Frederic Mishkin, who’s been a professor at Columbia Business School for almost 30 years, is good at solving problems and expressing ideas. Whether he’s standing in front of a lecture hall or engaged in a casual conversation, he’s a blur of motion, his hands waving, pointing, jabbing the air. “I talk with my hands,” he says. “I always have.” When he was in graduate school, in fact, one of his professors was so exasperated by this constant gesticulating that he made the young economist sit on his hands whenever he visited the professor’s office. It turns out, however, that Mishkin’s mentor had it exactly wrong. Gesture doesn’t hinder clear thought and speech — it facilitates it. Research demonstrates that the movements we make with our hands when we talk constitute a kind of second language, adding information that’s absent from our words. It’s learning’s secret code: Gesture reveals what we know. It reveals what we don’t know. And it reveals (as Donald Rumsfeld might put it) what we know, but don’t yet know we know. What’s more, the congruence (or lack of congruence) between what our voices say and how our hands move offers a clue to our readiness to learn. (MORE: In Praise of Tinkering) Many of the studies establishing the importance of gesture to learning have been conducted by Susan Goldin-Meadow, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. “We change our minds by moving our hands,” writes Goldin-Meadow in a review of this work published in the current issue of the journal Cognitive Science. Particularly significant are what she calls “mismatches” between verbal expression and physical gestures. A student might say that a heavier ball falls faster than a light one, for example, but make a gesture indicating that they fall at the same rate, which is correct. Such discrepancies indicate that we’re in a transitional state, moving from one level of understanding to another. The thoughts expressed by hand motions are often our newest and most advanced ideas about the problem we’re working on; we … Continue reading The Secret Code Of Learning