Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (22 page)

right position to make the critical movement at the right time). That way the gestures are perfectly timed with the speech, and together with the speech they form a complete whole. The two systems are perfectly coordinated.

The gestures also seem to be generated without any conscious awareness. When people are talking they will know that their hands have just done something, that they have made some movement, but if you ask them to make the same gesture again they find it very difficult to do this, or if you ask them what exactly the gesture was communicating, they will say ‘I have no idea.’ Many gestures contain a complex of different images: when asked to repeat the movement, speakers may make a stab at repeating one of these. They will know where in front of their body they made the movement but usually this is about the only thing that they will get exactly right (unlike speech itself, which we are pretty accurate at repeating and reproducing).

It may seem strange, considering the emphasis now placed by some psychologists on the imagistic gestures that speakers generate unconsciously while they talk, that until quite recently the historical view regarding such gestures was that they constituted a system very much secondary to speech, only really useful in noisy or difficult environments and not very accurate or precise (see Kendon 2004 for an overview).

My favourite story about the lack of precision and base inaccuracy of gestural communication involves the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854 during the Crimean War. The Heavy Brigade of cavalry led by General James Scarlett had made an uphill charge against the Russians in the plain of Balaklava. Five hundred British horsemen were pitted against three thousand Cossacks, but the Heavies prevailed after fierce fighting, and the Russians began to retreat. Lord Raglan, the Commanding Officer of the British forces, watched from the vantage point of the Sapoune Heights as the Russians started to escape back up the North Valley, pulling their cannon with them. Raglan sent a series of orders to Lord Lucan, the Commander of the Light Brigade, telling him to attack the guns that the Russians were attempting to pull away from either side of the valley. But the only guns that Lucan could see were the heavy gun emplacements a mile down the valley, and it would have been suicidal to attack these (see the excellent description in Cummins 2008:199).

An hour and a half passed with Lucan attempting to get clarification from Raglan and Raglan becoming more and more impatient. Finally, fed up, Raglan dictated a note that read in part: ‘Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front – follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy from carrying away the guns.’ The note was given to a captain Lewis Edward Nolan, one of the finest young cavalry officers in the British army … Riding pell-mell down the steep cliff to the valley, he arrived in front of Lucan and impatiently delivered the message to attack the Russian guns.

Angered by Nolan’s arrogance, Lucan replied: ‘Attack, sir? Attack what? What guns, sir?’ And Nolan, instead of pointing at the guns along the Causeway, flung his arm in the direction of the Russian emplacements a mile and a quarter down the valley: ‘There, my lord, is your enemy, there are your guns!’ (Cummins 2008:199)

It was Lucan’s brother-in-law, James Thomas Brudenell, the seventh Earl of Cardigan, who received the order from
Lord Lucan to lead the Light Brigade into the Valley of Death (an event, of course, immortalised in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’). Lucan was to follow with the Heavy Brigade. Cardigan was apparently heard to mutter, ‘Here goes the last of the Brudenells’ after he received his order. It was an extremely brave but foolhardy charge. Twenty minutes after the charge began only 195 out of 673 cavalrymen survived, and the whole thing would not have occurred without Captain Nolan’s infamous gesture.

The communication between Lords Raglan, Lucan and Cardigan was difficult for a number of reasons. They all had different perspectives on the valley: Raglan could see the whole thing unfold, Lucan and Cardigan could not see which guns Raglan was referring to. In addition, Lucan and Cardigan were feuding aristocrats (and feuding brothers-in-law who basically despised each other), so their relationship did not help the essential flow of the communication. So neither the physical nor what you might call the social context allowed for smooth communication here, and the whole communicational problem boiled down to what ‘the guns’ actually referred to. Nolan attempted to clarify ‘the guns’ with a gesture but the gesture was poorly formed, inaccurate and misconstrued (according to historical record). It was, thus, in many historians’ eyes, a single gesture that led to the Charge of the Light Brigade and the loss of so much life (as well as producing one of the most enduring and iconic images of the stiff upper lip of the British aristocracy in action, with Lord Cardigan leading his men bravely to what he thought was certain death, although he himself did survive).

So the historical view is that gestures are a poor form of communication, perhaps necessary in noisy or difficult environments (factories, talking to foreigners in one’s own language, heroic and tragic battles), but really only an add-on to speech, rather superfluous, and only really necessary when verbal language is itself stretched. The transformation of the way in which gestures are viewed began with the pioneering and influential work of David McNeill (1985). Through his careful and painstaking
analyses, McNeill demonstrated that this view is simply wrong. He showed that these gestures are an integral component of everyday communication in every context imaginable, a core part of the process of representing and communicating ideas, and in many ways every bit as significant as speech itself. He showed that if you want to understand a speaker’s underlying representation of an idea, then you need to hear the speech and see the gesture (the fact that our interpretation of the gestural information is done unconsciously is neither here nor there). He showed that it is only when the two channels are combined that the full message of the speaker is successfully conveyed (see also Beattie 2003).

Figure 11.3
shows a very simple example from McNeill (1992:13) that demonstrates some of the basic principles underlying this everyday communication, which involves both speech and gesture. What this example from a cartoon narration reveals is that within the speech itself there are details of the ‘action’, ‘the characters involved’ and ‘the concept of recurrence of a chase’, yet there is no mention of any weapon being used in the pursuit. However, the

‘she chases [him out again]’

Iconic: Hand gripping an object swings from left to right.

 

Figure 11.3
McNeill’s example of a simple action sequence.

Source: McNeill, D. (1992)
Hand and Mind. What Gestures Reveal About Thought
. With permission by University of Chicago Press.

gesture used alongside the speech portrays the weapon being brandished and communicates effectively why one character is running from another. Of course, the speaker could have said ‘she chases him out again with an umbrella’ but didn’t. It is as if the brain is sending the message about what needs to be communicated to the speech system and the gestural system simultaneously and, therefore, in order to understand the core message both the gesture and the sentence must be taken into account by the recipient of the message.

As McNeill (2000:139) says, ‘To exclude the gesture side, as has been traditional, is tantamount to ignoring half of the message out of the brain.’ The critical point is that if the receiver attends only to the speech, they will be missing out on this additional information. While the speech and gesture in this example are obviously connected in terms of their semantic content, they are not identical. As such, this gesture is said to be ‘complementary’ to speech (McNeill and Duncan 2000).

Although speech and gesture may communicate, they operate very differently as semiotic systems.
Figure 11.4
shows some pictures of a student talking about a table being raised towards the ceiling.

Once you start studying the sentence and the gesture, you can see some striking dissimilarities in how they function. Speech operates in a linear and segmented fashion, identifying what is being raised (‘the table’), the action (‘can be raised up’) and the direction of the action (‘towards the ceiling’), all sequentially in a linear and segmented way.

 

Figure 11.4
Gesture representing a table being raised towards the ceiling.

 

Figure 11.5
Multidimensional nature of the gesture.

The gesture is, however, multidimensional, representing the object, the movement, the speed and the direction simultaneously.

To understand speech we have to proceed in terms of bottom-up processing where we start with the individual words and interpret the meaning of words before trying to understand the sentence using both the word meanings and the syntax. Gesture operates much more in a top-down fashion. We need to understand that this particular gesture is representing a table moving upwards to be able to interpret that the hands wide apart are representing that it is a very large table and that the upward movement is telling us something about the speed of the movement of the table.

Speech also operates with individual words that have standards of form. If I use a word that you don’t recognise, you can ask me whether it is a proper word and what it means. But these gestures don’t have standards of form. They are not like sign languages of the deaf, nor are they like ‘emblems’, which are specifically coded gestural forms with a direct verbal translation (like the V sign meaning victory or the reverse V sign meaning f**k you). Both sign languages and emblems have standards of form: when

 

Figure 11.6
A famous V-sign: an emblem with standards of form.

Source: Bettmann-Corbis.