- Mar 2023
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Paul, Annie Murphy. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021, https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/The-Extended-Mind/9780544947580.
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- Apr 2022
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The way technologies like fMRI are applied is aproduct of our brainbound orientation; it has not seemed odd or unusual toexamine the individual brain on its own, unconnected to others.
In part because of modalities of studying the brain using methods like fMRI where the images are of an individual's head, we focus too much and too exclusively on single brains bound to individuals rather than on brains working in concert.
Greater flexibilities in tools and methods should help do studies of humans working in concert.
Link this to the anecdote:
I recall a radiology test within a medical school setting in which students were asked to diagnose an x-ray of a human patient's skull. Most either guessed small hairline fractures in the skull or that there was nothing wrong with the patient.
Can you diagnose the patient?
Almost all the students failed the question, and worse felt like idiots when the answer was revealed: the patient must be dead because the spinal column and the rest of the body are not attached. Compare:
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the brain stores social information differently thanit stores information that is non-social. Social memories are encoded in a distinctregion of the brain. What’s more, we remember social information moreaccurately, a phenomenon that psychologists call the “social encodingadvantage.” If findings like this feel unexpected, that’s because our culturelargely excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect. Socialexchanges with others might be enjoyable or entertaining, this attitude holds, butthey’re no more than a diversion, what we do around the edges of school orwork. Serious thinking, real thinking, is done on one’s own, sequestered fromothers.
"Social encoding advantage" is what psychologists refer to as the phenomenon of people remembering social information more accurately than other types.
Reference to read: “social encoding advantage”: Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown, 2013), 284.
It's likely that the social acts of learning and information exchange in oral societies had an additional stickiness over and beyond the additional mnemonic methods they would have used as a base.
The Western cultural tradition doesn't value the social coding advantage because it "excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect" (Paul, 2021). Instead it provides advantage and status to the individual thinking on their own. We greatly prefer the idea of the "lone genius" toiling on their own, when this is hardly ever the case. Our availability bias often leads us to believe it is the case because we can pull out so many famous examples, though in almost all cases these geniuses were riding on the shoulders of giants.
Reference to read: remember social information more accurately: Jason P. Mitchell, C. Neil Macrae, and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Encoding-Specific Effects of Social Cognition on the Neural Correlates of Subsequent Memory,” Journal of Neuroscience 24 (May 2004): 4912–17
Reference to read: the brain stores social information: Jason P. Mitchell et al., “Thinking About Others: The Neural Substrates of Social Cognition,” in Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About Thinking People, ed. Karen T. Litfin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 63–82.
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solo thinking isrooted in our lifelong experience of social interaction; linguists and cognitivescientists theorize that the constant patter we carry on in our heads is a kind ofinternalized conversation. Our brains evolved to think with people: to teachthem, to argue with them, to exchange stories with them. Human thought isexquisitely sensitive to context, and one of the most powerful contexts of all isthe presence of other people. As a consequence, when we think socially, wethink differently—and often better—than when we think non-socially.
People have evolved as social animals and this extends to thinking and interacting. We think better when we think socially (in groups) as opposed to thinking alone.
This in part may be why solo reading and annotating improves one's thinking because it is a form of social annotation between the lone annotator and the author. Actual social annotation amongst groups may add additonal power to this method.
I personally annotate alone, though I typically do so in a publicly discoverable fashion within Hypothes.is. While the audience of my annotations may be exceedingly low, there is at least a perceived public for my output. Thus my thinking, though done alone, is accelerated and improved by the potential social context in which it's done. (Hello, dear reader! 🥰) I can artificially take advantage of the social learning effects even if the social circle may mathematically approach the limit of an audience of one (me).
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the development of intelligent thinking is fundamentally a social process
great quote
How can social annotation practices take advantage of these sorts of active learning processes? What might be done in a flipped classroom setting to get students to use social annotation on a text prior to a lecture and have the questions and ideas from these sessions brought into the lecture space for discussion, argument, and expansion?
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Researchdemonstrates that students who engage in active learning acquire a deeperunderstanding of the material, score higher on exams, and are less likely to failor drop out.
Active learning is a pedagogical structure whereby a teacher presents a problem to a group of students and has them (usually in smaller groups) collectively work on the solutions together. By talking and arguing amongst themselves they actively learn together not only how to approach problems, but to come up with their own solutions. Teachers can then show the correct answer, discuss why it was right and explain how the alternate approaches may have gone wrong. Research indicates that this approach helps provide a deeper understanding of the materials presented this way, that students score higher on exams and are less likely to either fail or drop out of these courses.
Active learning sounds very similar to the sorts of approaches found in flipped classrooms. Is the overlap between the two approaches the same, or are there parts of the Venn diagrams of the two that differ, and, if so, how do they differ? Which portions are more beneficial?
Does this sort of active learning approach also help to guard against "group think" as the result of comparing solutions from various groups? How might this be applied to democracy? Would separate versions of committees that then convene to compare notes and come up with solutions improve the quality of solutions?
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In an ever-increasing sphere of digital print, why can't publishers provide readers a digitally programmed selection of footnote references in texts?
This digital version of Annie Murphy Paul's book has endnotes with links from the endnotes back to the original pages, but the opposite links from the reading don't go to the endnotes in an obvious way.
I'd love to be able to turn on/off a variety of footnote options so that I can see them on the pages they appear, as pop up modals, or browse through them in the end notes after-the-fact as I choose. This would allow me to have more choice and selection from a text based on what I want to get out of it rather than relying on a publisher to make that choice for me.
Often in publishing a text written for the broad public will "hide" the footnotes at the end of the text in unintuitive ways where as more scholarly presses will place them closer to their appearance within the text. Given the digital nature of texts, it should be possible to allow the reader to choose where these items appear to suit their reading styles.
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A 2019 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy ofSciences supports Wieman’s hunch. Tracking the intellectual advancement ofseveral hundred graduate students in the sciences over the course of four years,its authors found that the development of crucial skills such as generatinghypotheses, designing experiments, and analyzing data was closely related to thestudents’ engagement with their peers in the lab, and not to the guidance theyreceived from their faculty mentors.
Learning has been shown to be linked to engagement with peers in social situations over guidance from faculty mentors.
Cross reference: David F. Feldon et al., “Postdocs’ Lab Engagement Predicts Trajectories of PhD Students’ Skill Development,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116 (October 2019): 20910–16
Are there areas where this is not the case? Are there areas where this is more the case than not?
Is it our evolution as social animals that has heightened this effect? How could this be shown? (Link this to prior note about social evolution.)
Is it the ability to scaffold out questions and answers and find their way by slowly building up experience with each other that facilitates this effect?
Could this effect be seen in annotating texts as well? If one's annotations become a conversation with the author, is there a learning benefit even when the author can't respond? By trying out writing about one's understanding of a text and seeing where the gaps are and then revisiting the text to fill them in, do we gain this same sort of peer engagement? How can we encourage students to ask questions to the author and/or themselves in the margins? How can we encourage them to further think about and explore these questions? Answer these questions over time?
A key part of the solution is not just writing the annotations down in the first place, but keeping them, reviewing over them, linking them together, revisiting them and slowly providing answers and building solutions for both themselves and, by writing them down, hopefully for others as well.
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Researchers are also experimenting with “haptic” signals: physical nudgesdelivered via special gloves or tools that help mold a novice’s movementpatterns into those of an expert.
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Research has shown that,across disciplines, experts look in ways different from novices: they take in thebig picture more rapidly and completely, while focusing on the most importantaspects of the scene; they’re less distracted by visual “noise,” and they shiftmore easily among visual fields, avoiding getting stuck.
Experts have more practiced levels of visual perception of surroundings that provide them with information more quickly than novices who don't yet know what or where to focus their attention. Teaching with eye tracking technology might help to bridge the gap between novice and expert more quickly.
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Wine experts, meanwhile, know about surface-level characteristics like grapesand regions—but they think about wine in terms of function: wines that areluscious and fruity, good for pairing with spicy food; wines that are big and boldand can stand up to a hearty meal; wines that are fizzy and festive, fit for acelebration. “Luscious,” “Big,” and “Fizzy” are, in fact, three of the eightcategories Wesson devised for his stores (the others are “Soft,” “Fresh,” “Juicy,”“Smooth,” and “Sweet”).
As an example of deep functional classification by experts, sommelier Joshua Wesson uses the functional categories luscious, big, fizzy, soft, fresh, juicy, smooth, and sweet to describe wines for customers rather than using the more straightforward and surface level grape varietal descriptors that are otherwise used to categorize wines in stores. These higher level functional classifications also assist in choosing a wine for pairing far more subtly than the extraneous grape types and regions which may carry little informational value to wine novices.
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A third difference between experts and novices lies in the way they categorizewhat they see: novices sort the entities they encounter according to theirsuperficial features, while experts classify them according to their deep function.
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a phenomenon that psychologists call “thecaricature advantage”: the fact that we recognize a caricatured face even morereadily than we recognize a true-to-life depiction. While a caricature does distortits subject’s actual appearance, it does so in a systematic way, exaggerating whatis unique or distinctive about that individual—thereby making him or her evenmore instantly identifiable.
Exaggerating the features of people and objects in systematic ways helps people to more easily assimilate both knowledge about them as well as the ability to distinguish between them in an effect which psychologists call the "caricature advantage."
Link this to using caricature as a mnemonic technique for strengthening one's memory of objects and people.
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But reenacting the experience of being a novice need not be so literal; expertscan generate empathy for the beginner through acts of the imagination, changingthe way they present information accordingly. An example: experts habituallyengage in “chunking,” or compressing several tasks into one mental unit. Thisfrees up space in the expert’s working memory, but it often baffles the novice,for whom each step is new and still imperfectly understood. A math teacher mayspeed through an explanation of long division, not remembering or recognizingthat the procedures that now seem so obvious were once utterly inscrutable.Math education expert John Mighton has a suggestion: break it down into steps,then break it down again—into micro-steps, if necessary.
When teaching novices, experts utilize chunking, or breaking up an idea into smaller units. While this may help free up cognitive space from the expert's point of view it exhibits a lack of empathy for the novice who may need expert-sized chunks broken down into micro-sized chunks which are more appropriate to their beginner status.
While the benefits of chunking can be useful to both sets of participants, the sizes of the chunks need to be relative to one's prior experience to leverage their benefit.
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instructors and experts must also become more legible models. This can beaccomplished through what philosopher Karsten Stueber calls “re-enactiveempathy”: an appreciation of the challenges confronting the novice that isproduced by reenacting what it was like to have once been a beginner oneself.
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Our systems of academic education and workplace training rely on expertsteaching novices, but they rarely take into account the blind spots that expertsacquire by virtue of being experts.
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Kenneth Koedinger, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and thedirector of its Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, estimates that experts areable to articulate only about 30 percent of what they know.
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As Smith notes, the emulation of model texts was once a standard feature ofinstruction in legal writing; it fell out of favor because of concern that thepractice would fail to foster a capacity for independent thinking. The carefulobservation of how students actually learn, informed by research on the role ofcognitive load, may be bringing models back into fashion.
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In the course of teaching hundredsof first-year law students, Monte Smith, a professor and dean at Ohio StateUniversity’s law school, grew increasingly puzzled by the seeming inability ofhis bright, hardworking students to absorb basic tenets of legal thinking and toapply them in writing. He came to believe that the manner of his instruction wasdemanding more from them than their mental bandwidth would allow. Studentswere being asked to employ a whole new vocabulary and a whole new suite ofconcepts, even as they were attempting to write in an unaccustomed style and anunaccustomed form. It was too much, and they had too few mental resources leftover to actually learn.
This same analogy also works in advanced mathematics courses where students are often learning dense and technical vocabulary and then moments later applying it directly to even more technical ideas and proofs.
How might this sort of solution from law school be applied to abstract mathematics?
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This act of imitation relieves students of some of theirmental burden, Robinson notes, allowing them to devote the bulk of theircognitive bandwidth to the content of the assignment
By providing students solid examples of work that is expected of them they can more easily imitate the examples which frees up cognitive bandwidth so that they can focus their time and attention on creating their own content related to particular assignments.
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One of the field’sleading textbooks was authored by literature scholar Edward P. J. Corbett, whonever relinquished the notion that emulating the work of the masters was the firststep toward developing one’s own distinctive style. “Imitate, that you may bedifferent!” Corbett thundered.
Literature scholar Edward P.J. Corbett used to command "Imitate, that you may be different!" While his rhetoric and composition textbook may have encouraged students to emulate the masters, this pattern goes back to ancient Greek rhetoricians who also admonished
Link to rhetoric examples in antiquity. Link to the Finding Forrester example.
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Seeing examples of outstanding work motivates students by givingthem a vision of the possible. How can we expect students to produce first-ratework, he asks, when they have no idea what first-rate work looks like?
Showing students examples of work and processes that they can imitate will fuel their imaginations and capabilities rather than stifle them.
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In studies comparing European American children withMayan children from Guatemala, psychologists Maricela Correa-Chávez andBarbara Rogoff asked children from each culture to wait while an adultperformed a demonstration—folding an origami shape—for another childnearby. The Mayan youth paid far more sustained attention to the demonstration—and therefore learned more—than the American kids, who were oftendistracted or inattentive. Correa-Chávez and Rogoff note that in Mayan homes,children are encouraged to carefully observe older family members so that theycan learn how to carry out the tasks of the household, even at very young ages.
American children aren't encouraged to as attentive imitators as their foreign counterparts and this can effect their learning processes.
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why do weclap at the end of a performance
I can anecdotally confirm that my two year old used to imitate clapping at the end of songs on the radio because of what she'd seen us do in the past.
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Humans’ tendency to“overimitate”—to reproduce even the gratuitous elements of another’s behavior—may operate on a copy now, understand later basis. After all, there might begood reasons for such steps that the novice does not yet grasp, especially sinceso many human tools and practices are “cognitively opaque”: not self-explanatory on their face. Even if there doesn’t turn out to be a functionalrationale for the actions taken, imitating the customs of one’s culture is a smartmove for a highly social species like our own.
Research has shown that humans are "high-fidelity" imitators to the point of overimitation. It's possible that as an evolved and highly social species that imitation signals acceptance and participation by members of the society such that even "cognitively opaque" practices will be blindly followed.
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Humans’ tendency to“overimitate”—to reproduce even the gratuitous elements of another’s behavior—may operate on a copy now, understand later basis. After all, there might begood reasons for such steps that the novice does not yet grasp, especially sinceso many human tools and practices are “cognitively opaque”: not self-explanatory on their face. Even if there doesn’t turn out to be a functionalrationale for the actions taken, imitating the customs of one’s culture is a smartmove for a highly social species like our own.
Is this responsible for some of the "group think" seen in the Republican party and the political right? Imitation of bad or counter-intuitive actions outweights scientifically proven better actions? Examples: anti-vaxxers and coronavirus no-masker behaviors? (Some of this may also be about or even entangled with George Lakoff's (?) tribal identity theories relating to "people like me".
Explore this area more deeply.
Another contributing factor for this effect may be the small-town effect as most Republican party members are in the countryside (as opposed to the larger cities which tend to be more Democratic). City dwellers are more likely to be more insular in their interpersonal relations whereas country dwellers may have more social ties to other people and groups and therefor make them more tribal in their social interrelationships. Can I find data to back up this claim?
How does link to the thesis put forward by Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous? Does Henrich have data about city dwellers to back up my claim above?
What does this tension have to do with the increasing (and potentially evolutionary) propensity of humans to live in ever-increasingly larger and more dense cities versus maintaining their smaller historic numbers prior to the pre-agricultural timeperiod?
What are the biological effects on human evolution as a result of these cultural pressures? Certainly our cultural evolution is effecting our biological evolution?
What about the effects of communication media on our cultural and biological evolution? Memes, orality versus literacy, film, radio, television, etc.? Can we tease out these effects within the socio-politico-cultural sphere on the greater span of humanity? Can we find breaks, signs, or symptoms at the border of mass agriculture?
total aside, though related to evolution: link hypercycles to evolution spirals?
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While it was once regarded as a low-level, “primitive” instinct, researchers arecoming to recognize that imitation—at least as practiced by humans, includingvery young ones—is a complex and sophisticated capacity. Although non-humananimals do imitate, their mimicry differs in important ways from ours. Forexample, young humans’ copying is unique in that children are quite selectiveabout whom they choose to imitate. Even preschoolers prefer to imitate peoplewho have shown themselves to be knowledgeable and competent. Researchshows that while toddlers will choose to copy their mothers rather than a personthey’ve just met, as children grow older they become increasingly willing tocopy a stranger if the stranger appears to have special expertise. By the time achild reaches age seven, Mom no longer knows best.
Studies have shown that humans are highly selective about whom they choose to imitate. Children up to age seven show a propensity to imitate their parents over strangers and after that they primarily imitate people who have shown themselves to be knowledgeable and competent within an area of expertise.
This has applications to teaching with respect to math shaming. A teacher who says that math is personally hard for them is likely to be signaling to students that what they're teaching is not based on experience and expertise and thus demotivating the student from following and imitating their example.
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three steps required to solve the all-importantcorrespondence problem. Step one, according to Shenkar: specify one’s ownproblem and identify an analogous problem that has been solved successfully.Step two: rigorously analyze why the solution is successful. Jobs and hisengineers at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, immediately got towork deconstructing the marvels they’d seen at the Xerox facility. Soon theywere on to the third and most challenging step: identify how one’s owncircumstances differ, then figure out how to adapt the original solution to thenew setting.
Oded Shenkar's three step process for effective problem solving using imitation: - Step 1. Specify your problem and identify an analogous problem that has been successfully solved. - Step 2. Analyze why the solution was successful. - Step 3. Identify how your problem and circumstances differ from the example problem and figure out how to best and most appropriately adapt the original solution to the new context.
The last step may be the most difficult.
The IndieWeb broadly uses the idea of imitation to work on and solve a variety of different web design problems. By focusing on imitation they dramatically decrease the work and effort involved in building a website. The work involved in creating new innovative solutions even in their space has been much harder, but there, they imitate others in breaking the problems down into the smallest constituent parts and getting things working there.
Link this to the idea of "leading by example".
Link to "reinventing the wheel" -- the difficulty of innovation can be more clearly seen in the process of people reinventing the wheel for themselves when they might have simply imitated a more refined idea. Searching the state space of potential solutions can be an arduous task.
Link to "paving cow paths", which is a part of formalizing or crystalizing pre-tested solutions.
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Shenkar wouldlike to see students in business schools and other graduate programs taking
courses on effective imitation.
If imitation is so effective, what would teaching imitation to students look like in a variety of settings including, academia, business, and other areas?
Is teaching by way of imitation the best method for the majority of students? Are there ways to test this versus other methods for broad effectiveness?
How can we better leverage imitation in teaching for application to the real world?
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In her 2002 dissertation, and then in a series of articles published in medicaljournals, Pape made a case for imitating this practice. “The key to preventingmedication errors lies with adopting protocols from other safety-focusedindustries,” Pape wrote in the journal MEDSURG Nursing in 2003. “The airlineindustry, for example, has methods in place that improve pilots’ focus andprovide a milieu of safety when human life is at stake.”
In a 2002 dissertation and subsequent articles, Tess Pape proposed imitating solutions proposed by the FAA in airline accidents as a means of limiting distractions during medicine dispensing by nurses and medical staff to limit preventable medical errors.
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aviation experts haddevised a solution to the problem of pilot interruption: the “sterile cockpit rule.”Instituted by the Federal Aviation Administration in 1981, the rule forbids pilotsfrom engaging in conversation unrelated to the immediate business of flyingwhen the plane is below ten thousand feet.
The "sterile cockpit rule" was instituted by the FAA in 1981 as a solution to cut down on the high proportion of airborne accidents during take-off and landing. The rule forbids pilots from engaging in any conversations unrelated to the flight of the plane, which has the effect of removing any distracting stimuli which may otherwise cascade into an accident.
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the Institute of Medicine had released a landmark report on patientsafety, To Err Is Human. The report found that as many as 98,000 Americanswere dying each year as a result of preventable medical errors occurring inhospitals—more people than succumbed to car accidents, workplace injuries, orbreast cancer. And some significant portion of these deaths involved mistakes inthe dispensing of drugs.
Some might see the 98,000 preventable medical error deaths reported by the Institute of Medicine in To Err is Human (1999) now and laugh at the farcical number of deaths due to coronavirus since 2020, a large proportion of which could have been prevented due to better communication and coordination?
What if a more pragmatic anthropological viewpoint could be given to the current fractured state of American politics? If anthropologists are taught not to make value judgements on the way other cultures have come to live their lives, but simply to appreciate and report on them accurately, then perhaps we should leave those on the far right who believe in top down, patriarchal rule to their devices?
What if we nudged (forced) them all to actually live by their own rules by enforcing them to the nth degree? Republican politicians can only get away with badmouthing abortion or homophobic viewpoints because their feet are not held to the fire when those issues impinge upon their own families or even themselves. They have the wealth and the power to flout the laws and not face the direct consequences personally. Would their tunes change if forced by their own top down patriarchal perspectives applying to them?
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It’s paradoxical but true: imitating well demands a considerable degree ofcreativity.
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Researchshows that the imitator’s costs are typically 60 to 75 percent of those borne by
the innovator—and yet it is the imitator who consistently captures the lion’s share of financial returns.
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Jan-Michael Ross and Dmitry Sharapov, both business professors at ImperialCollege London, studied the competitive interactions among yachts engaged inhead-to-head races in the America’s Cup World Series. The researchers foundthat sailors often engaged in “covering,” or copying, the moves made by theirrivals—especially when their boat was in the lead. It might seem surprising thatsailors at the front of the pack would imitate those who are trailing, but Rossnotes that such emulation makes sense: as long as the leaders do as their rivalsbehind them do, their lead will remain locked in place. Says Ross, “Our researchchallenges the common view that it’s only the laggards, the also-rans, whoimitate.”
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Fourth, imitators are able to avoid being swayed by deception or secrecy: byworking directly off of what others do, copiers get access to the best strategies inothers’ repertoires. Competitors have no choice but to display what socialscientists call “honest signals,” as they make decisions for themselves based ontheir own best interests.
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Gerard Tellis and Peter Golder, both professors of marketing, conducted ahistorical analysis of fifty consumer product categories (including diapers, fromwhich the Pampers versus Chux example was taken). Their results showed thatthe failure rate of “market pioneers” is an alarming 47 percent, while the meanmarket share they capture is only 10 percent. Far better than being first, Tellisand Golder concluded, is being what some have called a “fast second”: an agileimitator. Companies that capitalize on others’ innovations have “a minimalfailure rate” and “an average market share almost three times that of marketpioneers,” they found. In this category they include Timex, Gillette, and Ford,firms that are often recalled—wrongly—as being first in their field.
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Under the Romantics’ influence, imitation did not merely become less favoredthan previously. It came to be actively disdained and disparaged—an attitudethat was carried forward into succeeding decades. The naturalists of the latenineteenth century described imitation as the habit of children, women, and“savages,” and held up original expression as the preserve of European men.Innovation climbed to the top of the cultural value system, while imitation sankto an unaccustomed low.
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The third advantage of imitation: copiers can evade mistakes by steering clearof the errors made by others who went before them, while innovators have nosuch guide to potential pitfalls.
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Second: imitators can draw from a wide variety of solutions instead of beingtied to just one.
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An individual whosimply buys what Buffett is buying, the researchers found, will earn an averageof more than 10 percent above market returns.
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by copying others, imitators allow other individuals to act asfilters, efficiently sorting through available options.
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Researchers from thesevaried disciplines are using models and simulations, as well as historicalanalyses and real-world case studies, to show that imitation is often the mostefficient and effective route to successful performance.
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As for which strategy worked best, there was really no contest: copying wasfar and away the most successful approach. The winning entry exclusivelycopied others—it never innovated. By comparison, a player-bot whose strategyrelied almost entirely on innovation finished ninety-fifth out of the one hundredcontestants.
Kevin N. Laland, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 50.
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In his illuminated bookJerusalem, Los—Blake’s alter ego—voiced a sentiment that might have servedas the Romantics’ motto. “I must create a system,” Blake’s character declared, orelse “be enslav’d by another man’s.”
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imitation more generally. Emmanuel Roze hasfound that the experience of imitating patients makes the young doctors he trainsmore empathetic
Imitation can potentially help one become more empathetic.
Is there a relationship between this effect and one's mirror neurons?
Donald J. Trump is well known for is sad impersonation of impaired and disabled people. Obviously he has no empathy for them and it's unlikely that his re-enactments will create empathy for him. Is this a result of a neurological deficit on his part?
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Researchers have demonstrated, for instance, that intentionallyimitating someone’s accent allows us to comprehend more easily the words theperson is speaking (a finding that might readily be applied to second-languagelearning).
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And indeed, a study conducted by Roze and his colleagues found that two anda half years after their neurological rotation, medical students who hadparticipated in the miming program recalled neurological signs and symptomsmuch better than students who had received only conventional instructioncentered on lectures and textbooks. Medical students who had simulated theirpatients’ symptoms also reported that the experience deepened theirunderstanding of neurological illness and increased their motivation to learnabout it.
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Imitating such forms with one’sown face and body is an even more effective means of learning, maintainsEmmanuel Roze, who introduced his “mime-based role-play training program”to the students at Pitié-Salpêtrière in 2015. Roze, a consulting neurologist at thehospital and a professor of neurology at Sorbonne University, had becomeconcerned that traditional modes of instruction were not supporting students’acquisition of knowledge, and were not dispelling students’ apprehension in theface of neurological illness. He reasoned that actively imitating the distinctivesymptoms of such maladies—the tremors of Parkinson’s, the jerky movementsof chorea, the slurred speech of cerebellar syndrome—could help students learnwhile defusing their discomfort.
Training students to be able to imitate the symptoms of disease so that they may demonstrate them to others is an effective form of context shifting. It allows the students to shift from a written or spoken description of the disease to a physical interpretation of it for themselves which also entails more cognitive work than even seeing a particular patient with the problem and identifying it correctly. The need to mentally internalize the issue and then physically recreate it helps in the acquisition of the knowledge.
Role playing or putting oneself into the shoes of another is another good example of creating a mental shift in context.
Getting medical students to play out the symptoms of patients can help to diffuse their social discomfort in dealing with these patients.
If this practice were used on broader scales might it also help to normalize issues that patients face and dispel social stigma toward them?
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Jean-Martin Charcot, the nineteenth-century physician known as the father ofneurology, practiced and taught at this very institution. Charcot brought hispatients onstage with him as he lectured, allowing his students to see firsthandthe many forms neurological disease could take
Nineteenth-century physician Jean-Martin Charcot, known as the father of neurology, brought patients to his lectures at Universitaire Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris to allow students to see forms of disease first hand.
When was the medical teaching practice of "rounds" instituted?
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if weare to extend our thinking with others’ expertise, we must find better ways ofeffecting an accurate transfer of knowledge from one mind to another.
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In these sessions, students didn’t listen to a description ofcomputer science concepts, or engage in a discussion about the work performedby computer scientists; they actually did the work themselves, under the tutors’close supervision.
The process seen in cognitive apprenticeships seems more akin to the sorts of knowledge transfer done in primary oral indigenous cultures by passing down stories and performing (song, dance, art, etc.) knowledge.
It shouldn't be surprising that cognitive apprenticeships work well given their general use by oral cultures over millennia.
link to: Writing out answers will show gaps in knowledge Performing actions will show gaps in knowledge
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crucial difference between traditional apprenticeships and modern schooling: inthe former, “learners can see the processes of work,” while in the latter, “theprocesses of thinking are often invisible to both the students and the teacher.”Collins and his coauthors identified four features of apprenticeship that could beadapted to the demands of knowledge work: modeling, or demonstrating the taskwhile explaining it aloud; scaffolding, or structuring an opportunity for thelearner to try the task herself; fading, or gradually withdrawing guidance as thelearner becomes more proficient; and coaching, or helping the learner throughdifficulties along the way.
This is what’s known as a cognitive apprenticeship, a term coined by Allan Collins, now a professor emeritus of education at Northwestern University. In a 1991 article written with John Seely Brown and Ann Holum, Collins noted a
In a traditional apprenticeship, a learner watches and is able to imitate the master process and work. In a cognitive apprenticeship the process of thinking is generally invisible to both the apprentice and the teacher. The problem becomes how to make the thinking processes more tangible and visible to the learner.
Allan Collins, John Seely Brown, and Ann Holum identified four pedagogical methods in apprenticeships that can also be applied to cognitive apprenticeships: - modeling: demonstrating a task while focusing on describing and explaining the steps and general thinking about the problem out loud - scaffolding: structuring a task to encourage and allow the learner the ability to try it themself - fading: as the learner gains facility and confidence in the process, gradually removing the teacher's guidance - coaching: as necessary, the teacher provides tips and suggestions to the learner to prompt them through potential difficulties
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- Mar 2022
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Hands can be a prompt, a window, a way station—butwhat they ought never have to be is still.
Missing reference in this chapter on encouraging gestures as a tool for thought: "idle hands are the devil's workshop".
Could the Bible have been encouraging the use of one's hands for communication??
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To signify that an angle is acute, Jeffreys taught them, “make Pac-Man withyour arms.” To signify that it is obtuse, “spread out your arms like you’re goingto hug someone.” And to signify a right angle, “flex an arm like you’re showingoff your muscle.” For addition, bring two hands together; for division, make akarate chop; to find the area of a shape, “motion as if you’re using your hand asa knife to butter bread.”
Math teacher Brendan Jeffreys from the Auburn school district in Auburn, WA created simple hand gestures to accompany or replace mathematical terms. Examples included making a Pac-Man shape with one's arms to describe an acute angle, spreading one's arms wide as if to hug someone to indicate an obtuse angle, or flexing your arm to show your muscles to indicate a right triangle. Other examples included a karate chop to indicate division or a motion imitating using a knife to butter bread to indicate finding the area of a shape.
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Washington State mathteacher Brendan Jeffreys turned to gesture as a way of easing the mental loadcarried by his students, many of whom come from low-income households,speak English as a second language, or both. “Academic language—vocabularyterms like ‘congruent’ and ‘equivalent’ and ‘quotient’—is not something mystudents hear in their homes, by and large,” says Jeffreys, who works for theAuburn School District in Auburn, a small city south of Seattle. “I could see thatmy kids were stumbling over those words even as they were trying to keep trackof the numbers and perform the mathematical operations.” So Jeffreys devised aset of simple hand gestures to accompany, or even temporarily replace, theunfamiliar terms that taxed his students’ ability to carry out mental math.
Mathematics can often be more difficult compared to other subjects as students learning new concepts are forced not only to understand entirely new concepts, but simultaneously are required to know new vocabulary to describe those concepts. Utilizing gestures to help lighten the cognitive load of the new vocabulary to allow students to focus on the concepts and operations can be invaluable.
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A familiar example ofsuch offloading is the way young children count on their fingers when workingout a math problem. Their fingers “hold” an intermediate sum so that their mindsare free to think about the mathematical operation they must execute (addition,subtraction) to reach the final answer.
Children counting on their fingers is an example of offloading cognitive load by using proprioception.
Different cultures use different finger sequences (particularly for the number 3) for counting up.
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designed gestures can lighten our mentalload.
Designed (or intentional) gestures can function to lighten the cognitive load of teaching by engaging multiple pathways simultaneously.
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Evaluations of the platform show that users who follow the avatar inmaking a gesture achieve more lasting learning than those who simply hear theword. Gesturing students also learn more than those who observe the gesture butdon’t enact it themselves.
Manuela Macedonia's research indicates that online learners who enact specific gestures as they learn words learn better and have longer retention versus simply hearing words. Students who mimic these gestures also learn better than those who only see the gestures and don't use them themselves.
How might this sort of teacher/avatar gesturing be integrated into online methods? How would students be encouraged to follow along?
Could these be integrated into different background settings as well to take advantage of visual memory?
Anecdotally, I remember some Welsh phrases from having watched Aran Jones interact with his cat outside on video or his lip syncing in the empty spaces requiring student responses. Watching the teachers lips while learning can be highly helpful as well.
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In a study published in 2020, for example, Macedonia and a group of sixcoauthors compared study participants who had paired new foreign-languagewords with gestures to those who had paired the learning of new words withimages of those words. The researchers found evidence that the motor cortex—the area of the brain that controls bodily movement—was activated in thegesturing group when they reencountered the vocabulary words they hadlearned; in the picture-viewing group, the motor cortex remained dormant. The“sensorimotor enrichment” generated by gesturing, Macedonia and hercoauthors suggest, helps to make the associated word more memorable
Manuela Macedonia and co-authors found that pairing new foreign words with gestures created activity in the motor cortex which helped to improve the associative memory for the words and the movements. Using images of the words did not create the same motor cortex involvement.
It's not clear which method of association is better, at least as written in The Extended Mind. Was one better than the other? Were they tested separately, together, and in a control group without either? Surely one would suspect that using both methods together would be most beneficial.
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the use of gestures to enhance verbal memory during foreign-language encoding.
Manuela Macedonia wrote her Ph.D. thesis on the use of gestures to enhance verbal memory for language acquisition.
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Back then, Macedonia foundherself increasingly frustrated with the conventional format of foreign-languagecourses: a lot of sitting, listening, and writing. That’s not how anyone learnstheir native language, she notes. Young children encounter new words in a richsensorimotor context: as they hear the word “apple,” they see and touch theshiny red fruit; they may even bring it to their mouth, tasting its sweet flesh andsmelling its crisp scent. All of these many hooks for memory are missing fromthe second-language classroom.
Most foreign language leaners spend all their time in classrooms or at home sitting down, listening, reading, and writing. This is antithetical to how children acquire language in more natural settings where they're able to move around, interact, taste, touch, smell, etc. as they learn new words in their language. These additional sensory mnemonic techniques add an incredible amount of information and associative hooks to help them remember new words and grammatical structures.
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Kerry Ann Dickson, an associate professor of anatomy and cell biology atVictoria University in Australia, makes use of all three of these hooks when sheteaches. Instead of memorizing dry lists of body parts and systems, her studentspractice pretending to cry (the gesture that corresponds to the lacrimal gland/tearproduction), placing their hands behind their ears (cochlea/hearing), and swayingtheir bodies (vestibular system/balance). They feign the act of chewing(mandibular muscles/mastication), as well as spitting (salivary glands/salivaproduction). They act as if they were inserting a contact lens, as if they werepicking their nose, and as if they were engaging in “tongue-kissing” (motionsthat represent the mucous membranes of the eye, nose, and mouth, respectively).Dickson reports that students’ test scores in anatomy are 42 percent higher whenthey are taught with gestures than when taught the terms on their own.
Example of the use of visual, auditory, and proprioceptive methods used in the pedagogy of anatomy.
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proprioceptive cue may be the mostpowerful of the three: research shows that making gestures enhances our abilityto think even when our gesturing hands are hidden from our view.
Annie Murphy Paul indicates that proprioceptive associations may be more powerful than auditory or visual ones as she notes that "research shows that making gestures enhances our ability to think even when our gesturing hands are hidden from our view."
This is something that could be researched and analyzed.
My personal experience is that visual >> auditory >> smell >> proprioception. Smell with respect to memory is incredibly difficult to exercise as are auditory method. Visual and proprioceptive methods are easier to actively practice though.
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There isthe auditory hook: we hear ourselves saying the words aloud. There is the visualhook: we see ourselves making the relevant gesture. And there is the“proprioceptive” hook; this comes from feeling our hands make the gesture
Gestural mnemonic associations work on three levels: auditory associations, visual associations, and proprioceptive associations.
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Designed gestures offer another benefit as well: they are especially effectiveat reinforcing our memory.
Intentional gestures can be used as mnemonic devices as the movement can be associated with things we wish to remember.
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S CLEAR THAT spontaneous gestures can support intelligent thinking. There’salso a place for what we might call designed gestures: that is, motions that arecarefully formulated in advance to convey a particular notion. Geologist MicheleCooke’s gestures, inspired by sign language, fall into this category; she verydeliberately uses hand movements to help students understand spatial conceptsthat are difficult to communicate in words.
There are two potential axes for gestures: spontaneous and intentional. Intentional gestures include examples like sign language, memetic pantomimes, and dance or related animal mimicry gestures used by indigenous cultures for communicating the movement and behavior of animals.
Intentional gestures can also be specifically designed for pedagogical purposes as well as for mnemonic purposes.
cross reference to Lynne Kelly example about movement/gesture in indigenous cultures.
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In a study carried out by Susan Goldin-Meadow and colleagues at theUniversity of Chicago, a group of adults was recruited to watch video recordingsof children solving conservation problems, like the water-pouring task weencountered earlier. They were then offered some basic information aboutgesture: that gestures often convey important information not found in speech,and that they could attend not only to what people say with their words but alsoto what they “say” with their hands. It was suggested that they could payparticular attention to the shape of a hand gesture, to the motion of a handgesture, and to the placement of a hand gesture. After receiving these simpleinstructions, study subjects watched the videos once more. Before the briefgesture training, the observing adults identified only around 30 to 40 percent ofinstances when children displayed emerging knowledge in their gestures; afterreceiving the training, their hit rate shot up to about 70 percent.
Concentrating on the shape, motion, and placement of hand gestures dramatically help a learner to more concretely understand material and understanding in others.
Link this to the use of movement in dance with respect to memory in Lynne Kelly's work.
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The use of gesture supplies a temporary scaffold that supports theseundergraduates’ still wobbly understanding of the subject as they fix theirknowledge more firmly in place.
Gesturing supplies a visual scaffolding which allows one to affix their budding understanding of new concepts into a more permanent structure.
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people are more likely to gesturewhen they have something to gesture at.
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“It is from the attempt of expressing themselves thatunderstanding evolves, rather than the other way around,” he maintains.
—Woff-Michael Roth
Actively attempting to express oneself is one of the best methods of evolving one's understanding.
Link this to the ideas related to being forced to actively manufacture the answer to a question is one of the best ways to learn.
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The study’s authors suggest that this discrepancy may emerge fromdifferences in boys’ and girls’ experience: boys are more likely to play withspatially oriented toys and video games, they note, and may become morecomfortable making spatial gestures as a result. Another study, this oneconducted with four-year-olds, reported that children who were encouraged togesture got better at rotating mental objects, another task that draws heavily onspatial-thinking skills. Girls in this experiment were especially likely to benefitfrom being prompted to gesture.
The gender-based disparity of spatial thinking skills between boys and girls may result from the fact that at an early age boys are more likely to play with spatially oriented toys and video games. Encouraging girls to do more spatial gesturing at an earlier age can dramatically close this spatial thinking gap.
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Even adults, when asked to gesture more, respond byincreasing their rate of gesture production (and consequently speak morefluently); when teachers are told about the importance of gesturing to studentlearning, and encouraged to make more gestures during instruction, theirstudents make greater learning gains as a result.
It's been shown that merely asking people to gesture more will increase their rates of gesturing. In educational settings this improves both teachers' instruction methods as well as the learning and retention by students.
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A simple request to “move your handsas you explain that” may be all it takes. For children in elementary school, forexample, encouraging them to gesture as they work on math problems leadsthem to discover new problem-solving strategies—expressed first in their handmovements—and to learn more successfully the mathematical concept understudy.
Given the benefits of gesturing, teachers can improve their pedagogy simply by encouraging their students to move their hands while explaining things or working on problems.
Studies with elementary school children have shown that if they gesture while solving math problems led them to discover and understand new concepts and problem solving strategies.
link this with prior idea of handwriting out annotations/notes as well as drawing and sketchnoting ideas from lectures
Students reviewing over Cornell notes also be encouraged to use their hands while answering their written review questions.
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Research suggeststhat making these motions will improve our own performance: people who
gesture as they teach on video, it’s been found, speak more fluently and articulately, make fewer mistakes, and present information in a more logical and intelligible fashion.
Teachers who gesture as they teach have been found to make fewer mistakes, speak more fluently/articulately, and present their lessons in a more intelligible and logical manner.
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Yet the most popular and widely viewed instructional videos available onlinelargely fail to leverage the power of gesture, according to a team ofpsychologists from UCLA and California State University, Los Angeles. Theresearchers examined the top one hundred videos on YouTube devoted toexplaining the concept of standard deviation, an important topic in the study ofstatistics. In 68 percent of these recordings, they report, the instructor’s handswere not even visible. In the remaining videos, instructors mostly used theirhands to point or to make emphatic “beat” gestures. They employed symbolicgestures—the type of gesture that is especially helpful in conveying abstractconcepts—in fewer than 10 percent of the videos reviewed.
Symbolic gestures, which are the most valuable for relaying abstract information, are some of the least seen in online digital pedagogy. Slightly more frequent are "beat" gestures that are used for emphatic emphasis, while in the majority of studied online instructional videos the lecturers hands aren't seen on the video at all.
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A number ofstudies have demonstrated that instructional videos that include gesture producesignificantly more learning for the people who watch them: viewers direct theirgaze more efficiently, pay more attention to essential information, and morereadily transfer what they have learned to new situations. Videos that incorporategesture seem to be especially helpful for those who begin with relatively littleknowledge of the concept being covered; for all learners, the beneficial effect ofgesture appears to be even stronger for video instruction than for live, in-personinstruction.
Gestures can help viewers direct their attention to the most salient and important points in a conversation or a lecture. As a result, learning has been show to be improved in watching lectures with gestures.
Learning using gestures has been shown to be stronger in video presentations over in-person instruction.
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In one study, subjects who had watched a videotapedspeech were 33 percent more likely to recall a point from the talk if it wasaccompanied by a gesture. This effect, detected immediately after the subjectsviewed the recording, grew even more pronounced with the passage of time:thirty minutes after watching the speech, subjects were more than 50 percentmore likely to remember the gesture-accompanied points.
People are more likely to remember points from talks that are accompanied by gestures. This effect apparently increases with time.
What does the effect of time have on increased lengths? Does it continue to increase and then decrease at some point? Anecdotally I often recall quotes and instances from movies based on movements that I make.
What effects, if any, are seen in studies of mirror-neurons and those with impairment of them? What memory effects might be seen with those on the autism spectrum who don't have strong mirror-neuron responses? If this is impaired, what might account for their improved memories for some types of material? Which types of material do they have improved memories for?
Is the same true of drawing points from a speech using the ideas of sketchnotes? Is drawing an extension of gestural improvement of memory?
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Research shows that moving our hands advances our understanding ofabstract or complex concepts, reduces our cognitive load, and improves ourmemory.
movement and gesture as a mnemonic device
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Cooke often employs a modified form of sign language with her (hearing)students at UMass. By using her hands, Cooke finds, she can accurately capturethe three-dimensional nature of the phenomena she’s explaining.
Can gesturing during (second) language learning help dramatically improve the speed and facility of the second language acquisition by adult learners?
Evidence in language acquisition in children quoted previously in The Extended Mind would indicate yes.
link this related research
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People who are fluent in sign language, as Cooke is, have beenfound to have an enhanced ability to process visual and spatial information. Suchsuperior performance is exhibited by hearing people who know sign language, aswell as by the hearing impaired—suggesting that it is the repeated use of astructured system of meaning-bearing gestures that helps improve spatialthinking.
Evidence indicates that those who are have experience or fluency in sign language (both hearing and non-hearing) have increased visual-spatial intelligence and reasoning. Practice using gesturing directly improves spatial thinking.
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Such results suggest that the act of gesturing doesn’t just help communicatespatial concepts to others; it also helps the gesturer herself understand theconcepts more fully. Indeed, without gesture as an aid, students may fail tounderstand spatial ideas at all
Could the pedagogy of using gestures to understand "strike and dip" in geology also be applied to using the right hand rule in better understanding electricity and magnetism? Would research on this idea show similar results as in geology? This could be an interesting way of testing this result in another area.
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“penetrative thinking.” This is the capacity to visualize and reason about theinterior of a three-dimensional object from what can be seen on its surface—acritical skill in geology, and one with which many students struggle.
Penetrative thinking is the ability to abstractly consider and internally visualize or theorize about the inside of a three dimensional object based on what can be seen on its surface.
Penetrative thinking can be useful in areas like geology and anatomy.
Improvements in penetrative thinking can be exercised, encouraged, and improved by using gestures.
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Students learning about geology for the first time can also benefit from usinggesture.
Geology is a solid example of an area in which gesture can be used in teaching the subject, by using the hands to indicate the movements of one mass against another.
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Research shows that people who are asked to write on complex topics,instead of being allowed to talk and gesture about them, end up reasoning lessastutely and drawing fewer inferences.
Should active reading, thinking, and annotating also include making gestures as a means of providing more clear reasoning, and drawing better inferences from one's material?
Would gestural movements with a hand or physical writing be helpful in annotation over digital annotation using typing as an input? Is this related to the anecdotal evidence/research of handwriting being a better method of note taking over typing?
Could products like Hypothes.is or Diigo benefit from the use of digital pens on screens as a means of improving learning over using a mouse and a keyboard to highlight and annotate?
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Gesturing also increases as afunction of difficulty: the more challenging the problem, and the more optionsthat exist for solving it, the more we gesture in response.
When presented with problems people are prone to gesture more with the increasing challenges of those problems. The more ways there are to solve a particular problem, the more gesturing one is likely to do.
What sort of analysis could one do on politicians who gesture their speech with relation to this? For someone like Donald J. Trump who floats balloons (ideas--cross reference George Lakoff) in his speeches, is he actively gesturing in an increased manner as he's puzzling out what is working for an audience and what isn't? Does the gesturing decrease as he settles on the potential answers?
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Gesture encourages experimentation.”
—Susan Goldin-Meadow
Can teachers encourage gesture as a means of helping their students learn? How might this be done?
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Goldin-Meadow has found, learners who produce such speech-gesture mismatches are especially receptive to instruction—ready to absorb andapply the correct knowledge, should a parent or teacher supply it.
gesture mismatch indicates reception to instruction
People can demonstrate a mismatch between what they gesture and what they say. This mismatch occurs both during development as well as in adulthood and can often be seen during problem solving. Susan Goldin-Meadow had research that indicates that learners who demonstrate this sort of gesture mismatch are more receptive to instruction.
Is there a way to encourage or force gesture mismatch as a means of improving pedagogy?
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Studies show that children whose parents gesture a lot proceed togesture frequently themselves, and eventually to acquire expansive spoken-wordvocabularies.
Studies show the importance of gesturing in developing children as a precursor to language. Adults who gesture more have children who gesture more as well. There also seems to be a direct correlation to the gestural vocabulary of children at 14 months and their verbal vocabulary at 4 and 1/2 years of age.
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Children can typically understand and act on a request to point to theirnose, for example, a full six months before they are able to form the spokenword “nose.”
Many children are also able to begin using sign language for their needs prior to being able to use spoken language as well.
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Research shows that we all engage in such “gestural foreshadowing,” in whichour hands anticipate what we’re about to say.
Research by Christian Heath indicates that in interpersonal communication that speakers gesture meaning before they form the related words and listeners begin nodding at the gestures before they hear the spoken words.
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All of us, then, are effectively bilingual: we speak one or more languages, butwe are also fully fluent in gesture.
I'm reminded of how Academy Award winning film editor Walter Murch once told me that his first edit of a feature film was always done without any sound at all. If the motions and actions of the actors could communicate as much meaning as possible, then the spoken words would only help to supplement the storytelling.
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linguists theorize that gesture was humankind’searliest language, flourishing long before the first word was spoken
Evolutionarily speaking many animals communicate via gesture (body movements, tail wagging, etc.), so it isn't a far stretch to declare that linguists would consider gesture to be a precursor to language.
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On other occasions,gesture supplies meaning that is not found anywhere in the speaker’s words
Gesture can supply contextual meaning of a speaker's meaning that isn't found in their spoken words.
What potential implications might this have to famous examples of visual versus non-visual communication, specfically: - The Kennedy/Nixon debates in which television and radio audiences had different perceptions of who won or lost. - Donald J. Trump's speeches where his politicobabble could be construed to mean almost anything to any listener, but his gestures may sway the meaning to a more concrete meaning.
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gesture is often scorned as hapless“hand waving,” or disparaged as showy or gauche.
The value of gesture is sometimes disparaged with the phrase "handy waving".
Some of this statement is misleading as a hand waving argument relies solely on the movement of the hands as "proof" of something which is neither communicated well with the use of either words or the physical hand movements. The communication fails on both axes, but the blame is placed on the gestural portion of the communication, perhaps because it may have been the more important of the two?
Link this to the example of the Riverside teacher who used both verbal and visual gestures and acting to cement the trigonometry ideas of soh, cah, toa to her students and got fired for it. In her example, the gauche behaviour was overamplified by extreme exaggeration as well as racist expression.
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Research demonstrates that gesture can enhance our memory by reinforcing thespoken word with visual and motor cues.
Research shows that gesture can impact our memories by helping to associate speech with visual cues.
References for this?
Link this to the idea that our visual memories are much stronger than our verbal ones.
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“symbolic gestures”—movementsthat capture the overall meaning of the speaker’s message—along with what arecalled “beat gestures”: hand motions that serve to punctuate a particular point.
There are two broad types of gestures: - symbolic gestures: movements that help to capture the semantic meaning of one's message; - beat gestures which serve to punctuate one's points.
Are there other gesture types or classifications? Is there research on the perceived ability of actors who perform these techniques? What about small facial movements like eyebrows which may serve these functions as well.
Relate to micro facial movement research as means of communicating emotion.
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Jean Clarke, a professor of entrepreneurship and organization at EmlyonBusiness School in France, has spent years watching entrepreneurs like GabrielHercule make their case at demo days, incubators, and investment forums acrossEurope. In a study published in 2019, she and her colleagues reported thatcompany founders who deployed “the skilled use of gesture” in their pitcheswere 12 percent more likely to attract funding for their new ventures.
Researcher Jean Clarke's research (2019) indicates that entrepreneurs who employ "the skilled use of gesture" are 12 percent more likely to have their pitches funded than those who don't.
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Perhaps most important, gesture generates the sense that an asyet immaterial enterprise is a palpable reality in the present moment
Gesture used in communication has the ability to conjure or imply the immediate physical presence of ideas or objects that are otherwise either distant or which don't yet exist.
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gesture isimpressionistic and holistic, conveying an immediate sense of how things lookand feel and move.
Gestures provide a powerful and immediate sense of how things look, feel, and move and provide facilities that can't be matched by spoken communication.
Link this to the idea of dance being used in oral cultures to communicate the movement of animals, particularly in preparation for hunting. cross reference: Songlines and Knowledge and Power by Lynne Kelly
Link to [[a picture is worth a thousand words]]
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Researchers who study embodiedcognition are drawing new attention to the fact that people formulate and conveytheir thoughts not only with words but also with the motions of the hands and therest of the body. Gestures don’t merely echo or amplify spoken language; theycarry out cognitive and communicative functions that language can’t touch.
Embodied cognition is a theory in psychology that a the mind is shaped by entire body of an organism. The mind is not only attached to the body, but the body influences the mind. Movement of the body doesn't just amplify one's spoke language, for humans, but it helps to create cognitive and communicative functions that language cannot, and these extend not only to viewers, but the communicator themself.
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Annotators
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