98. Darwin and the origins of the head shake

Why is there such a strong cross-cultural tendency for lateral head movements, i.e. head shakes, to signify negation? (Note: Lateral negation is not a universal. In some cultures, negation is done by a quick backward head movement as if withdrawing.) Here is what Charles Darwin proposed in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872):

With infants, the first act of denial consists in refusing food; and I repeatedly noticed with my own infants, that they did so by withdrawing their heads laterally from the breast, or from anything offered them in a spoon. In accepting food and taking it into their mouths, they incline their head forwards.

Like a lot of just so stories, Darwin's has a certain first-blush plausibility. To my knowledge, nobody has suggest a different account, though I'd be very interested to hear about it if I'm wrong. Another, perhaps more basic, curiosity: why is it the head that is recruited for negation and affirmation? Why not some other part of the body?

97. Foot and mind

Some people without hands gesture with their feet. Friend and colleague Isabel Galhano Rodrigues did an in-depth case study of an armless man, which she presented at last year's International Gesture Studies Conference (and, more recently, at our very own GGSD!). Not coincidentally, Isabel was also the one to recently send me some clips of Adriana Macias, a woman with no arms and a considerable YouTube presence. What is striking about such cases is how natural the gestures look, how hand-like the feet can be when pressed into service. As I watch this video, my brain very quickly forgets its a foot she's gesturing with:



I actually like this second video better, despite its lower production values:



Aside from their obvious shock-factor, foot gestures in the congenitally armless raise important questions for cognitive scientists. How is fine motor control with the feet represented neurally? How do the degrees of freedom of the human foot constrain gesture production? Does gesture always serve the same cognition-lubricating function, regardless of which limbs are used?

It deserves mention that people with arms also gesture with their feet, albeit rarely and less fluidly. I mentioned such an example in an earlier post, and I'll re-post the clip below as a point of comparison:

96. GGSD @ UCSD

It's an exciting time to be a gesture researcher in Southern California.

Rafael Núñez and I have recently put together a new research group, Gesture Group San Diego, which has generated a lot of early interest and enthusiasm. The website for the group is here. (Yes, I realize that our acronym, GGSD, is already in use by the Geotechnical and Geoenviromental Software Directory.) We're meeting every other week while UCSD classes are in session. Last meeting we had a talk on pointing by John Haviland, and our schedule for the rest of the quarter includes presentations by Carol Padden, Adam Kendon, and Chris Johnson.

95. Inaugural gestures

The inaugural address was a stirring speech, well-crafted and well-delivered, the sparkling centerpiece of a day we won't forget. But let's be frank: Obama's inaugural gestures were repetitive and uninspired. I invite you to watch again for yourself:



He relies heavily on two gestures, using them over and over without obvious concern for nuances of context. The first is the 'sky point', a gesture I have written a lot about previously (first here, and then later here here here):

His second trusty gestural standby is a species of the well-known precision grip gesture (discussed before in this post). In Obama's version, the hand is balled in a fist, but the thumb and index finger are made to touch:




It's truly sad to see a man with such obvious oratorical gifts have the creativity coached out of his hands. But I don't mean to unfairly single out Obama: all American politicians in recent memory seem to have been taught to curb their manual enthusiasm behind the podium. To get a sense of how Obama gestures in a more natural face-to-face setting, take a look at the video of his appearance on David Letterman.

94. MLK's head movements

It occurred to me that I hadn't watched a video of Martin Luther King speak in a long while. His skills as an orator are well-known, of course, but I don't recall much being made specifically of his gestures. (More often he is praised for the biblical heft of his words, his deeply metaphorical style of argumentation, the rich yet plain-spoken imagery, the quality and pacing and strength of his voice.) In the "I Have a Dream" speech (see video of the full version below), MLK does very little with his hands.



The most common speech-related movement he makes in this speech is a lateral head shake, sometimes quite subtle. What's interesting here is that these head shakes are not (or, at least not always) head shakes of negation. They seem to be something else, and I'm inclined to think there is something distinctly preacherly about them. Of course, they could also be something more idiosyncratic, a trademark rhetorical gesture of MLK's.

A good example of these kinds of non-negative head movements begins at 3:45 in the video. Dr. King says: "... all men— yes, black men as well as white men." As he says "all men" there is a quick lateral head quiver, and as he says "black men as well as white men" there is a full-blown head shake.

Happy MLK day!

93. Cultivating manly grace

At the Museum of Jurassic Technology last month I stumbled on this classic (or at least quite old) book, Great speeches and how to make them (1911) by Grenville Keiser. (Keiser, as you already know, is author of other almost-classics like How to argue and win and How to develop power and personality in speaking,). In his chapter on 'Gesture and action' (pg. 92-100), Keiser offers the following advice:

1. A speaker should cultivate manly grace of movement at all times.
2. The hands when not in use should be dropt at the sides.
3. The student may practise at home, but never before an audience.
4. The knees should be kept straight.
5. It is objectionable to slap the hands audibly together.
6. Gestures, if too frequent, lose force.
7. The hands should not be rested on the hips, nor placed in the pockets.
8. To rise on the toes is likely to have a ludicrous effect.
9. The proper gesture and action are largely determined by the subject and occasion.
10. All stiffness should be avoided.
11. When the arms move in curves they give the impression of ease and grace.
12. The feet must be kept firmly on the floor.
13. It is well not to use the index hand too much-- this is, the hand with forefinger extended. Audiences do not like to be admonished.
14. The head and body should move together.
15. When the chest is held high and full, it gives manliness to the speaker's attitude.
16. The walk to the platform should be reasonable slow and dignified.
17. It is not necessary to bow, except to acknowledge unusual recognition from the audience.
18. If the chin is elevated it may given an unfavorable impression of pride or arrogance.
19. When two gestures are made in quick succession, one should, if possible, glide into the other.
20. Both arms are used for intensity, breadth, appeal, or unusual energy.
21. A change of standing position should not be made during a pause, but while speaking.
22. The manner of the speaker will best recommend itself to an audience by being modest and natural.
23. A speaker should never lean or lounge while on the platform.
24. Looking down suggests lapse of memory or shyness.
25. If a bow is used, it should a slight bending from the waist, not from the head.

See also an earlier post on gesture prescriptivism.

92. Gesturing while driving

California just passed legislation prohibiting texting while driving (see story). I know of no legislation in the works to prohibit gesturing while driving, though this is quite prevalent. Here's an example recorded over the holidays (note the Christmas music in the background) of my brother driving and simultaneously telling a story about summer camp. I made this recording with my point-and-shoot digital camera, and he had no idea he was being video-ed.



One cool thing about this sequence is how he shifts perspectives so fluidly, from the perspective of the other player, to his own perspective, to that of the onlookers. This perspective-shifting is managed in some places with changes in posture. I also like the parts where both hands are off the wheel simultaneously. Yikes.

When I told my brother afterward that I got good candid footage of him gesturing while driving, he said: "What do you mean gesturing? Shouldn't I have been driving?"

91. Face-to-face strolling

Jonah Lehrer recently posted about research on different kinds of strollers and their health benefits. It turns out that though most strollers face forward so that the child sees the world and not the caretaker, this is not the best for the child. In a pretty massive study comparing world-facing (WF) to caretaker-facing (CF) strollers, researchers found that the CF kids had more conversations, more laughter, lower heart rates, and fell asleep faster than their WF counterparts. Wowsers! You can download a PDF of the research report here.

In the comments on Lehrer's post, readers mused about a comparison between slings and strollers. Slings offer tactile intimacy, which seems to be really important developmentally. (I'm thinking of the classic wire monkey studies, as well as the stuff on co-sleeping by McKenna.) I'm not sure that slings afford mutual gaze.

** On a skeptical note, this research does not seem to have (yet) been subjected to the rigors of peer review.

90. Human Interaction 101

It looks like I will be teaching an undergraduate seminar at UCSD this summer titled 'Human Interaction'. (I wanted to call it 'Talking Bodies'; then 'Face-to-Face Interaction'. Both were rejected in favor of the rather innocuous sounding but descriptive title above.) I'm out-of-my-socks stoked. Over the next few months I will be using this blog to share some of my ideas about what I will teach. I would be most gratitudinous for any feedback.

The skinny: we learn to be human by interacting with others face to face. That much I take to be uncontroversial. But as a coherent, stand-alone topic human interaction has sort of fallen through the disciplinary cracks. (It's not exactly linguistics. Or psychology. Or sociology. Or anthropology.) So, here is what I am imagining for topics:

1. Conversation. Things like: speech acts, participant roles, assessments, back-channel, turn-taking, repairs, etc.

2. Proximity and posture. Things like: the arrangement of bodies in space, cross-cultural proxemics, postural sway, body position as narrative device, close-talking, etc.

3. Gaze. Things like: the morphology of the human eye, social gaze in other species, mutual gaze, gaze and language structure, etc.

4. Facial expression and affect. Things like: putative human universals a la Paul Ekman, Darwin's notion of antithesis, eye-brow flashes, facial recognition areas, shrugging, laughter, etc.

5. Head movements. Things like: nodding and shaking the head, head movements as a narrative device, etc.

5. Verbal and gestural deixis. Things like: verbal deixis in cross-linguistic perspective, metaphorical dimensions of deictic reference, pointing in man and the animals, lip-pointing, etc.

6. Gesture. Things like: history of gesture studies, difference between gesture and sign language, gesture classification, evolution of gesture, metaphorical gesture, etc.

7. Discourse marking. Things like: "oh", "so", "actually", "well", "alright", "I mean", etc.

8. The material world. Things like: environmentally coupled gestures, maps and charts, collaborative work, etc.

So those eight topic areas constitute the first, say, two thirds of the course. The idea is to first assemble an analytical toolkit and then, in the second part of the course, consider some case studies of conceptualization-in-interaction. I am considering the following as case-studies:

(a) Talking about space
(b) Talking about time
(c) Talking about persons
(d) Talking about perceptual, cognitive, emotional, spiritual experience
(e) Greetings
(f) Questions

Again, this is a first pass at the organization of the course and suggestions are most welcome. In particular, if anyone has taught, taken, or heard of a similar course, I would love to see syllabi. Also, right now I am planning to just assemble a course-reader rather than assign a textbook, but if anybody knows of a textbook that might be appropriate I'm all ears.

A major goal of mine is to make the course a pluralist smorgasbord. By pluralist I'm pretty sure I mean: cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, and cross-species. As in: What can neuroscience teach us about human faces? Or literature? How do chimpanzees use gaze? What about other primates? How have people studied gesture in laboratory settings? If we look closely at cases of, for instance, radically isolated deaf speakers in Papua New-Guinea, what can we learn about human interaction more generally? And on and on.

89. Nabokov on Time

As you may have noticed, this blog has a central question: Why do creatures like us talk like we do? As you may or may not have mused, this invites a follow-up question: How would creatures unlike us talk? Creatures with eighteen fingers instead of ten. Or with eyes on their derriers. Or who see in five-dimensional colorspace. What metaphors would they use? How would they carve up the world around them?

Nabokov apparently thought about these questions. There's a passage in Ada where he muses (through the narrative device of an over-wrought academic tract) about the human experience of time, and how it is rooted in our particular perceptuo-anatomico apparatuses:

The irreversibility of Time (which is not heading anywhere in the first place) is a very parochial affair: had our organs and orgitrons not been asymmetrical, our view of Time might have been ampitheatric and altogether grand, like ragged night and jagged mountains around a small, twinkling, satisfied hamlet.

Cultures everywhere construe time as one-dimensional space. In fact, time-as-unidimensional-space is currently under consideration as a cross-cultural universal. What Vlad suggests here is that this fact has everything to do with the organization of our bodies. We have eyes in the front, not the back; we locomote effectively forward, less effectively backward. If our heads were ringed round with eyes, and if moved smoothly every which way, maybe Time would be something "ampitheatric."