September 30, 2023 • 35 mins
Ever wondered how our hand movements not only express our thoughts but also shape them? Our guest, Dr. Susan Golden Meadow, is an expert in the fascinating world of gestures, and she's here to unravel their powerful role in communication, thinking, and learning. The magic of nonverbal cues is at your fingertips, from learning to navigate misdirection in conversations to understanding how parents create a unique communicative context for their kids.
We're diving straight into the heart of Susan's vast research, starting from her early fascination with the structured gestures of deaf children that intriguingly mirror the structure of language. Ponder over the captivating science behind how gestures can shape our thoughts and the unique ways in which our hands can be used to deceive others. Plus, we're offering a glimpse of Susan's upcoming projects and how her research has evolved over time.
To wrap things up, we're exploring some deep reflections on what it means to be human and the unexpected ways in which our hands help us relax. We're also talking about the fascinating process our brains undergo when we pair speech with gestures. Join us as we journey from the intimate dynamics of family communication to the wider social implications of gestures. Whether you're an academic, a student, or simply someone curious about the power of nonverbal communication, this episode has something for everyone.
We're diving straight into the heart of Susan's vast research, starting from her early fascination with the structured gestures of deaf children that intriguingly mirror the structure of language. Ponder over the captivating science behind how gestures can shape our thoughts and the unique ways in which our hands can be used to deceive others. Plus, we're offering a glimpse of Susan's upcoming projects and how her research has evolved over time.
To wrap things up, we're exploring some deep reflections on what it means to be human and the unexpected ways in which our hands help us relax. We're also talking about the fascinating process our brains undergo when we pair speech with gestures. Join us as we journey from the intimate dynamics of family communication to the wider social implications of gestures. Whether you're an academic, a student, or simply someone curious about the power of nonverbal communication, this episode has something for everyone.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Pushing Boundaries, a podcast about
pioneering research,breakthrough discoveries and
unconventional ideas.
I'm your host, Dr Thomas RVerny.
My guest today is Dr SusanGolden Meadows, distinguished
Service Professor in theDepartment of Psychology and in
(00:23):
the Department of ComparativeHuman Development at the
University of Chicago.
She has authored fourextraordinary books Neurons to
Neighborhoods that I wouldreally like to hear more about
later, resilience of Language,hearing, gesture and Her Latest
(00:45):
Thinking with your Hands theSurprising Science Behind how
Gestures Shape Our Thoughts.
I love this title.
By the way, may I call youSusan.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Thank you, and you may call me Thomas, of course.
In addition, Susan editedLanguage in Mind, advances in
the Study of Language andThought, in Collaboration with
D'Andre Gentner, and ProfessorGolden Meadows is currently the
president of the CognitiveDevelopment Society and also the
(01:21):
editor of a new journal.
Is that wrong?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
That's wrong.
I'm no longer the president andI'm no longer the editor, but I
did start the journal.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Okay, so we'll edit that.
So she started the journal.
Okay, Welcome, Susan.
I understand that one of yourprimary interests lies in
gestures, role in communicating,thinking and learning.
Have I got that right?
Speaker 2 (01:51):
You've got that right .
Speaker 1 (01:52):
I got that right.
Okay, so you seem to have thisinterest started while you were
an undergraduate at Smith'sCollege.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Some of it did.
Yes, I've always beeninterested in language.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Okay, so can you tell me a little bit more about your
beginnings at Smith's Collegeand then you went to Geneva, a
little bit about how sort of yougot into this line of work.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
So at Smith.
Smith is very close to theClark School for the Deaf and we
would visit it occasionally forclasses and Clark School for
the Deaf is an oral school.
It's still an oral school wherethey teach deaf children to
speak, and some children coulddo it, others could not.
(02:37):
But what was really strikingabout the kids is that they
would all generate gesturesbehind the teachers back and
they would communicate with eachother and that was sort of well
known in the deaf community.
So I found that fascinating andI ended up exploring that for
my dissertation at Penn.
(02:58):
But before then I went toGeneva on my junior year abroad
and discovered Piaget anddiscovered psychology and
discovered observing the realworld and so I started to again
study language but I didn'treally get into gesture until I
came back and did mydissertation at the University
(03:21):
of Pennsylvania working withLila Gliedman and Heidi Feldman.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Right, and you said that these children developed
gestures on their own.
Did they copy other children'sgestures or did they develop
their own?
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Well, that's an interesting question for those
kids.
I don't know what I did for mydissertation.
I studied six individualchildren deaf children of
hearing parents in thePhiladelphia area, and those
children developed them on theirown because they didn't know
one another.
So it was just the deaf childin a sea of hearing people and
(03:59):
would develop these gestures.
And the interesting thing aboutthe gestures is that they are
structured.
They're structured likelanguage, so they look like
language.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
So when you say structured, can you explain that
a little bit?
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2 (04:14):
So they are not miming.
So, for example, if I wanted toask you for an apple, I might
do a whole event of picking upan apple, eating an apple and
just trying to explore, show youand acting it.
But that's not what they do.
What they do would be to pointat the apple and then do eat, to
(04:40):
indicate that that's what theywould like to have happened.
And so they have individualgestures that are sort of like
beads on a string and they areordered.
So, for example, when I talkabout, or when the children
would talk about, objects andactions on them, they'd point at
the or indicate the objectsfirst and then do the action.
(05:00):
If they want to talk aboutgiving something to themselves,
they do the action and thenpoint at themselves, and that
was pretty uniform across allthe children.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
I understand.
So it becomes an abstraction ina sense, like it starts with
concrete things like eating anapple, 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 (05:26):
Yeah, those are.
That's a good question.
The kids.
I studied the children whenthey're little and so
abstractions like that weredifficult, but there are adult.
These kids are called homesigners because they sign at
home.
They invent their own gesturesystems, but adult home signers,
(05:47):
my guess is, can developabstractions of that sort.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
So I believe that at the moment, like in the present,
you are studying like speakingchildren, like children who have
hearing and speech Right, andso can you tell me a little bit
more about that part of yourresearch?
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Well, yes, I got into that in part because I needed
to understand how differentthese children, these deaf
children's, gestures were fromthe gestures that their parents
would create or their gesturesthat other children would use.
So I started to study thegestures that adults use when
(06:34):
they talk and children use whenthey talk.
So it was almost as a controlfor what the deaf children do.
The deaf children do somethingquite, quite different from what
we all do when we talk, thegestures that we produce when we
talk.
So I have studied that in bothchildren and in adults and in
learning situations, and I'mvery interested in the gestures.
(06:54):
They look very different fromhome sign.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
How are they different?
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Well, they are what you're used to.
They're sort of fluid.
They aren't beads on a string.
They don't have systematicorder because they're not little
parts like that.
So they look much less likelanguage and more like a
pictorial array.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Yes, yes.
So what really fascinated meabout your research was the fact
that you said that gesturesshape our thoughts, so I wonder
whether you could say a littlebit more about that.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
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 yousome evidence for that.
But the evidence that we havefor gesture shaping our thoughts
is when we tell children togesture or adults to gesture,
(07:59):
that changes the way they learn.
So they learn more quickly ifthey're gesturing than if
they're not gesturing.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Yes, yes.
And what is your research onthat?
Can you tell me a little bitmore about the research?
Well, we have the evidence.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Right we.
It's just that we give childrenmath problems and some of those
math.
Some of the children are askedto gesture and do particular
movements as they learn andothers are told just to do it in
speech.
So there's children who are ingesture and speech and children
doing it just speech.
And the kids who do gesture andspeech learn much more quickly
(08:43):
than the kids who are doingspeech alone.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
And what gestures?
Do you actually prescribe thegestures, or do they just invent
them or generate them on theirown?
Speaker 2 (08:53):
We've done it both ways.
We've told children if we'redoing a math problem, then you
know.
We have pointed these twonumbers and then pointed the
blank and tell the children todo that, or we have just said
okay, the next time you describethis problem, I want you to
move your hands.
And that works too.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
So would you say you know to the general public that
using gestures will improvetheir memories of the situation?
I guess that they are in.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
We have some evidence to suggest that if you describe
something and gesture whileyou're doing it, you are more
likely to remember it.
It's not a big effect, but youare more likely to remember it.
But action is like that too.
I mean, there's evidence thatif you act while you're in the
moment, likely that will improveyour memory.
(09:52):
So memory is one component ofwhat gesture does.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
So the more senses actually you use, the more the
memory will be inscribed in yourwhatever brain.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Yeah, that's one way of thinking about it, and people
have actually said that, forsure.
But I think gesture is doingsomething more than that.
I think it's not just yetanother modality, and the reason
I think that is because signersgesture, and when signers
gesture, they're using the samemodality.
They're using their hands to dosign language and they're using
(10:26):
their hands to gesture, andgesture has the same effect for
signers as it does for speakers,so it's not just two modalities
.
What I think it really is isit's two ways of representing
information.
So language is very categorical, hierarchical rule, governed,
and we know all of that quitespontaneously.
(10:47):
Gesture actually is much moreimagistic and it sort of fills
in the gaps that language leaves.
So there are two differentforms of representation produced
simultaneously, which I thinkis important and that actually
helps.
It seems to help us think.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
When I was, when I was studying at university, I
would find that if I made notesto myself and then I summarized
my notes, I would remember itmuch better than I just read
without making notes.
So, in a sense, making notesand using your hands and your
(11:26):
body and visual, tactile, allthat, have you compared that
with gestures, like thedifference, let's say, between
writing down something and justgesturing while you're talking?
Speaker 2 (11:43):
No, because I mean we haven't been and memory is not
my.
The focus of what my sense isthe way we study memory two ways
actually.
One is that we've asked peopleto either just describe a
phenomenon and gesture, and thenthey remember it better, or we
just let them gesture or not andthey remember it better, but we
(12:06):
haven't compared it.
I'm not arguing that gesture isbetter or worse than anything.
I was trying to do it Gesturedoes.
The other thing we have found isthat if you gesture while you
speak, while you explainsomething, that sort of lightens
your cognitive load.
You are, which is surprising ina way, because when you're
gesturing along with your speech, you're doing two things rather
(12:29):
than one and you think thatwould be more weighty.
But in fact it is up cognitionand so it makes it so that you
can remember more other things.
So it lightens your load, whichI find very interesting, and I
think the reason it does that isbecause gesture and speech are
such an integrated system.
You don't have to think togesture, you just gesture and it
(12:52):
comes spontaneously.
Blind people who have neverseen anybody gesture they're
congenerally blind gesturenonetheless, so it's a pretty
robust process.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
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 worldgestures are kind of discouraged
.
You're not supposed to speakwith your hands.
And people like I live inCanada, you live in the United
(13:28):
States, kind of look down onpeople 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, whichwould be more like Southern
European cultures Spanish,italian, greece.
Have you noticed a differencebetween people, well, nations,
(13:52):
cultures that use gestures, asopposed to those that don't?
Speaker 2 (13:57):
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 Europeansfind that in fact everybody
gestures and they gesture atroughly the same rates.
What's really different is howbig you gesture, whether you're
sort of out there, I mean, ifyou're big, much more noticeable
(14:19):
.
What also differs is the numberof emblems that you have,
things like thumbs up or an okayor a check.
Some cultures have many, manyand some have fewer.
But those aren't the kind ofgestures that I'm interested in.
I'm interested in thespontaneous ones that you create
(14:40):
on the fly as you talk, andthere every culture does it.
Some cultures do it morequietly and others big, but it
happens in all cultures, evencultures that don't think you
should be gesturing.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
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 (15:07):
Well, the first discovery that we made that
children produce information orconvey information with their
hands and their speech came froma task that we gave children is
a Piagetian task calledconservation of water.
You pour water from onecontainer.
You have two containers, havethe same amount of water for
(15:29):
this container out into a flatdish and the water looks
different and children of acertain age think it is
different.
They say it's a differentamount of water because you
poured it, but some childrenwill say it's different and
they'll say the same informationfor their hands and their mouth
.
It's different because thisone's tall and this one's short,
(15:51):
and basically you're talkingabout height in both, but other
children will say it's differentbecause this one's tall and
this one's short.
Okay, so the second one isconveying information about
width, and if you're ever goingto understand that the amount of
water really hasn't changed,you're going to have to
(16:12):
understand that height and widthcompensate for one another,
that there are two dimensions tolook at here.
So the child who does this andtalks about height is, in fact,
further along in thinking aboutthis, but you can't find it in
his mouth, it's coming out ofhis hands.
And so when we found childrenlike that and we give them
(16:32):
instruction, they are likely tolearn the task, the concept of
conservation.
So it's the children who havethis extra information in their
gestures who are on theprecipice of learning.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Very interesting.
You say in your book that thetime is ripe to take advantage
of our hands.
How can we do that?
Speaker 2 (16:56):
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 ofmy graduate students is doing a
lovely study now on socialevaluation, but she's found that
(17:19):
sometimes people will say well,men and women are equally good
as leaders.
But they'll say men and womenare equally good as leaders.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Doesn't look like equal.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
No, it doesn't look like equal, and so they've sort
of given away the ghost here.
But I don't think they evenrecognize it.
They don't realize it.
So sort of realizing it,realizing what we're saying with
our hands sometimes can be veryhelpful.
Also realizing where we get theinformation from somebody else.
(17:52):
So if I see you doing that, Imay assume you're.
You know you're pretty sexist,but you didn't sound it.
You did what you said wasperfectly okay.
But, I still got the impressionthat you're sexist and I got it
from your hands and I shouldknow where I got it from.
(18:14):
It might enlarge ourconversation.
It might help us to know wherewe're getting ideas about people
and to even talk about ourgestures.
We can do that.
Wait a minute.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
It's another way of sort of judging or being aware,
sensitive to the other person,because there's so many
nonverbal ways that peoplecommunicate and very often the
nonverbal is much more truer,much more to the point.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Sometimes yes, and what?
Speaker 1 (18:51):
people say right.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Right, right, right, and I think we do naturally make
use of that information.
We always do that, but we don'talways know where it's coming
from.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Right, so we call it intuition or a gut feeling.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Right, right, and it may be a little bit more than a
gut feeling that the person Iinvaded with his hands or her
Right.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
Was there anything in your own background that you
think contributed to yourinterest in the subject?
Speaker 2 (19:21):
I don't think so really.
I just got very.
I've always been interested inlanguage and communication and I
really got into the idea ofhands from the deaf children I
studied because that was thebest way to study where language
comes from, without a languagemodel, because these children
are making up their own language.
So I got the hands through thissort of this way to approach
(19:47):
the emergence of language andthen it just grew when I became
interested in gestures that wetalk.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Were there any obstacles in your development of
this interest in language thatyou had to overcome Any
opposition from professors orfamily?
Speaker 2 (20:07):
No, no, I think I learned in Geneva how to observe
Piaget.
I did take a couple of coursesfrom Piaget when I was there.
I was really lucky and he's oneof the best observers of people
and children that I've evercome in contact with.
(20:29):
He was amazing, so I learnedhow to look.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
And when.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
I came back to the United States and went to
graduate school.
Lyle Gleitman was also reallyinterested in this question of
language emergence, and so webegan to study this.
Nobody really objected to it.
They weren't sure to do it.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
So, along the way, did you make any mistakes?
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Oh, always.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
I mean, how did you correct them?
Speaker 2 (21:01):
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 outare all these movements language
?
What do we mean by language?
And we had to figure out whatthese, which movements were the
(21:25):
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 stuffand over time we would get a
sense of what was important,what was recurring, what was the
structure of these systems.
So have thrown out coding, many,many coding systems.
(21:47):
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 andwe know we've captured it.
This is an assumption when wecan find something systematic in
(22:10):
what the children are doing,whether and we were guided by
what other children do whenthey're learning language from
hearing people or from signingpeople.
So the development of languagewas what guided us.
We were looking to see whetherthe deaf children would do
things and say things like kidswho are learning spoken language
(22:31):
or sign language.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Well, what is language?
How do you, how do you definelanguage?
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Well, you know, in a way, what we did was we avoided
the question.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
That's what we yes.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
By just.
You know, everybody will assumethat what young children are
doing when they're opening theirmouths or signing with their
hands is copying the language orlearning the language, not just
copying the language from theirparents.
And so what we did in comparingour deaf kids to hearing kids
and signing kids, was to sayokay, whatever you think they're
(23:16):
doing, our kids are doing ittoo, or they're not doing it
either way.
But we found a lot ofsimilarities.
So, rather than take on thevery difficult question of what
is language, we assumed thatwhatever it is that young
children do when they start tocommunicate with their parents
(23:38):
and their friends and whateverof these deaf children are doing
that too.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Right, so what's your next project?
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Well, we're still looking at the deaf children,
going back to the old videotapesto try to see whether the
parents are not.
They don't create gestures thatlook like home signs, but they
do respond to the children'sgestures and they make it.
(24:10):
They make a communicativesituation for the children.
Now, they don't respond in a,so it's not like they shake
their heads yes for one orderand not for another.
It's not that gross.
But what we're trying to do isto see whether there are subtle
pieces of information that theparents are giving the children
(24:32):
and in that way, at leastproviding a nice context,
communicative context, withinwhich the children can grow.
And then we'll again comparethat to hearing kids who are
learning spoken language fromtheir parents.
So we're moving on with that.
But we're also looking atwhat's going on in the brain
(24:53):
when we produce these gesturesalong with speech.
You know we I'm very, veryinterested in what happens if
we're really saying one thingwith our hands and something
different with our mouths.
What's going on in our brainsat that moment?
So we are trying to use ethners, which allows you to both talk
(25:16):
move while you and talk whileyour brain is being imaged to
see if we can figure out whatthat is, and then we're going to
figure out what that statelooks like.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
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 (25:35):
Sure, we have.
Actually, I have a colleague,Greg Norman, with whom I'm
working, and we have littlephysio belts that we've put on
kids as they're learning.
Good yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Good, good, good good .
Do you recall?
Do you recall a child or anadult that you have worked with
that sort of changed your mindin some significant way, made an
(26:08):
impression?
Speaker 2 (26:09):
I remember a child who I was called in to observe.
He was a child who was bornwith his organs on the outside
of his body and he lived in thehospital for months and months
and months and months.
I don't even know what happenedto this child, but he was sort
of in a bubble and he had atrach and whatever, and he
(26:31):
created gestures in the same waythat, in a way that the deaf
child did.
I think his gestures looked alittle different because he was
hearing language and so he wascreating the gestures in that
way, but he was a child thatreally struck me.
I mean, this is a way that wecan communicate with our hands.
(26:51):
If you cannot use your mouth,you will use your hands to
communicate.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Right, that makes sense.
Yes, so in terms of your ownpersonal experiences, what is
your most vivid childhood memory?
Speaker 2 (27:11):
My most vivid childhood memory yes.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
What stands out when you look back on your childhood?
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Wait, this is not relevant to my.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
No, it's not.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
But seeing my mother in the hospital when she had
breast cancer.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Oh yes.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
That was a big one.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
And how did you react to that?
What do you remember about it?
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Being pretty frightened.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
And how old would you have been I?
Speaker 2 (27:46):
was around 10.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
And did your mother recover?
Speaker 2 (27:50):
She did, and she lived till 93 and died of
something else.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
Fantastic Good.
So you have some good genes.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
I hope so.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
I hope so too.
So, speaking of your mother,did your parents understand your
work?
Did they support it?
Speaker 2 (28:09):
They certainly supported it.
I don't know how much theyreally got into the.
Yeah, the person who reallysupported my work was my husband
.
He was a great supporter andalways listened to me talk about
my science and it was terrific.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Do you have children?
Yes, and do any of them followin your footsteps?
Speaker 2 (28:32):
They don't.
Well, they're mostly.
My husband was a doctor.
I have two doctors and one ITguy, but they're all what they
are is they're great teachers.
They love explaining things topeople, but they're not
academics.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Okay, so, speaking of academics, who would you say
are the two or three mostinfluential people in your
academic career, people who haveinfluenced you the most in your
academic life?
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Well, one was my advisor who recently died, lila
Glipman.
She was the person with whom Ibegan the deaf studies.
Yes, and she just was anamazing person.
She worked until the day shedied.
She was writing an abstract inthe hospital.
She just was amazing.
(29:35):
So she was a great inspiration.
And, of course, from afar,piaget he was not I didn't work
intimately with him, but justsort of having that experience
when I was very young, I was 18.
Yes, I was influencing.
It influenced me.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
What's the best compliment you ever received?
Speaker 2 (30:05):
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.
(30:26):
I don't like to up-skate if Ican avoid it.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
So if you won $100 million in a lottery, how would
you spend it?
Speaker 2 (30:39):
Oh, I'd set up a study.
We have a Center for Gesture,sign and language here at the
University of Chicago and it istremendously underfunded.
Okay, okay.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
People out there listen to this.
Yes.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
So I do that for future students and faculty.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Very good, very good.
Okay, so is there somethingthat you have found that people
misunderstand about you?
About me or about you, not yourresearch, but about you
personally.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
I don't feel very misunderstood.
No, no, I don't.
No, maybe I'm an open book.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
I'm kind of suspicious of people who say I'm
an open book because I say itmyself sometimes.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
You know, my whole work shows that there are things
in us that we don't evenrecognize are there.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
That's right.
What's the best advice you everreceived?
Speaker 2 (31:53):
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 youlove, that you have a passion
for.
I mean, I feel very fortunatein that the work that I do is
(32:16):
not even work.
It's just fun for me.
I will do it forever if I can.
I don't care even whether I getpaid for it.
It's really just enjoyable todo this, and that is, it's a
gift.
It's a real gift.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Well, I'm sure you inspire a lot of people with
your work.
It certainly is quiteremarkable.
I would like to know, if I may,how do you relax?
Speaker 2 (32:54):
That's a good question, isn't it?
There are a few things I dophysically, you know, if I can,
I like to cross country ski, Ilike to, I like to windsurf and
things like that, but of courseyou need the wind and you need
the snow in order to do that.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Right, so, and Chicago is a pretty windy city,
so I guess that would work.
Okay, so my last question iswhat does being human mean to
you?
Speaker 2 (33:31):
I think for me it's having relations with people and
helping people andunderstanding people and
relating to people.
That's what being human is forme.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Well, I would certainly support that.
Thank you so much.
This has been inspiring,interesting, fascinating.
Remember, Listeners, pleaseremember the books that I've
just mentioned, Especially thelast one which I'm looking up
(34:11):
now.
Yes, here we are Thinking withyour hands the surprising
science behind how gesturesshape our thoughts.
I really I love that book.
It's a great book.
It has a lot of really, reallyinteresting information in it,
and I would just like to saythat my guest in two weeks time
(34:34):
will be Steven Gillen Hall, filmand television director, writer
and producer.
We shall talk about Steven'smost recent documentary,
Uncharitable.
Dr David Ho, Time Magazine manof the year 1996 and former
president of Harvard University,has said of this film, and I
quote what scales with nonprofitorganization have to achieve to
(35:00):
eradicate the great socialproblems that confront us and
how do our traditions andbeliefs about charity stand in
their way?
So that's in two weeks time andonce again, thank you, Susan.
I wish you continued success inyour studies and teachings.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
Take care, bye, bye.
This is Pushing Boundaries, a podcast about
pioneering research,breakthrough discoveries and
unconventional ideas.
I'm your host, Dr Thomas RVerny.
My guest today is Dr SusanGolden Meadows, distinguished
Service Professor in theDepartment of Psychology and in
(00:23):
the Department of ComparativeHuman Development at the
University of Chicago.
She has authored fourextraordinary books Neurons to
Neighborhoods that I wouldreally like to hear more about
later, resilience of Language,hearing, gesture and Her Latest
(00:45):
Thinking with your Hands theSurprising Science Behind how
Gestures Shape Our Thoughts.
I love this title.
By the way, may I call youSusan.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Thank you, and you may call me Thomas, of course.
In addition, Susan editedLanguage in Mind, advances in
the Study of Language andThought, in Collaboration with
D'Andre Gentner, and ProfessorGolden Meadows is currently the
president of the CognitiveDevelopment Society and also the
(01:21):
editor of a new journal.
Is that wrong?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
That's wrong.
I'm no longer the president andI'm no longer the editor, but I
did start the journal.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Okay, so we'll edit that.
So she started the journal.
Okay, Welcome, Susan.
I understand that one of yourprimary interests lies in
gestures, role in communicating,thinking and learning.
Have I got that right?
Speaker 2 (01:51):
You've got that right .
Speaker 1 (01:52):
I got that right.
Okay, so you seem to have thisinterest started while you were
an undergraduate at Smith'sCollege.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Some of it did.
Yes, I've always beeninterested in language.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Okay, so can you tell me a little bit more about your
beginnings at Smith's Collegeand then you went to Geneva, a
little bit about how sort of yougot into this line of work.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
So at Smith.
Smith is very close to theClark School for the Deaf and we
would visit it occasionally forclasses and Clark School for
the Deaf is an oral school.
It's still an oral school wherethey teach deaf children to
speak, and some children coulddo it, others could not.
(02:37):
But what was really strikingabout the kids is that they
would all generate gesturesbehind the teachers back and
they would communicate with eachother and that was sort of well
known in the deaf community.
So I found that fascinating andI ended up exploring that for
my dissertation at Penn.
(02:58):
But before then I went toGeneva on my junior year abroad
and discovered Piaget anddiscovered psychology and
discovered observing the realworld and so I started to again
study language but I didn'treally get into gesture until I
came back and did mydissertation at the University
(03:21):
of Pennsylvania working withLila Gliedman and Heidi Feldman.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Right, and you said that these children developed
gestures on their own.
Did they copy other children'sgestures or did they develop
their own?
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Well, that's an interesting question for those
kids.
I don't know what I did for mydissertation.
I studied six individualchildren deaf children of
hearing parents in thePhiladelphia area, and those
children developed them on theirown because they didn't know
one another.
So it was just the deaf childin a sea of hearing people and
(03:59):
would develop these gestures.
And the interesting thing aboutthe gestures is that they are
structured.
They're structured likelanguage, so they look like
language.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
So when you say structured, can you explain that
a little bit?
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2 (04:14):
So they are not miming.
So, for example, if I wanted toask you for an apple, I might
do a whole event of picking upan apple, eating an apple and
just trying to explore, show youand acting it.
But that's not what they do.
What they do would be to pointat the apple and then do eat, to
(04:40):
indicate that that's what theywould like to have happened.
And so they have individualgestures that are sort of like
beads on a string and they areordered.
So, for example, when I talkabout, or when the children
would talk about, objects andactions on them, they'd point at
the or indicate the objectsfirst and then do the action.
(05:00):
If they want to talk aboutgiving something to themselves,
they do the action and thenpoint at themselves, and that
was pretty uniform across allthe children.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
I understand.
So it becomes an abstraction ina sense, like it starts with
concrete things like eating anapple, 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 (05:26):
Yeah, those are.
That's a good question.
The kids.
I studied the children whenthey're little and so
abstractions like that weredifficult, but there are adult.
These kids are called homesigners because they sign at
home.
They invent their own gesturesystems, but adult home signers,
(05:47):
my guess is, can developabstractions of that sort.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
So I believe that at the moment, like in the present,
you are studying like speakingchildren, like children who have
hearing and speech Right, andso can you tell me a little bit
more about that part of yourresearch?
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Well, yes, I got into that in part because I needed
to understand how differentthese children, these deaf
children's, gestures were fromthe gestures that their parents
would create or their gesturesthat other children would use.
So I started to study thegestures that adults use when
(06:34):
they talk and children use whenthey talk.
So it was almost as a controlfor what the deaf children do.
The deaf children do somethingquite, quite different from what
we all do when we talk, thegestures that we produce when we
talk.
So I have studied that in bothchildren and in adults and in
learning situations, and I'mvery interested in the gestures.
(06:54):
They look very different fromhome sign.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
How are they different?
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Well, they are what you're used to.
They're sort of fluid.
They aren't beads on a string.
They don't have systematicorder because they're not little
parts like that.
So they look much less likelanguage and more like a
pictorial array.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Yes, yes.
So what really fascinated meabout your research was the fact
that you said that gesturesshape our thoughts, so I wonder
whether you could say a littlebit more about that.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
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 yousome evidence for that.
But the evidence that we havefor gesture shaping our thoughts
is when we tell children togesture or adults to gesture,
(07:59):
that changes the way they learn.
So they learn more quickly ifthey're gesturing than if
they're not gesturing.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Yes, yes.
And what is your research onthat?
Can you tell me a little bitmore about the research?
Well, we have the evidence.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Right we.
It's just that we give childrenmath problems and some of those
math.
Some of the children are askedto gesture and do particular
movements as they learn andothers are told just to do it in
speech.
So there's children who are ingesture and speech and children
doing it just speech.
And the kids who do gesture andspeech learn much more quickly
(08:43):
than the kids who are doingspeech alone.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
And what gestures?
Do you actually prescribe thegestures, or do they just invent
them or generate them on theirown?
Speaker 2 (08:53):
We've done it both ways.
We've told children if we'redoing a math problem, then you
know.
We have pointed these twonumbers and then pointed the
blank and tell the children todo that, or we have just said
okay, the next time you describethis problem, I want you to
move your hands.
And that works too.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
So would you say you know to the general public that
using gestures will improvetheir memories of the situation?
I guess that they are in.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
We have some evidence to suggest that if you describe
something and gesture whileyou're doing it, you are more
likely to remember it.
It's not a big effect, but youare more likely to remember it.
But action is like that too.
I mean, there's evidence thatif you act while you're in the
moment, likely that will improveyour memory.
(09:52):
So memory is one component ofwhat gesture does.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
So the more senses actually you use, the more the
memory will be inscribed in yourwhatever brain.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Yeah, that's one way of thinking about it, and people
have actually said that, forsure.
But I think gesture is doingsomething more than that.
I think it's not just yetanother modality, and the reason
I think that is because signersgesture, and when signers
gesture, they're using the samemodality.
They're using their hands to dosign language and they're using
(10:26):
their hands to gesture, andgesture has the same effect for
signers as it does for speakers,so it's not just two modalities
.
What I think it really is isit's two ways of representing
information.
So language is very categorical, hierarchical rule, governed,
and we know all of that quitespontaneously.
(10:47):
Gesture actually is much moreimagistic and it sort of fills
in the gaps that language leaves.
So there are two differentforms of representation produced
simultaneously, which I thinkis important and that actually
helps.
It seems to help us think.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
When I was, when I was studying at university, I
would find that if I made notesto myself and then I summarized
my notes, I would remember itmuch better than I just read
without making notes.
So, in a sense, making notesand using your hands and your
(11:26):
body and visual, tactile, allthat, have you compared that
with gestures, like thedifference, let's say, between
writing down something and justgesturing while you're talking?
Speaker 2 (11:43):
No, because I mean we haven't been and memory is not
my.
The focus of what my sense isthe way we study memory two ways
actually.
One is that we've asked peopleto either just describe a
phenomenon and gesture, and thenthey remember it better, or we
just let them gesture or not andthey remember it better, but we
(12:06):
haven't compared it.
I'm not arguing that gesture isbetter or worse than anything.
I was trying to do it Gesturedoes.
The other thing we have found isthat if you gesture while you
speak, while you explainsomething, that sort of lightens
your cognitive load.
You are, which is surprising ina way, because when you're
gesturing along with your speech, you're doing two things rather
(12:29):
than one and you think thatwould be more weighty.
But in fact it is up cognitionand so it makes it so that you
can remember more other things.
So it lightens your load, whichI find very interesting, and I
think the reason it does that isbecause gesture and speech are
such an integrated system.
You don't have to think togesture, you just gesture and it
(12:52):
comes spontaneously.
Blind people who have neverseen anybody gesture they're
congenerally blind gesturenonetheless, so it's a pretty
robust process.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
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 worldgestures are kind of discouraged
.
You're not supposed to speakwith your hands.
And people like I live inCanada, you live in the United
(13:28):
States, kind of look down onpeople 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, whichwould be more like Southern
European cultures Spanish,italian, greece.
Have you noticed a differencebetween people, well, nations,
(13:52):
cultures that use gestures, asopposed to those that don't?
Speaker 2 (13:57):
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 Europeansfind that in fact everybody
gestures and they gesture atroughly the same rates.
What's really different is howbig you gesture, whether you're
sort of out there, I mean, ifyou're big, much more noticeable
(14:19):
.
What also differs is the numberof emblems that you have,
things like thumbs up or an okayor a check.
Some cultures have many, manyand some have fewer.
But those aren't the kind ofgestures that I'm interested in.
I'm interested in thespontaneous ones that you create
(14:40):
on the fly as you talk, andthere every culture does it.
Some cultures do it morequietly and others big, but it
happens in all cultures, evencultures that don't think you
should be gesturing.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
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 (15:07):
Well, the first discovery that we made that
children produce information orconvey information with their
hands and their speech came froma task that we gave children is
a Piagetian task calledconservation of water.
You pour water from onecontainer.
You have two containers, havethe same amount of water for
(15:29):
this container out into a flatdish and the water looks
different and children of acertain age think it is
different.
They say it's a differentamount of water because you
poured it, but some childrenwill say it's different and
they'll say the same informationfor their hands and their mouth
.
It's different because thisone's tall and this one's short,
(15:51):
and basically you're talkingabout height in both, but other
children will say it's differentbecause this one's tall and
this one's short.
Okay, so the second one isconveying information about
width, and if you're ever goingto understand that the amount of
water really hasn't changed,you're going to have to
(16:12):
understand that height and widthcompensate for one another,
that there are two dimensions tolook at here.
So the child who does this andtalks about height is, in fact,
further along in thinking aboutthis, but you can't find it in
his mouth, it's coming out ofhis hands.
And so when we found childrenlike that and we give them
(16:32):
instruction, they are likely tolearn the task, the concept of
conservation.
So it's the children who havethis extra information in their
gestures who are on theprecipice of learning.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Very interesting.
You say in your book that thetime is ripe to take advantage
of our hands.
How can we do that?
Speaker 2 (16:56):
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 ofmy graduate students is doing a
lovely study now on socialevaluation, but she's found that
(17:19):
sometimes people will say well,men and women are equally good
as leaders.
But they'll say men and womenare equally good as leaders.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Doesn't look like equal.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
No, it doesn't look like equal, and so they've sort
of given away the ghost here.
But I don't think they evenrecognize it.
They don't realize it.
So sort of realizing it,realizing what we're saying with
our hands sometimes can be veryhelpful.
Also realizing where we get theinformation from somebody else.
(17:52):
So if I see you doing that, Imay assume you're.
You know you're pretty sexist,but you didn't sound it.
You did what you said wasperfectly okay.
But, I still got the impressionthat you're sexist and I got it
from your hands and I shouldknow where I got it from.
(18:14):
It might enlarge ourconversation.
It might help us to know wherewe're getting ideas about people
and to even talk about ourgestures.
We can do that.
Wait a minute.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
It's another way of sort of judging or being aware,
sensitive to the other person,because there's so many
nonverbal ways that peoplecommunicate and very often the
nonverbal is much more truer,much more to the point.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Sometimes yes, and what?
Speaker 1 (18:51):
people say right.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Right, right, right, and I think we do naturally make
use of that information.
We always do that, but we don'talways know where it's coming
from.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Right, so we call it intuition or a gut feeling.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Right, right, and it may be a little bit more than a
gut feeling that the person Iinvaded with his hands or her
Right.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
Was there anything in your own background that you
think contributed to yourinterest in the subject?
Speaker 2 (19:21):
I don't think so really.
I just got very.
I've always been interested inlanguage and communication and I
really got into the idea ofhands from the deaf children I
studied because that was thebest way to study where language
comes from, without a languagemodel, because these children
are making up their own language.
So I got the hands through thissort of this way to approach
(19:47):
the emergence of language andthen it just grew when I became
interested in gestures that wetalk.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Were there any obstacles in your development of
this interest in language thatyou had to overcome Any
opposition from professors orfamily?
Speaker 2 (20:07):
No, no, I think I learned in Geneva how to observe
Piaget.
I did take a couple of coursesfrom Piaget when I was there.
I was really lucky and he's oneof the best observers of people
and children that I've evercome in contact with.
(20:29):
He was amazing, so I learnedhow to look.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
And when.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
I came back to the United States and went to
graduate school.
Lyle Gleitman was also reallyinterested in this question of
language emergence, and so webegan to study this.
Nobody really objected to it.
They weren't sure to do it.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
So, along the way, did you make any mistakes?
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Oh, always.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
I mean, how did you correct them?
Speaker 2 (21:01):
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 outare all these movements language
?
What do we mean by language?
And we had to figure out whatthese, which movements were the
(21:25):
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 stuffand over time we would get a
sense of what was important,what was recurring, what was the
structure of these systems.
So have thrown out coding, many,many coding systems.
(21:47):
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 andwe know we've captured it.
This is an assumption when wecan find something systematic in
(22:10):
what the children are doing,whether and we were guided by
what other children do whenthey're learning language from
hearing people or from signingpeople.
So the development of languagewas what guided us.
We were looking to see whetherthe deaf children would do
things and say things like kidswho are learning spoken language
(22:31):
or sign language.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Well, what is language?
How do you, how do you definelanguage?
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Well, you know, in a way, what we did was we avoided
the question.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
That's what we yes.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
By just.
You know, everybody will assumethat what young children are
doing when they're opening theirmouths or signing with their
hands is copying the language orlearning the language, not just
copying the language from theirparents.
And so what we did in comparingour deaf kids to hearing kids
and signing kids, was to sayokay, whatever you think they're
(23:16):
doing, our kids are doing ittoo, or they're not doing it
either way.
But we found a lot ofsimilarities.
So, rather than take on thevery difficult question of what
is language, we assumed thatwhatever it is that young
children do when they start tocommunicate with their parents
(23:38):
and their friends and whateverof these deaf children are doing
that too.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Right, so what's your next project?
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Well, we're still looking at the deaf children,
going back to the old videotapesto try to see whether the
parents are not.
They don't create gestures thatlook like home signs, but they
do respond to the children'sgestures and they make it.
(24:10):
They make a communicativesituation for the children.
Now, they don't respond in a,so it's not like they shake
their heads yes for one orderand not for another.
It's not that gross.
But what we're trying to do isto see whether there are subtle
pieces of information that theparents are giving the children
(24:32):
and in that way, at leastproviding a nice context,
communicative context, withinwhich the children can grow.
And then we'll again comparethat to hearing kids who are
learning spoken language fromtheir parents.
So we're moving on with that.
But we're also looking atwhat's going on in the brain
(24:53):
when we produce these gesturesalong with speech.
You know we I'm very, veryinterested in what happens if
we're really saying one thingwith our hands and something
different with our mouths.
What's going on in our brainsat that moment?
So we are trying to use ethners, which allows you to both talk
(25:16):
move while you and talk whileyour brain is being imaged to
see if we can figure out whatthat is, and then we're going to
figure out what that statelooks like.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
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 (25:35):
Sure, we have.
Actually, I have a colleague,Greg Norman, with whom I'm
working, and we have littlephysio belts that we've put on
kids as they're learning.
Good yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Good, good, good good .
Do you recall?
Do you recall a child or anadult that you have worked with
that sort of changed your mindin some significant way, made an
(26:08):
impression?
Speaker 2 (26:09):
I remember a child who I was called in to observe.
He was a child who was bornwith his organs on the outside
of his body and he lived in thehospital for months and months
and months and months.
I don't even know what happenedto this child, but he was sort
of in a bubble and he had atrach and whatever, and he
(26:31):
created gestures in the same waythat, in a way that the deaf
child did.
I think his gestures looked alittle different because he was
hearing language and so he wascreating the gestures in that
way, but he was a child thatreally struck me.
I mean, this is a way that wecan communicate with our hands.
(26:51):
If you cannot use your mouth,you will use your hands to
communicate.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Right, that makes sense.
Yes, so in terms of your ownpersonal experiences, what is
your most vivid childhood memory?
Speaker 2 (27:11):
My most vivid childhood memory yes.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
What stands out when you look back on your childhood?
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Wait, this is not relevant to my.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
No, it's not.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
But seeing my mother in the hospital when she had
breast cancer.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Oh yes.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
That was a big one.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
And how did you react to that?
What do you remember about it?
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Being pretty frightened.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
And how old would you have been I?
Speaker 2 (27:46):
was around 10.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
And did your mother recover?
Speaker 2 (27:50):
She did, and she lived till 93 and died of
something else.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
Fantastic Good.
So you have some good genes.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
I hope so.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
I hope so too.
So, speaking of your mother,did your parents understand your
work?
Did they support it?
Speaker 2 (28:09):
They certainly supported it.
I don't know how much theyreally got into the.
Yeah, the person who reallysupported my work was my husband
.
He was a great supporter andalways listened to me talk about
my science and it was terrific.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Do you have children?
Yes, and do any of them followin your footsteps?
Speaker 2 (28:32):
They don't.
Well, they're mostly.
My husband was a doctor.
I have two doctors and one ITguy, but they're all what they
are is they're great teachers.
They love explaining things topeople, but they're not
academics.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Okay, so, speaking of academics, who would you say
are the two or three mostinfluential people in your
academic career, people who haveinfluenced you the most in your
academic life?
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Well, one was my advisor who recently died, lila
Glipman.
She was the person with whom Ibegan the deaf studies.
Yes, and she just was anamazing person.
She worked until the day shedied.
She was writing an abstract inthe hospital.
She just was amazing.
(29:35):
So she was a great inspiration.
And, of course, from afar,piaget he was not I didn't work
intimately with him, but justsort of having that experience
when I was very young, I was 18.
Yes, I was influencing.
It influenced me.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
What's the best compliment you ever received?
Speaker 2 (30:05):
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.
(30:26):
I don't like to up-skate if Ican avoid it.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
So if you won $100 million in a lottery, how would
you spend it?
Speaker 2 (30:39):
Oh, I'd set up a study.
We have a Center for Gesture,sign and language here at the
University of Chicago and it istremendously underfunded.
Okay, okay.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
People out there listen to this.
Yes.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
So I do that for future students and faculty.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Very good, very good.
Okay, so is there somethingthat you have found that people
misunderstand about you?
About me or about you, not yourresearch, but about you
personally.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
I don't feel very misunderstood.
No, no, I don't.
No, maybe I'm an open book.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
I'm kind of suspicious of people who say I'm
an open book because I say itmyself sometimes.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
You know, my whole work shows that there are things
in us that we don't evenrecognize are there.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
That's right.
What's the best advice you everreceived?
Speaker 2 (31:53):
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 youlove, that you have a passion
for.
I mean, I feel very fortunatein that the work that I do is
(32:16):
not even work.
It's just fun for me.
I will do it forever if I can.
I don't care even whether I getpaid for it.
It's really just enjoyable todo this, and that is, it's a
gift.
It's a real gift.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Well, I'm sure you inspire a lot of people with
your work.
It certainly is quiteremarkable.
I would like to know, if I may,how do you relax?
Speaker 2 (32:54):
That's a good question, isn't it?
There are a few things I dophysically, you know, if I can,
I like to cross country ski, Ilike to, I like to windsurf and
things like that, but of courseyou need the wind and you need
the snow in order to do that.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Right, so, and Chicago is a pretty windy city,
so I guess that would work.
Okay, so my last question iswhat does being human mean to
you?
Speaker 2 (33:31):
I think for me it's having relations with people and
helping people andunderstanding people and
relating to people.
That's what being human is forme.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Well, I would certainly support that.
Thank you so much.
This has been inspiring,interesting, fascinating.
Remember, Listeners, pleaseremember the books that I've
just mentioned, Especially thelast one which I'm looking up
(34:11):
now.
Yes, here we are Thinking withyour hands the surprising
science behind how gesturesshape our thoughts.
I really I love that book.
It's a great book.
It has a lot of really, reallyinteresting information in it,
and I would just like to saythat my guest in two weeks time
(34:34):
will be Steven Gillen Hall, filmand television director, writer
and producer.
We shall talk about Steven'smost recent documentary,
Uncharitable.
Dr David Ho, Time Magazine manof the year 1996 and former
president of Harvard University,has said of this film, and I
quote what scales with nonprofitorganization have to achieve to
(35:00):
eradicate the great socialproblems that confront us and
how do our traditions andbeliefs about charity stand in
their way?
So that's in two weeks time andonce again, thank you, Susan.
I wish you continued success inyour studies and teachings.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
Take care, bye, bye.
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