Power Cues. Nick Morgan
to the gestures, attitudes, and postures of other people. We’ve evolved to be able to do that effortlessly, for the most part, by pushing the activity down to our unconscious minds, which are faster and more powerful than our conscious minds. So that’s a good thing.
Except when we want to understand what it is that we’re reading so effortlessly. What we’re actually doing is monitoring the thousands of minute adjustments in body language that the people around us are constantly making. They do so to express their unconscious attitudes, intents, and emotions. We do so in order to understand what they’re saying. The whole process probably preceded our ability to vocalize as a species.
To understand why this counterintuitive situation might exist, it helps to learn a little about how the brain works. It’s not what we think. Most of us have this idea that we can call the “Mr. Spock Theory of the Brain,” after the Star Trek character known for his logic and ability to keep his emotions under control. So, for example, we imagine that we get a thought, such as, “I’m thirsty,” and then we direct our bodies to act on that thirst, reaching for a glass of water. Neat, logical, and very Spockian.
But it turns out that our bodies don’t work that way. What actually happens is that we get an unconscious intent or desire—like thirst—and then our bodies start acting on that intent or desire. Only after that—entire nanoseconds later—do our conscious minds catch on to what’s happening. In effect, our conscious minds say, “I just noticed that I’m reaching for water. I must be thirsty. Yes, that’s it. I’m thirsty. Good thing I’ve got a drink of water heading my way.”9
That’s counterintuitive, and it probably makes you a little uncomfortable. But that’s the way it is. Our conscious minds are just along for the ride, like one of those birds that sits on a hippopotamus, picking off the bugs that swarm around the beast.
How Our Minds Really Work: Not So Much
We’re barely in control of our simplest, most basic needs, let alone our higher-order wishes and desires. Again, one of the purposes of this book is to give you far more control over what’s happening to you and your body as you go through your daily life.
Now, let’s be clear that most of the time unconscious control of moments, like that of thirst, is a good thing. If you were aware of everything your unconscious mind took care of, from keeping your heart beating and your body temperature relatively constant to monitoring your surroundings for incoming hazards, you’d quickly be overwhelmed by the sheer tediousness of it all. There’s a good reason why most of that stuff is run—beautifully—by your unconscious mind. It does it really, really well, so you don’t have to.
That frees up your conscious mind for more interesting things and important moments. But the problem with the arrangement is that it leaves you largely helpless in those moments when you do want to take control of a room, a meeting, or a negotiation. You want to do it subtly, without everyone else becoming aware of your sudden wielding of power, because it’s far more effective that way.
So what I’m going to do is to show you how to learn to become conscious of those aspects of your unconscious behavior that are most important for confidence, intuition, charisma, and leadership. You’re going to learn to control them and then you’ll be able to bring them to conscious awareness when you want to and leave them to your unconscious mind when you’re not trying to take charge.
That’s mastery. And it begins with the conscious control of your own hitherto unconscious gestures, and the conscious reading of others’ gestures, something you have also left to your unconscious mind until now.
What the Research Says about Your Hands: They’re Smarter Than You Think
Let’s go a little deeper into the language and meaning of gesture and its use. You need to know what’s really at stake. And it will surprise you.
Psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow kept noticing something strange.10 One of the prime tests psychologists use to determine how advanced a child is in her development is what is known as the “conservation test.” This test has a child pour liquid from a tall, skinny glass into a squat, fat glass. Now, because the second glass is shorter in height, very young children will tell you that there is less water once they’ve poured it into the second glass.
But once a child reaches a certain point in her development, she realizes that the liquid is conserved—that it’s the same amount. That’s conservation, and it’s an important breakthrough in everyone’s development, as a child growing up.
Goldin-Meadow noticed that when you asked children to explain their rationale for figuring out whether the liquid is conserved or not, they gestured a lot. In fact, sometimes they gestured things that they didn’t say. Kids who understood the concept might, for example, flip their hands back and forth to indicate that the two amounts of water were the same. Some of the kids who couldn’t yet verbally explain the idea would also make that flipping gesture, as if their hands knew something their brains didn’t.
This was surprising, because the dominant view about gesture until pioneers like Goldin-Meadow taught us differently was that gesture was a meaningless accompaniment to speech, which was really the important stuff.
You Don’t Say What You Mean—You Gesture It
What Goldin-Meadow was noticing was that gesture and speech were different, and things were being said by the children with their gestures that they didn’t say with their speech. As she notes, “It’s hard even to think about gestures separately from speech. We (coded) them separately. So we’d code the speech without the picture, and then we’d turn the sound off and code the gesture.” The accidental result was that Goldin-Meadow and her fellow researchers noticed that speech and gesture were not the same.
You don’t normally notice this phenomenon in ordinary communication. As Goldin-Meadow says, “That’s not how our brains process it. Our brains just glom it all together and integrate it.” So it took an expert to notice that our gestures have meaning, and meaning different from what we’re saying.
You don’t notice this phenomenon consciously, but your unconscious mind is keeping track of it. Goldin-Meadow says, “We did some brain imaging studies that show that when there’s different sets of information, we do pick up on it … We’re just beginning to look at how people process those differences. We’ve got evidence that people will respond to a mismatch differently, because we’re seeing different brain patterns for matches and mismatches” between words and gestures.
So our gestures sometimes convey different information from our words, and our unconscious minds take note of those differences and process them. If you think about it from your personal awareness of the world, it makes perfect sense. We’ve all had the experience of conversing with someone who says one thing but gestures another, and we get what they mean from the gesture.
Goldin-Meadow worked out a very elegant, simple test for this. She had subjects listen to a story that involved a stairway. The researchers made the gesture for a spiral staircase, but didn’t verbalize that idea. Yet when they tested the subjects, they got the spiral staircase idea.
In another study Goldin-Meadow conducted, children whose teachers produced “grouping” gestures while explaining an algebra problem were more likely to talk about that idea later, even though the teacher hadn’t discussed it at all. Concepts introduced via gesture are picked up by the unconscious mind and can be vocalized later even if the speakers are not aware of the concepts consciously.
But Goldin-Meadow is honing in on a further aspect of gesture and speech, one that has fascinating implications for why we gesture. As she puts it, “If you gesture, it lightens your cognitive load.” By that, she means that it takes less mental effort to speak while gesturing. She goes on, “We don’t really know why that is. We just know that it is.”
It’s a mystery, but the implications are important. You need to gesture. If you don’t, you’re making your brain work much harder.