Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

Learning from gesture: How our hands change our minds.

When people talk, they gesture, and those gestures often reveal information that cannot be found in speech. Learners are no exception. A learner's gestures can index moments of conceptual instability, and teachers can make use of those gestures to gain access into a student's thinking. Learners can also discover novel ideas from the gestures they produce during a lesson, or from the gestures th...

Opening: Our Networks, Our Lives

Using our hands to change our minds.

Jean Piaget was a master at observing the routine behaviors children produce as they go from knowing less to knowing more about at a task, and making inferences not only about how children understand the task at each point, but also about how they progress from one point to the next. This article examines a routine behavior that Piaget overlooked-the spontaneous gestures speakers produce as the...

Our Genes , Ourselves ?

Is he right? We in the United States seem to be of two minds. Most of us have an intuition that, although our genes provide advantages and constraints, we retain great control over our lives. But we are developing a second, competing intuition that, like it or not, our genes determine our abilities, our preferences, and our emotions. Perhaps this second intuition is what induced Rutgers Univers...

How gesture works to change our minds.

When people talk, they gesture. We now know that these gestures are associated with learning-they can index moments of cognitive instability and reflect thoughts not yet found in speech. But gesture has the potential to do more than just reflect learning-it might be involved in the learning process itself. This review focuses on two non-mutually exclusive possibilities: (1) The gestures we see ...