- Drafting
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According to the RAE, shredding is “undoing something by dividing it into small parts”, but that is not what we generally answer.
Have you ever been asked what shredding is and your answer made the person who asked you laugh?
It is an irresistible classic that even has reserved spaces in social networks, as in the videos of the #crumblechallenge of TikTok, in which countless people are seen verifying that sometimes it is easier to express themselves with gestures than with words.
And it is that this connection between the mouth and the hands goes back to our origins, and no matter how evolved we think we are, what we learned at that time is still present.
“Humans are very gestural creatures,” Dr. Gillian Forester, an evolutionary and developmental psychologist at the Birkbeck School at the University of London, told the BBC’s CrowdScience program.
“First, let’s think about our evolutionarily older selves, which dates back about 500 million years to the appearance of vertebrates.”
Although more research is needed on the subject, “what we have indicates that when we were primitive creatures, when the hands took the food, the mouth was ready to receive it. So if you grabbed something big, your mouth knew it had to open wide. in par, and if it was small, not so much “.
As we became more sophisticated, we began to use our hands and mouths to communicate as well, “but that link between the hand and the mouth for food continued to be present in communication.”
In fact, “the parts of the brain that control the hands and the mouth are highly overlapping,” Forester adds.
Talk with your hands
So when we speak, we tend to use our hands. And when the hands are busy, the mouth sometimes gets involved … have you ever caught yourself with your tongue half sticking out when you are concentrating on doing manual work?
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There are several hypotheses about the reason why this happens, among them the fact that with that gesture we are communicating that we are focused on something and that we would prefer not to be interrupted.
The non-verbal component of communication is known and highly valued, so much so that there are courses to control your gestures in order to present a suitable image in certain situations.
But if it is about gesturing to communicate with others, Why even when we talk on the phone we move our hands?
“I have an even more striking example,” Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology and Comparative Human Development told BBC CrowdScience.
“We have data on people who have been blind since birth and make gestures when they speak: they have never seen anyone move their hands and yet when they speak, they gesticulate “.
“But the fact that a blind person or someone talking on the phone moves their hands is only rare if you think that the only function that the gesture has is to transmit information to another person. If you know that, in addition to transmitting information, it also helps you organize your own thoughts then it is not strange“, says the expert in gestures.
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Although they are not seeing us, we move our hands.
So by moving your hands when you speak, you not only help others but also yourself to understand yourself.
And it can reveal something fascinating: what we are about to learn.
Hands first
There are different types of hand gestures, Goldin-Meadow explained.
The iconic they are illustrative, like when you are talking about something big and you spread your arms; the rhythmic, such as those we do to emphasize something we are saying or the emblematic, which are the ones that can replace words, such as the movement you make with your hand to say hello or say goodbye.
“We are more interested in the spontaneous ones because the spontaneous ones tell us more about what someone is thinking,” said the psychologist, who with her work team has focused on the iconic ones, those that show what is on your mind … and they found that they don’t always agree with what you’re saying.
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In one of the experiments, some children showed that they knew …
“When talking about a tall object, you would make the gesture to show that it is tall, but sometimes we see other gestures.”
They saw these mismatches in experiments with learning-age children and found that those who made the ‘wrong’ gesture were “more open to instruction on a task than those who produced only coincidences in their gestures and speech.”
In one study, children were shown two identical containers of the same amount of water. When asked if they had the same amount of water, they answered yes.
Then they poured the water from one of the tall, thin containers into a shorter, wider one, and asked if the amounts were the same or different.
“Those under 7 years of age respond: ‘It’s different because this one is taller than this one’, and they make the gesture of alto and later, under.
“But other kids say: ‘It’s different because this one is taller than this one’, but they make the gesture of height and width. And they are the most likely to benefit from the knowledge we impart to them. ”
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… what they still can’t say.
“We think it’s because they know a little more. They know about width, they have recognized it … but they can’t talk about her yet.
“They are gestures capable of catching information that is not yet accessible to speech,” said Goldin-Meadow.
“It is really a knowledge that they have encapsulated in their hands”.
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.