't express herself.

Literally tied her hands.

The advisor thought that what she would express was emotion. But she didn't really think about the fact that Diana could express her ideas too.

Her thoughts with her hands. I think they would be equally worried about that. The royal family.

It's interesting. I guess if you're in the royal family business, you don't want people to know how you're feeling.

I think that's right.

It could be even more dangerous than for them to know what you're thinking.

Yes. And that's an interesting part of your book is how much we communicate, not generalize feelings only.

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