Recently, I read through an article in Educational Psychology Review. It is titled Learning from Gesture: How Our Hands Change Our Minds. It is a great open access article. I’ve been reading The Experience Machine by Andy Clark. This book clued me into the research in this area which has led me to read more about human gestures and learning.
Simply put, human gesturing plays a huge part in human learning and communication. One can consider the ways in which our hands operate while we are speaking. Such gesturing is an extension of our cortical patterns involved in learning. We learn by hearing sounds, such as by hearing the words of a teacher. It appears that hand gesturing extends our capacity for learning which involves a completely different realm of sensory input (vision, touch, etc.). For example, the authors of the paper point out (see my gesture there!) that children who have a disconnect between their gestures and oral understanding of a concept tend to benefit from more instruction about that concept.
Children who are introduced to a moral concept and then subsequently gesture more appear to have significant awareness of complex nuances when moral issues are discussed.
There are so many metaphysical ideas to consider in the setting of gesturing and the human experience. The brain might have a conscious experience that is purely subjective while raising one’s hand in celebration is a concordant objective experience in time and space. Thus, the subjective and objective experience are united as one — brain and hand, for example. The objective moving of the hand even appears to open up memory resources of the brain while one is speaking.
It is even more fascinating to consider that when an individual’s spoken expression is combined with their gesturing, the combined effect improves comprehension of the listener.
This human comprehension of listening and seeing in unison involves the rods, cones, and ganglia of the retina; the cochlea and cranial nerve VIII of the ears; the speed of sound (about 343 meters per second in air); and the speed of light (299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum). Thus, the human experience involves (1) time and (2) what we perceive involving all of our senses. Human exactness of experience will never be perfect due to constraints of sound and light in the limitations of time. We will never experience the exact NOW.
Also, in the setting of our hands and fingers being involved in gesturing, we have to think about how our hands interact with the environment — enclosed in a room or interacting outside; temperature; humidity; and air pressure. The molecules at the tips of our fingers must necessarily interact with the air molecules of the environment while our hands / fingers move or wave or our vocal cords produce sound waves. The air moves. Sounds are made. Light is absorbed. From both a philosophical and theoretical perspective, the atoms, molecules, skin bacteria, and a human entity all experience every gesturing event. The human experiencing of learning can be extended to the idea of panexperientialism. Panexperientialism suggests that some degree of consciousness (although I would rather stick with “some degree of experience”) occurs at all levels of reality.
Panexperientialism suggests that all of reality from the singular electron to the universe as a whole experiences. What you do when you interact with others around you is an experience. If you express hate, then those around you experience hate. If you express love or kindness, then those around you experience love or kindness. If “love of other” is an act of creativity (which I strongly believe), then kindness, understanding, and a potenital goal for novelty in all Creation can be acheived even if it is at the level of one quark.
God certainly experiences what we are doing when we communicate orally and physically. This concept is the theological basis of panexperientialism. God does not force, even for the good. However, God may lure for the good which has the potential for creativity. God never forces. God does lure.
So, teaching others well, both objectively and subjectively, is good. Learning, both objectively and subjectively, is good. We need to use our human forms to aim for the good while realizing our limited humanity in time and space means that we will sometimes fail.
image created by Meta AI
Phi-The-Sci: Equilateral Musings 