Gestures as Language: I Misspelled My Smile

I am greatly interested in how our brain processes extreme amounts of data, even though we are conscious of only a small fraction of it. And how we’re often unaware that that even occurs.

For this entry, I’ll focus on language. Think about how we recall an encounter with a friend; we rarely speak about their body language or facial expressions, and mostly relay what verbally transpired.

Or how we gets loads of work done via email and telephone, which leads us to believe language itself- written and verbal- is the dominant mode of communication. Few would argue against that. But it’s certainly not the only one, and what we’re finding out is that our brain processes all communication in the same way, even non-verbal.

Jamie Talan writes of a recent study conducted by Patrick J. Gannon of Hofstra University School of Medicine, where people’s brains were scanned during various forms of communication to see which areas were activated. And what they found was that the brain treats both gestures and words the same way.

Patrick J. Gannon (via Jamie Talan at BusinessWeek.com):
“The language areas of the brain- the highly evolved frontal and temporal lobes- process simple gestures with the same snippet of tissue that’s used to hear the prose of Shakespeare.”

And,

Jamie Talan, BusinessWeek.com:
“The experiments revealed…the brain can receive information in any form- a gesture, a picture, words on a page, a sound or an object- and that these regions can process it.”

It’s interesting how we feel that we’re in complete control of our communications, how quickly these actions take place, and how important they are for social interactions, whether we pay active attention to them or not. We often don’t know why someone, from just a glance, might instantly make us uneasy or immediately relaxed; we just know they do.

Malcolm Gladwell- Blink p. 195
“This practice of inferring the motivations and intentions of others is classic thin-slicing. It is picking up the subtle, fleeting cues in order to read someone’s mind- and there is almost no other impulse so basic and so automatic and at which, most of the time, we so effortlessly excel.”

Of course, I’m lumping facial expressions with gestures, but as Talan had mentioned above, the brain can receive communicative information in any form and the same areas of the brain will process it as language.

I can speak and write about expressions; If only I could relay a conversation of facial expressions via paraphrased expressions (emotiphrased? paremoted?). That would be fun.

I just emotiphrased how I felt about writing this blog. You missed it.