1 . When learning a foreign language, most people fall back on traditional methods: reading, writing, listening and repeating. But Brian Mathias’ research team found out that if you gesture with your arms while studying, you can remember the vocabulary better, even months later.

As Mathias describes, they had 22 German-speaking adults learn a total of 90 invented artificial words over four days. While the test subjects first heard the new vocabulary, they were shown a video of a person making a gesture that matched the meaning of the word. When the word was repeated, the subjects performed the gesture themselves. Five months later, they were asked to translate the vocabulary they had learned into German. Those who performed better on the task showed a higher level of activity in their motor cortex — the part of the brain that is responsible for our body movements. The researchers concluded that the motor cortex contributed to the translation of the vocabulary learned with gestures. The effect did not occur when the subjects were only presented with matching pictures instead of gestures.

Another research group led by Leipzig had young adults and eight-year-old children listen to new vocabulary for five days, paired with matching pictures or videos of gestures. After two months, the two methods were still tied. But after six months, the adults benefited more from the gestures than the pictures, while the children were helped equally by both.

But it is not only the motor component itself that promotes learning. The meaning conveyed by the gesture also figures in. “I think we underuse gesture in our classrooms,” Goldin-Meadow says. “Good teachers and good listeners use it, but not always in a systematic way. Others don’t necessarily bring it into the class — and it could be used more often and more effectively.”