Intelligence in the Flesh by Guy Claxton

Author:Guy Claxton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300208825
Publisher: Yale University Press

The welling up of gesture and thought

Everything is the way it is because it got that way.

D’Arcy Thompson

Let me bring some evidence to bear on this metaphorical proposition. If the ‘unfurling fern’ view is right, then we should see the original seed differentiating into different ‘branches’ as the unfurling takes place. For example, something we might eventually say, and all the non-verbal gestures that accompany it, may well stem from a common embryonic concern, and carry different aspects of the original meaning or intention. Our ‘utterance’ is the whole fern, not just one particular frond. Over many years of painstaking research, psycholinguist David McNeill at the University of Chicago has demonstrated that this is exactly what happens when we are trying to communicate.

His research focuses on the relationship between what we say – for example, when we are describing a cartoon we have just watched to a third party – and the hand gestures that spontaneously accompany the speech. Through detailed analysis of videotapes, McNeill and his collaborators have discovered that speech and gesture do indeed emerge from the same root, and carry complementary aspects of the meaning we want to convey. For example, describing a scene, one observer said, ‘Sylvester was in the Bird Watchers’ Society building, and Tweetie was in the Broken Arms Hotel …’ As she referred to Sylvester she gestured to her right-hand side, and as she referred to Tweetie she gestured to her left, indicating that the two locations were on opposite sides of the street. A few seconds later, she reported that ‘He then ran across the street’, and gestured to her right as she did so – indicating that it was Sylvester who crossed the street, not Tweetie. Speech and gesture were woven together seamlessly – and unconsciously – in order to resolve the potential ambiguity of the pronoun ‘he’.

We might imagine – if we could slow the ‘movie’ of our own experience down sufficiently – that we might catch the germ of the desire to communicate something as it begins to stir deep in the body-brain. It might involve a need for approval or a desire to impress – to want to be a ‘good subject’, in McNeill’s experiment – or a wish to convey involvement and amusement in the cartoon, or a dozen other intentions. When I say to my wife, ‘I think the front lawn needs cutting’, I can trace the source of that casual comment back to a small archaic tremor of potential concern about being disapproved of by meticulous neighbours. When she says to me, ‘Shall we go for a walk if it’s nice tomorrow?’ I can, I fancy, hear a faint echo of anxiety about my health and the sedentary nature of my work.

The broad structure of these fronds of communication is determined by the genetic programmes that shape our bodies. The actual expression of these genetic guidelines, though, is powerfully modulated by the accidents of our experience. So the fine details of how an embryonic intention unfurls are heavily experience-dependent.

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