Some quotes that explain his thinking about the power of reading body language which he defines as those fleeting unconscious signals we all send off

Quotes From Visible Thought by Geoffrey Beattie

( Routledge 2003)

“I will argue that (the movements of the arms and hands) provide us with a glimpse of our hidden unarticulated thoughts”

Of course there have been books on body language in the past but they tend to focus on slow behaviours”

How do we identify the very brief facial expressions, which flit across the human face in interaction? What about the very quick movement of the hands and arms?

Big Brother constitutes and rich source of multi layered interaction

Voluntary or deliberate facial, movements, like false smiles, are controlled by the cerebral hemispheres and show an asymmetry in their expression on the face as a result of this. Involuntary facial movements that reflect real emotion, such as genuine smiles are controlled by lower or more primitive areas of the brain.

The hands represent the human mind in action. They provide us with a window on the human mind, where we can glimpse some of the unarticulated thinking that goes along with speech.

The claim that human beings use two separate languages (verbal and gestural) each with its own function may simply not be correct

We can, potentially discriminate between unconscious movements produced naturally by the brain and those that are produced consciously or deliberately by television presenters or people ‘acting’ in every day life.

Sapir argues for the existence of a collective unconscious, that is a set of rules or grammar, which everyone applies in bodily expression without being able to make the rules explicit.

Hewes presents a coherent argument that the first form of language must have been gestural in form

Different types of gesture

Iconic-gestures whose form displays a close relationship to the meaning of the accompanying speech

Metaphoric-gestures that are essentially pictorial but the content depicted here is an abstract idea rather than a concrete object or event

The Beat-movements that look as though they are beating out musical time.

Some people seem to miss out on the gesture channel completely. Others are tuned to it and quite unconsciously the process this important information along with speech itself. The differences between the amounts of information received (between the two) are quite staggering.

Through hand movements people quite unconsciously and unwittingly display their inner thoughts and their ways of understanding events in the world

Gesture-speech communications (i.e. the combination of the two) are remembered better. In everyday natural communication speakers spontaneously generate images to accompany their talk. Thereby through this activity they are helping to encode the content of the speech into the memory of another person