Visible Thought: The Critical Role of Hand Gestures in Everyday Communication

On 16 October 2019 Professor Geoffrey Beattie from Edge Hill University delivered the IMCC's Inaugural Lecture. 

Professor Beattie lectured on how Human beings frequently make hand movements whilst they are talking. These gestural movements are often imagistic in form and co-occur alongside the speech itself. There has been considerable debate in psychology over many years about their function, but it is now clear that they often convey core parts of the underlying message. Since we have little conscious awareness of these movements, they can be particularly revealing - we control what we say in our speech but find it difficult, or impossible, to control the content and form of these gestural movements. Their form and ‘meaning’ may not match the accompanying speech and these gesture-speech mismatches can indicate various underlying psychological states, including attempts at deception. Prof Beattie argued for the essential unity of speech and gesture in the transmission of thought, and suggested that we have underestimated the considerable communicative significance of these movements. These movements make thought visible, and we are able, quite literally, to ‘see’ what people mean in everyday conversations.