Our earliest tools are our bodies. Our hands raise and turn and toss and carry and push and pull, our legs walk and climb and kick allowing us to move and act in the world and to create the multitude of artifacts that improve our lives. The list of actions made by our hands and feet and other parts of our bodies is long. What is more remarkable is we turn those actions in the world into actions on thought through gestures, language, and graphics, thereby creating cognitive tools that expand the mind. The focus here is gesture; gestures transform actions on perceptible objects to actions on imagined thoughts, carrying meaning with them rapidly, precisely, and directly. We review evidence showing that gestures enhance our own thinking and change the thought of others. We illustrate the power of gestures in studies showing that gestures uniquely change conceptions of time, from sequential to simultaneous, from sequential to cyclical, and from a perspective embedded in a timeline to an external perspective looking on a timeline, and by so doing obviate the ambiguities of an embedded perspective. We draw parallels between representations in gesture and in graphics; both use marks or actions arrayed in space to communicate more immediately than symbolic language.

中文翻译：

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思维工具：手势改变时间观念

我们最早的工具是我们的身体。我们的双手举起、转动、折腾、搬运、推拉，我们的双腿行走、攀爬和踢腿，使我们能够在世界上移动和行动，并创造出大量改善我们生活的人工制品。我们的手脚和身体其他部位的动作清单很长。更值得注意的是，我们通过手势、语言和图形将世界上的这些行为转化为思想行为，从而创造出扩展思维的认知工具。这里的重点是手势；手势将可感知物体上的动作转化为想象思想上的动作，快速、准确、直接地携带意义。我们回顾了表明手势增强了我们自己的思维并改变了他人的想法的证据。我们在研究中说明了手势的力量，这些研究表明手势独特地改变了时间概念，从连续到同时，从连续到循环，从嵌入时间线的视角到查看时间线的外部视角，并通过这样做避免嵌入视角的模糊性。我们在手势表示和图形表示之间进行比较；两者都使用排列在空间中的标记或动作来比符号语言更直接地进行交流。