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This is Pushing Boundaries, a podcast about pioneering research, breakthrough discoveries and unconventional ideas. I'm your host, Dr Thomas R Verny. My guest today is Dr Susan Golden Meadows, distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Psychology and in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. She has authored four extraordinary books Neurons to Neighborhoods that I would really like to hear more about later, resilience of Language, hearing, gesture and Her Latest Thinking with your Hands the Surprising Science Behind how Gestures Shape Our Thoughts. I love this title. By the way, may I call you Susan.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Thank you, and you may call me Thomas, of course. In addition, Susan edited Language in Mind, advances in the Study of Language and Thought, in Collaboration with D'Andre Gentner, and Professor Golden Meadows is currently the president of the Cognitive Development Society and also the editor of a new journal. Is that wrong?
Speaker 2:That's wrong. I'm no longer the president and I'm no longer the editor, but I did start the journal.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we'll edit that. So she started the journal. Okay, Welcome, Susan. I understand that one of your primary interests lies in gestures, role in communicating, thinking and learning. Have I got that right?
Speaker 2:You've got that right.
Speaker 1:I got that right. Okay, so you seem to have this interest started while you were an undergraduate at Smith's College.
Speaker 2:Some of it did. Yes, I've always been interested in language.
Speaker 1:Okay, so can you tell me a little bit more about your beginnings at Smith's College and then you went to Geneva, a little bit about how sort of you got into this line of work.
Speaker 2:So at Smith. Smith is very close to the Clark School for the Deaf and we would visit it occasionally for classes and Clark School for the Deaf is an oral school. It's still an oral school where they teach deaf children to speak, and some children could do it, others could not. But what was really striking about the kids is that they would all generate gestures behind the teachers back and they would communicate with each other and that was sort of well known in the deaf community. So I found that fascinating and I ended up exploring that for my dissertation at Penn. But before then I went to Geneva on my junior year abroad and discovered Piaget and discovered psychology and discovered observing the real world and so I started to again study language but I didn't really get into gesture until I came back and did my dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania working with Lila Gliedman and Heidi Feldman.
Speaker 1:Right, and you said that these children developed gestures on their own. Did they copy other children's gestures or did they develop their own?
Speaker 2:Well, that's an interesting question for those kids. I don't know what I did for my dissertation. I studied six individual children deaf children of hearing parents in the Philadelphia area, and those children developed them on their own because they didn't know one another. So it was just the deaf child in a sea of hearing people and would develop these gestures. And the interesting thing about the gestures is that they are structured. They're structured like language, so they look like language.
Speaker 1:So when you say structured, can you explain that a little bit? What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2:So they are not miming. So, for example, if I wanted to ask you for an apple, I might do a whole event of picking up an apple, eating an apple and just trying to explore, show you and acting it. But that's not what they do. What they do would be to point at the apple and then do eat, to indicate that that's what they would like to have happened. And so they have individual gestures that are sort of like beads on a string and they are ordered. So, for example, when I talk about, or when the children would talk about, objects and actions on them, they'd point at the or indicate the objects first and then do the action. If they want to talk about giving something to themselves, they do the action and then point at themselves, and that was pretty uniform across all the children.
Speaker 1:I understand. So it becomes an abstraction in a sense, like it starts with concrete things like eating an apple, but then it becomes eating anything. Does it then lead to hunger, like, how would they, how would they gesture hunger? I'm hungry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those are. That's a good question. The kids. I studied the children when they're little and so abstractions like that were difficult, but there are adult. These kids are called home signers because they sign at home. They invent their own gesture systems, but adult home signers, my guess is, can develop abstractions of that sort.
Speaker 1:So I believe that at the moment, like in the present, you are studying like speaking children, like children who have hearing and speech Right, and so can you tell me a little bit more about that part of your research?
Speaker 2:Well, yes, I got into that in part because I needed to understand how different these children, these deaf children's, gestures were from the gestures that their parents would create or their gestures that other children would use. So I started to study the gestures that adults use when they talk and children use when they talk. So it was almost as a control for what the deaf children do. The deaf children do something quite, quite different from what we all do when we talk, the gestures that we produce when we talk. So I have studied that in both children and in adults and in learning situations, and I'm very interested in the gestures. They look very different from home sign.
Speaker 1:How are they different?
Speaker 2:Well, they are what you're used to. They're sort of fluid. They aren't beads on a string. They don't have systematic order because they're not little parts like that. So they look much less like language and more like a pictorial array.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes. So what really fascinated me about your research was the fact that you said that gestures shape our thoughts, so I wonder whether you could say a little bit more about that.
Speaker 2:Well, what I mean by that is, I think gestures do two things. They communicate our thoughts. They reflect our thoughts. For sure, and I can give you some evidence for that. But the evidence that we have for gesture shaping our thoughts is when we tell children to gesture or adults to gesture, that changes the way they learn. So they learn more quickly if they're gesturing than if they're not gesturing.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes. And what is your research on that? Can you tell me a little bit more about the research? Well, we have the evidence.
Speaker 2:Right we. It's just that we give children math problems and some of those math. Some of the children are asked to gesture and do particular movements as they learn and others are told just to do it in speech. So there's children who are in gesture and speech and children doing it just speech. And the kids who do gesture and speech learn much more quickly than the kids who are doing speech alone.
Speaker 1:And what gestures? Do you actually prescribe the gestures, or do they just invent them or generate them on their own?
Speaker 2:We've done it both ways. We've told children if we're doing a math problem, then you know. We have pointed these two numbers and then pointed the blank and tell the children to do that, or we have just said okay, the next time you describe this problem, I want you to move your hands. And that works too.
Speaker 1:So would you say you know to the general public that using gestures will improve their memories of the situation? I guess that they are in.
Speaker 2:We have some evidence to suggest that if you describe something and gesture while you're doing it, you are more likely to remember it. It's not a big effect, but you are more likely to remember it. But action is like that too. I mean, there's evidence that if you act while you're in the moment, likely that will improve your memory. So memory is one component of what gesture does.
Speaker 1:So the more senses actually you use, the more the memory will be inscribed in your whatever brain.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's one way of thinking about it, and people have actually said that, for sure. But I think gesture is doing something more than that. I think it's not just yet another modality, and the reason I think that is because signers gesture, and when signers gesture, they're using the same modality. They're using their hands to do sign language and they're using their hands to gesture, and gesture has the same effect for signers as it does for speakers, so it's not just two modalities.
Speaker 2:What I think it really is is it's two ways of representing information. So language is very categorical, hierarchical rule, governed, and we know all of that quite spontaneously. Gesture actually is much more imagistic and it sort of fills in the gaps that language leaves. So there are two different forms of representation produced simultaneously, which I think is important and that actually helps. It seems to help us think.
Speaker 1:When I was, when I was studying at university, I would find that if I made notes to myself and then I summarized my notes, I would remember it much better than I just read without making notes. So, in a sense, making notes and using your hands and your body and visual, tactile, all that, have you compared that with gestures, like the difference, let's say, between writing down something and just gesturing while you're talking?
Speaker 2:No, because I mean we haven't been and memory is not my. The focus of what my sense is the way we study memory two ways actually. One is that we've asked people to either just describe a phenomenon and gesture, and then they remember it better, or we just let them gesture or not and they remember it better, but we haven't compared it. I'm not arguing that gesture is better or worse than anything. I was trying to do it Gesture does.
Speaker 2:The other thing we have found is that if you gesture while you speak, while you explain something, that sort of lightens your cognitive load. You are, which is surprising in a way, because when you're gesturing along with your speech, you're doing two things rather than one and you think that would be more weighty. But in fact it is up cognition and so it makes it so that you can remember more other things. So it lightens your load, which I find very interesting, and I think the reason it does that is because gesture and speech are such an integrated system. You don't have to think to gesture, you just gesture and it comes spontaneously. Blind people who have never seen anybody gesture they're congenerally blind gesture nonetheless, so it's a pretty robust process.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you have observed in your studies that there are cultures, nations, that seem to support gestures more than others. Like in some cultures certainly, let's say, in the English speaking, german speaking world gestures are kind of discouraged. You're not supposed to speak with your hands. And people like I live in Canada, you live in the United States, kind of look down on people who use too many gestures which we don't know. You live in the United States, kind of look down on people who use too many gestures, which would be more like Southern European cultures Spanish, italian, greece. Have you noticed a difference between people, well, nations, cultures that use gestures, as opposed to those that don't?
Speaker 2:Well, there is no culture that doesn't use gesture. I haven't done these studies, but the people who have studied Southern and Northern Europeans find that in fact everybody gestures and they gesture at roughly the same rates. What's really different is how big you gesture, whether you're sort of out there, I mean, if you're big, much more noticeable. What also differs is the number of emblems that you have, things like thumbs up or an okay or a check. Some cultures have many, many and some have fewer.
Speaker 2:But those aren't the kind of gestures that I'm interested in. I'm interested in the spontaneous ones that you create on the fly as you talk, and there every culture does it. Some cultures do it more quietly and others big, but it happens in all cultures, even cultures that don't think you should be gesturing.
Speaker 1:Right, okay, so you write that gestures can convey substantive information, information that is often not expressed in speech. Can you speak more on that?
Speaker 2:Well, the first discovery that we made that children produce information or convey information with their hands and their speech came from a task that we gave children is a Piagetian task called conservation of water. You pour water from one container. You have two containers, have the same amount of water for this container out into a flat dish and the water looks different and children of a certain age think it is different. They say it's a different amount of water because you poured it, but some children will say it's different and they'll say the same information for their hands and their mouth. It's different because this one's tall and this one's short, and basically you're talking about height in both, but other children will say it's different because this one's tall and this one's short.
Speaker 2:Okay, so the second one is conveying information about width, and if you're ever going to understand that the amount of water really hasn't changed, you're going to have to understand that height and width compensate for one another, that there are two dimensions to look at here. So the child who does this and talks about height is, in fact, further along in thinking about this, but you can't find it in his mouth, it's coming out of his hands. And so when we found children like that and we give them instruction, they are likely to learn the task, the concept of conservation. So it's the children who have this extra information in their gestures who are on the precipice of learning.
Speaker 1:Very interesting. You say in your book that the time is ripe to take advantage of our hands. How can we do that?
Speaker 2:Well, I think, by becoming a little bit more conscious of them noticing, because we can mislead people with our hands. My favorite example is one of my graduate students is doing a lovely study now on social evaluation, but she's found that sometimes people will say well, men and women are equally good as leaders. But they'll say men and women are equally good as leaders.
Speaker 1:Doesn't look like equal.
Speaker 2:No, it doesn't look like equal, and so they've sort of given away the ghost here. But I don't think they even recognize it. They don't realize it. So sort of realizing it, realizing what we're saying with our hands sometimes can be very helpful. Also realizing where we get the information from somebody else. So if I see you doing that, I may assume you're. You know you're pretty sexist, but you didn't sound it. You did what you said was perfectly okay.
Speaker 2:But, I still got the impression that you're sexist and I got it from your hands and I should know where I got it from. It might enlarge our conversation. It might help us to know where we're getting ideas about people and to even talk about our gestures. We can do that. Wait a minute.
Speaker 1:It's another way of sort of judging or being aware, sensitive to the other person, because there's so many nonverbal ways that people communicate and very often the nonverbal is much more truer, much more to the point.
Speaker 2:Sometimes yes, and what?
Speaker 1:people say right.
Speaker 2:Right, right, right, and I think we do naturally make use of that information. We always do that, but we don't always know where it's coming from.
Speaker 1:Right, so we call it intuition or a gut feeling.
Speaker 2:Right, right, and it may be a little bit more than a gut feeling that the person I invaded with his hands or her Right.
Speaker 1:Was there anything in your own background that you think contributed to your interest in the subject?
Speaker 2:I don't think so really. I just got very. I've always been interested in language and communication and I really got into the idea of hands from the deaf children I studied because that was the best way to study where language comes from, without a language model, because these children are making up their own language. So I got the hands through this sort of this way to approach the emergence of language and then it just grew when I became interested in gestures that we talk.
Speaker 1:Were there any obstacles in your development of this interest in language that you had to overcome Any opposition from professors or family?
Speaker 2:No, no, I think I learned in Geneva how to observe Piaget. I did take a couple of courses from Piaget when I was there. I was really lucky and he's one of the best observers of people and children that I've ever come in contact with. He was amazing, so I learned how to look.
Speaker 1:And when.
Speaker 2:I came back to the United States and went to graduate school. Lyle Gleitman was also really interested in this question of language emergence, and so we began to study this. Nobody really objected to it. They weren't sure to do it.
Speaker 1:So, along the way, did you make any mistakes?
Speaker 2:Oh, always.
Speaker 1:I mean, how did you correct them?
Speaker 2:Well, one mistake. It feels like a small thing, but how do you write this down? We recorded it by video. But then we had to figure out are all these movements language? What do we mean by language? And we had to figure out what these, which movements were the relevant ones. So we would start with big, big, big, big pads, you know, and write down everything, of course, get right down everything, but we wrote down a lot of stuff and over time we would get a sense of what was important, what was recurring, what was the structure of these systems.
Speaker 2:So have thrown out coding, many, many coding systems. I've started again, you know, start, done it all, come back, not right, thrown it out, started again to to really capture what's there. And I think we capture it and we know we've captured it. This is an assumption when we can find something systematic in what the children are doing, whether and we were guided by what other children do when they're learning language from hearing people or from signing people. So the development of language was what guided us. We were looking to see whether the deaf children would do things and say things like kids who are learning spoken language or sign language.
Speaker 1:Well, what is language? How do you, how do you define language?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, in a way, what we did was we avoided the question.
Speaker 1:That's what we yes.
Speaker 2:By just. You know, everybody will assume that what young children are doing when they're opening their mouths or signing with their hands is copying the language or learning the language, not just copying the language from their parents. And so what we did in comparing our deaf kids to hearing kids and signing kids, was to say okay, whatever you think they're doing, our kids are doing it too, or they're not doing it either way. But we found a lot of similarities. So, rather than take on the very difficult question of what is language, we assumed that whatever it is that young children do when they start to communicate with their parents and their friends and whatever of these deaf children are doing that too.
Speaker 1:Right, so what's your next project?
Speaker 2:Well, we're still looking at the deaf children, going back to the old videotapes to try to see whether the parents are not. They don't create gestures that look like home signs, but they do respond to the children's gestures and they make it. They make a communicative situation for the children. Now, they don't respond in a, so it's not like they shake their heads yes for one order and not for another. It's not that gross.
Speaker 2:But what we're trying to do is to see whether there are subtle pieces of information that the parents are giving the children and in that way, at least providing a nice context, communicative context, within which the children can grow. And then we'll again compare that to hearing kids who are learning spoken language from their parents. So we're moving on with that. But we're also looking at what's going on in the brain when we produce these gestures along with speech. You know we I'm very, very interested in what happens if we're really saying one thing with our hands and something different with our mouths. What's going on in our brains at that moment? So we are trying to use ethners, which allows you to both talk move while you and talk while your brain is being imaged to see if we can figure out what that is, and then we're going to figure out what that state looks like.
Speaker 1:I think it would be interesting also to see what's going on in the rest of the body, not just the brain?
Speaker 2:Sure, we have. Actually, I have a colleague, Greg Norman, with whom I'm working, and we have little physio belts that we've put on kids as they're learning. Good yeah.
Speaker 1:Good, good, good good. Do you recall? Do you recall a child or an adult that you have worked with that sort of changed your mind in some significant way, made an impression?
Speaker 2:I remember a child who I was called in to observe. He was a child who was born with his organs on the outside of his body and he lived in the hospital for months and months and months and months. I don't even know what happened to this child, but he was sort of in a bubble and he had a trach and whatever, and he created gestures in the same way that, in a way that the deaf child did. I think his gestures looked a little different because he was hearing language and so he was creating the gestures in that way, but he was a child that really struck me. I mean, this is a way that we can communicate with our hands. If you cannot use your mouth, you will use your hands to communicate.
Speaker 1:Right, that makes sense. Yes, so in terms of your own personal experiences, what is your most vivid childhood memory?
Speaker 2:My most vivid childhood memory yes.
Speaker 1:What stands out when you look back on your childhood?
Speaker 2:Wait, this is not relevant to my.
Speaker 1:No, it's not.
Speaker 2:But seeing my mother in the hospital when she had breast cancer.
Speaker 1:Oh yes.
Speaker 2:That was a big one.
Speaker 1:And how did you react to that? What do you remember about it?
Speaker 2:Being pretty frightened.
Speaker 1:And how old would you have been I?
Speaker 2:was around 10.
Speaker 1:And did your mother recover?
Speaker 2:She did, and she lived till 93 and died of something else.
Speaker 1:Fantastic Good. So you have some good genes.
Speaker 2:I hope so.
Speaker 1:I hope so too. So, speaking of your mother, did your parents understand your work? Did they support it?
Speaker 2:They certainly supported it. I don't know how much they really got into the. Yeah, the person who really supported my work was my husband. He was a great supporter and always listened to me talk about my science and it was terrific.
Speaker 1:Do you have children? Yes, and do any of them follow in your footsteps?
Speaker 2:They don't. Well, they're mostly. My husband was a doctor. I have two doctors and one IT guy, but they're all what they are is they're great teachers. They love explaining things to people, but they're not academics.
Speaker 1:Okay, so, speaking of academics, who would you say are the two or three most influential people in your academic career, people who have influenced you the most in your academic life?
Speaker 2:Well, one was my advisor who recently died, lila Glipman. She was the person with whom I began the deaf studies. Yes, and she just was an amazing person. She worked until the day she died. She was writing an abstract in the hospital. She just was amazing. So she was a great inspiration. And, of course, from afar, piaget he was not I didn't work intimately with him, but just sort of having that experience when I was very young, I was 18. Yes, I was influencing. It influenced me.
Speaker 1:What's the best compliment you ever received?
Speaker 2:For me, being clear and interesting is important to me, so when people find my book, they understand it and they find it fascinating. It makes me happy. I think it's great. I like to be understood. I don't like to up-skate if I can avoid it.
Speaker 1:So if you won $100 million in a lottery, how would you spend it?
Speaker 2:Oh, I'd set up a study. We have a Center for Gesture, sign and language here at the University of Chicago and it is tremendously underfunded. Okay, okay.
Speaker 1:People out there listen to this. Yes.
Speaker 2:So I do that for future students and faculty.
Speaker 1:Very good, very good. Okay, so is there something that you have found that people misunderstand about you? About me or about you, not your research, but about you personally.
Speaker 2:I don't feel very misunderstood. No, no, I don't. No, maybe I'm an open book.
Speaker 1:I'm kind of suspicious of people who say I'm an open book because I say it myself sometimes.
Speaker 2:You know, my whole work shows that there are things in us that we don't even recognize are there.
Speaker 1:That's right. What's the best advice you ever received?
Speaker 2:About what I mean wide open question. Okay. So for students and for science, I think it's really be interested in what you're doing. Yes, I'm something that you love, that you have a passion for. I mean, I feel very fortunate in that the work that I do is not even work. It's just fun for me. I will do it forever if I can. I don't care even whether I get paid for it. It's really just enjoyable to do this, and that is, it's a gift. It's a real gift.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm sure you inspire a lot of people with your work. It certainly is quite remarkable. I would like to know, if I may, how do you relax?
Speaker 2:That's a good question, isn't it? There are a few things I do physically, you know, if I can, I like to cross country ski, I like to, I like to windsurf and things like that, but of course you need the wind and you need the snow in order to do that.
Speaker 1:Right, so, and Chicago is a pretty windy city, so I guess that would work. Okay, so my last question is what does being human mean to you?
Speaker 2:I think for me it's having relations with people and helping people and understanding people and relating to people. That's what being human is for me.
Speaker 1:Well, I would certainly support that. Thank you so much. This has been inspiring, interesting, fascinating. Remember, Listeners, please remember the books that I've just mentioned, Especially the last one which I'm looking up now. Yes, here we are Thinking with your hands the surprising science behind how gestures shape our thoughts. I really I love that book. It's a great book. It has a lot of really, really interesting information in it, and I would just like to say that my guest in two weeks time will be Steven Gillen Hall, film and television director, writer and producer. We shall talk about Steven's most recent documentary, Uncharitable. Dr David Ho, Time Magazine man of the year 1996 and former president of Harvard University, has said of this film, and I quote what scales with nonprofit organization have to achieve to eradicate the great social problems that confront us and how do our traditions and beliefs about charity stand in their way? So that's in two weeks time and once again, thank you, Susan. I wish you continued success in your studies and teachings.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Take care, bye, bye.