You have probably received this advice at some point: stand still, keep your hands at your sides, don't distract your audience with unnecessary movements. It sounds professional. It sounds controlled. It is also completely backwards.
The truth is that restricting your gestures does not make you look more polished. It makes you dumber. Literally. When you suppress your natural hand movements, you are robbing your brain of a cognitive tool it depends on to think clearly and speak fluently.
The Research
Susan Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues at the University of Chicago have spent decades studying the cognitive function of gesture. Their research reveals something remarkable: gesturing is not just for the audience's benefit. It is for yours.
In one elegant experiment, participants were asked to explain math problems while simultaneously holding a list of unrelated words in memory. Some participants were allowed to gesture freely. Others were instructed to keep their hands still.
The results were decisive. Participants who gestured while explaining remembered significantly more words from the memory task than those who kept their hands still. The physical act of gesturing did not consume cognitive resources. It created them.
Why This Happens
Your brain has a limited working memory capacity. This bottleneck explains why complex ideas feel hard to articulate. You are simultaneously retrieving vocabulary, constructing sentences, monitoring your audience, and holding your overall argument in mind. When any of these demands spike, something has to give.
Gesturing provides an escape valve. By using your hands to represent spatial or conceptual information, you "offload" that information onto your motor system. Your hand rising to indicate "increase" or moving outward to show "expansion" carries meaning that your verbal system no longer needs to encode.
This mechanism explains why speakers who are prevented from gesturing often become more dysfluent. Their vocabulary simplifies. Their sentence structures become less complex. The act of suppressing movement does not free up resources. It consumes them, leaving less capacity for the core task of speaking.
The Learning Advantage
The cognitive benefits of gesture do not stop at working memory. Cook and Goldin-Meadow extended this research to learning and retention, studying children as they learned new mathematical concepts.
Children who gestured while learning retained the knowledge significantly better over time. The benefit appeared immediately and was maintained in follow-up tests. Gesturing creates what researchers call a secondary memory trace. The movement itself encodes information in the motor system, providing an additional pathway for later retrieval.
When your brain tries to recall the concept, it has two routes instead of one: the verbal memory and the motor memory of the accompanying gesture. This dual encoding explains why gestured information sticks better than verbal-only learning.
Practical Applications
1. Stop Suppressing Your Natural Movements
If your hands want to move while you speak, let them. That urge is not a nervous habit to overcome. It is your brain recruiting your motor system for cognitive support. Fighting it makes you less articulate, not more professional. Your natural gestures evolved for a reason.
2. Use Iconic Gestures for Key Concepts
When you want your audience to remember a specific point, associate it with a distinct, purposeful movement. The dual coding of verbal and motor information creates a stronger memory trace for both you and your listeners. A hand rising for "growth," spreading apart for "expansion," or coming together for "convergence" reinforces meaning through multiple channels.
3. Rehearse with Full Physical Movement
When practicing a speech or presentation, do not just move your mouth. Move your body. The motor engrams you create during rehearsal provide an additional recall pathway during delivery. Your gestures can literally remind you of your next point. This is especially valuable for longer presentations where memory load is highest.
The Bottom Line
The advice to control your hands and stand perfectly still is not just dated. It is the opposite of what the science shows. Gesturing makes you smarter in the moment by freeing cognitive resources. It makes your message stick by creating motor memory traces that persist long after you stop talking. And it makes your delivery more natural because you are working with your brain instead of against it.
The next time someone tells you to keep your hands still, remember that they are asking you to speak with half your brain tied behind your back.
Put This Into Practice
Your gestures are not nervous habits to eliminate. They are cognitive tools that make you a clearer, more memorable speaker.