Wave your hands more, I can’t hear you!
I wonder if medical science has discovered the nerve that connects our hands to our vocal chords?

Some things are harder to describe “hands free” than others. If you are trying to tell someone how to navigate a series of left, right turns on a curly back-road, for example, a bit of hand action is almost mandatory. What is really funny is watching somebody describe this same route over the phone. The receiver of the directions can obviously not see their hands, and yet the direction-giver will still wave them about. It is even funnier if they try to describe which exit to take at a round-about. At this point the complex hand movements may result in inadvertantly dropping the phone.

The capacity to add meaning to words by swirling gestures is often credited to different nationalities, some more than others. An Italian friend of mine willingly admits his need to talk with his hands. It is almost a badge of honour, a treasured aspect of his heritage. Talking with your hands is something he savours like a good glass of wine. For him, talking without his hands would be like drinking watered down grape juice in comparison. It is a far richer communication experience, as it involves greater depths of physicality. More than hearing is involved but also kinaesthetic aspects of space and time, and the visual processing of movement and scope. Having a conversation where both people wave their hands is a deep and moving experience, about half way between talking and giving each other a big hug.

Basically anything swirly really needs at least one hand free if you want to describe it properly. If you were to tie string across both hands and ask someone to describe a spiral staircase you may find you’ve discovered a new knitting method. Either that or you’d have to free the person using scissors.

Can you imagine a world where everything could be discussed hands free? What a boring place it would be. You could never tell someone the distance between the pegs needs to be “about this big” or to stir the soufflé mix “sort of like this” (see, without my hands, you actually have no idea what I’m talking about!). We could never discuss soft serve ice cream cones, spiral staircases, and definitely not fishing stories. If somebody were to discover the secret nerve responsible for this phenomenon, maybe we could just short-circuit the fishing stories part and keep the rest? Now that would be a scientific discovery worth making.
Posted by A.Ready at 9:03 PM 0 comments
Sunday, January 6, 2008