Hands

Ever catch yourself making hand gestures while you’re talking?

Ever try to stop yourself from doing this, only to find that your hands seem to want to be a part of the conversation?

It turns out that this technique—gesture foreshadowing—is actually capable of doing some of the thinking for you. This process is called cognitive offloading.

You’re reading this and giving me the side-eye. I can feel it.

I could instantly see how writing something down on a piece of paper (or typing it) qualifies, and I’ve written my fair share about how your mind actually expands well outside of your brain and includes things like your contact list in your phone (when is the last time you memorized a phone number?).

This idea hit me like a thunderbolt, and I had to know whether there was anything to it. Indeed, there is.

When you wave your hands about in the air, you’re making little symbols with the shapes you build. As strange as it may sound, these symbols are doing some of the work your brain would normally be doing here.

This is a bit like how a computer has RAM (Random Access Memory) that it uses in order to store and access pertinent little chunks of temporary information. RAM might store the last thing you copied, for instance, and it doesn’t make sense to rewrite the permanent memory for something you probably won’t need for longer than a few more minutes.

You’re probably thinking what I was thinking, too: it’s not like you write the stuff down or something. You make shapes in the air and then they disappear.

Here’s an example that might help us explain this. If you’ve ever taken notes in class in order to prepare for a test, you might understand this one intuitively already. I must have filled up a few dozen notebooks over the years, but I’m willing to bet that I only ever reread a few pages of the stuff I wrote down.

That’s because the act of writing itself helped to embed the lesson into my memory. It was a different mode than the way the information was presented to me, and that really matters a lot.

If I hear something, then see it, I’m more likely to remember it later. Even better, if I myself write something down, I’m going through a very different cognitive process than hearing something for the first time.

There’s something about the physical process of moving your body around, too. Minds are not merely located inside our heads, and the more we can get that through our skulls (and into our digestive tract), the better.

I’ve practiced martial arts regularly for 30 years now, and I have a hard time articulating what’s going on when I train. That seems odd: I’ve been doing this forever, so by now I should have figured out the right words to use. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised at this, though, since my brain stores the words I want to use, while the intellectual processing is experienced by both my brain and body.

This immersive puzzle isn’t just a physical challenge, but also an intellectual exercise. My students and training partners throw unexpected curve after curve at me, and I get to try to solve these novel puzzles every time I train. The dance between brain and body is what makes up the mind, and jiu jitsu can be the perfect juncture of these two things.

If jiu jitsu is me using my mind to solve puzzles, rolling (that’s what we call live training with resistance) is a conversation between two minds. This conversation has every potential to be as complex or as simple as any verbal conversation between two minds.

Understanding how the brain and body work together is at the frontier of medicine, one of the truly big questions we’re trying to answer some time this century.

Have you ever gone for a walk in order to come up with an idea, or gone out to work in the yard for a while only to be struck by inspiration in the middle of the activity? Are you a die-hard hand gesturer, or do you tend to talk without expressive movements?