Book review: Language Is Gesture by: David McNeill

[John F Sowa]

At Harvard, I was a graduate student in mathematics, but I also audited a course on psycholinguistics by David McNeill.  That was many years ago, but it had a strong influence on my 1983 book, Conceptual Structures.  Following is a review of his more recent book, which makes an important point about the intimate relationship between gestures and language.

I believe that relationship is as fundamental as the relationship betwen language and logic.  For AI, this implies that LLMs that deal with purely linguistic issues are inadequate for full language understanding.   The reasoning methods must take into account all sources of knowledge in addition to language -- that includes information in all sensory modalities -- visual, auditory, tactile, taste, odors, and every kind of feeling, imagination, and internal bodily sensations while awake or sleeping.

This issue has strong implications.  One of them is that immense amounts of language data are inadequate UNLESS accompanied by access to every other kind of sensation from the human brain, body, and IMAGINATION.

Following is a review of McNeill's recent book.  I have not read it, but the review summarizes many of the isses that I recall from his course and other books that he wrote.

John

___________

Linguist List:  Feb 23 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Review: Language Is Gesture: David McNeill (2025)

By Lauren Gawne [l.gawne at latrobe.edu.au]

Subject: Cognitive Science, Language Acquisition.

Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-2737

Publisher: MIT Press

http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Book URL: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262552912/language-is-gesture/

SUMMARY

Language is Gesture is a sustained exploration of McNeill’s concept of

the ‘Growth Point’, a cognitive underpinning for the deep link between

speech and gesture. This book starts at Chapter 1 with Beginning, but

in many ways this book starts in the middle of a conversation that

began in the 1980s when McNeill commenced his focus on the role of

gesture in spoken communication (McNeill 1992, 2005, 2012, 2016, inter

alia). 

This work has been fundamental to the conceptualisation of

Gesture Studies as an empirical field with observable and testable

phenomena. One of the major contributions of McNeill and his lab at

the University of Chicago has been the development of a standard

benchmark experimental task for exploring the relationship between

speech and representational iconic gestures. This task is the

retelling of Canary Row, a 1950 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies short,

and it has been the basis of many studies with different populations.

McNeill draws on this deep catalogue of work, some his own, some from

his lab and some from other teams, in the arguments put forward in

this book. I read a paperback print copy of this work. Commendably, an

Open Access version is also available through MIT press, either as a

whole monograph PDF or individual chapter PDFs. I read some small

sections electronically.

Beginning (Chapter 1) lays out the generally established observation

that gesture is an inseparable part of language and presents McNeill’s

argument that this deep synthesis of speech (or sign) and gesture is a

result of the “indivisible Gestalt” (p. 7) that he called the Growth

Point. The first half of this chapter is spent unpacking the

complexity of the utterance “drops it down the drain pipe” with an

accompanying iconic gesture. Readers of McNeill’s work will be

familiar with this example from three decades of his work; his habit

of revisiting this and other examples is a fact he acknowledges (p.

4). While this utterance is unpacked in detail there is an assumption

that the reader is familiar with the anatomy of gesture and the Canary

Row task origin of this example. In the second half of this chapter

McNeill summarises his argument that the Growth Point arises as part

of the end point in language acquisition. McNeill argues that there

are three stages of language acquisition. The first (Acquisition 1) is

speech for attainment, directing the attention of adults instinctively

from birth. The second stage (Acquisition 2) occurs around the first

year of life, and involves pantomime to act out communicative needs.

Acquisition 3 is the end stage of human cognitive development, with

the unity of speech and gesture, and gesture playing an "orchestrating

role" (p. 17). McNeill argues that children go through these stages of

development in the first four years of life in a recapitulation of the

evolution of human language and cognition. Laying out this argument in

the introduction is important, because the book does not also

recapitulate this set of developments in a linear approach.

Chapter Two outlines the Growth Point Facets. McNeill lists: dual

semiosis, dialectic, field of equivalents, psychological predicate,

synchrony, material carrier, irreducibility. Each of these is framed

as a process in themselves, so that Growth Points are a process of

processes. McNeill then demonstrates how different Growth Points are

active across four examples, walking through each element. In each of

these examples, we see the experience of the moment of speaking, a

specific experience McNeill refers to as BEING. In the appendix of the

chapter each of the elements of Growth Points is defined and

articulated.

The next three chapters are a single section in three parts, focusing

on Acquisition 3, “The Achievement”. Acquisition 3: The Achievement,

Part 1. Child Growth Points (Chapter 3), focuses on the earliest

phases of temporal and semantic unity between gesture and speech in

surface representation. For gesture and speech to synchronise in this

way, gestures need to be initiated in advance of their execution.

Drawing on video recordings from CHILDES (Forrester 2000) as well as

studies analysing child retellings of Canary Row, McNeill argues that

gesture is organising the speaker’s energy into speech, and that it is

gesture that shapes speech. This recurring theme is the driving force

behind the title of this book. This close analysis also allows McNeill

to provide more nuanced insight into the relationship between the

facets of the Growth Point. He argues that dual semiosis is the

“king-maker” (p. 52), being the earliest facet to develop and the

feature that demonstrates that Acquisition 3 has been reached. Dual

semiosis is the shorthand for the different ways gesture and speech

structure meaning, which McNeill has argued for in a sustained manner

across his career (McNeill 1985: p. 370; McNeill 1992: p. 41); gesture

does not have the same features of structure and composition that

speech/sign systems do, and this duality allows speech and gesture to

work together to make more complex meaning.

Acquisition 3: The Achievement, Part 2. Cohesion (Chapter 4) focuses

on cohesion, both in the specific execution of a single gesture/speech

unit, but also how a single gesture fits into the larger set of

gestures and the narrative context. This larger unit of analysis is

called a “catchment” (p. 64). This chapter draws on more adult

examples than Chapter 3, as well as discussion of classic studies in

child language acquisition that do not include gestural data. There is

one paragraph at the end of the chapter (p. 82) that speculates on the

development of catchments as part of the process of Acquisition 3 and

the higher-level cognitive development that is required for this

sophisticated feature of gesture use.

Acquisition 3: The Achievement, Part 3. Unpacking the Growth Point

into Speech (Chapter 5) expands on McNeill’s observation that it is

gesture leading speech. Again, this chapter starts mostly with

examples drawn from the literature on adults to explain the process of

unpacking, but does return to child language. There is a discussion of

inner speech, and an explanation of the way different facets of the

Growth Point do not need to be expressed in every context.

In Chapter 6 we take a step back to before Acquisition 3. Both

Acquisition 1 and Acquisition 2 are covered. Acquisition 1 is

observable from birth, encompassing both the coos and cries of the

newborn as well as the babbling that cooccurs with manual

articulation, including “quasi-ideophones” which are sounds used

regularly but not linked to meaning. This is then superseded by

Acquisition 2, which McNeill argues differs in that it refers to the

outside world (p. 111), drawing on pantomime to create meaningful

communication that lacks the complexity seen in Acquisition 3.

Chapter 7 focuses on “Words”, tracing words through the three stages

of acquisition as a lens on the recapitulation of language evolution.

This chapter ends with some hypothesising about literacy and the

manual act of learning to read by pointing at words.

Chapter 8 is called Maturation, and while it does look at some of the

cognitive maturation that goes into human language capacity, it also

looks more generally at the biological underpinnings and neural areas

that might be involved in Growth Point facets. This is framed around

what McNeill calls the "thought-language-hand brain link” that needs

to occur for Acquisition 3 to happen. There is also discussion of when

this link goes awry, drawing on McNeill’s research with corpus

colostomy patients and people with aphasia all retelling the events of

Canary Row. Human capacity for language is also situated in contrast

to non-humans, with a focus on bonobos and chimps.

Chapter 9 (Things to Come) looks at features of gesture and speech

that come later in language maturation. Acquisition 3 is when speech

and gesture are unified, but finessed coordination, as well as use of

beats, abstract deixis, emblems and metaphoric gestures, continues to

develop well into later childhood. McNeill gives timelines for most of

these phenomena but does not return to his opening question about why

emblems are prevalent in early communication but don't mature until

later.

Chapter 10 (Leaps to the Future) is the conclusion to the book,

looking to the future of McNeill’s argument and work rather than the

timeline of gesture development. Along with recapitulation of key

themes, there is a meditation on the iterative process of the writing

that McNeill took in the production of this monograph. There is also

an exploratory discussion of James's (1890) concept of ‘sciousness’, a

cognitive state where knowledge exists that is not in the

consciousness, and where McNeill argues the Growth Point lies.

EVALUATION

The themes and analysis in this book will be familiar to anyone who

has followed McNeill’s career. McNeill & Duncan (2000) is the first

sustained discussion of Growth Points, but they are referenced in

multiple places in McNeill (1992), and many of the topics addressed in

this book were raised as early as McNeill’s (1985) article. While

McNeill sees this book as the fifth in a series that began with

McNeill (1992), his 1979 book The Conceptual Basis of Language and

1987 book Psycholinguistics: A New Approach both included a whole

chapter that touches on similar concerns and show the same sustained

focus that McNeill brings to this latest work. The shift to focus on

acquisition and its relationship to evolution are later developments

evidenced in McNeill’s 2012 How Language Began, with a focus on

evolution, and 2016 Why We Gesture, with a focus on acquisition.

It’s a pity McNeill does not spend a little more time introducing the

reader to the experimental paradigm he has been so instrumental in

establishing. It means that the larger context of many examples is

unclear, and this approach also underplays McNeill’s major

contributions to Gesture Studies. The citations allow the reader to

piece together a remarkable breadth of data, but it does make this

harder to recommend to a reader just joining the conversation at this

point. It’s a disappointing contrast to McNeill’s fellow retired

Chicago professor Susan Goldin-Meadow’s Thinking with your Hands

(2023), which does a lovely job of situating key papers and

collaborators for a general audience.

As McNeill mentions in the concluding chapter, his process is a highly

iterative one, and this volume appears to bring some new observations

while revisiting established data. McNeill (2016) previously had

Acquisition 2 as the stage of gesture-speech cohesion, and so has

added nuance here with a three-stage process. There is also a more

detailed explanation of his belief (first articulated in 2012) that it

makes sense to consider acquisition a recapitulation of the origins of

language. There are also new perspectives on, or more space for more

detailed exploration of, existing examples. All of this means that

there should be ample testable hypotheses about the Growth Point, and

its place in acquisition and evolution, from the work in this book.

REFERENCES

Forrester, Michael. 2000. CHILDES English Forrester Corpus.

doi:10.21415/T5N31C

Goldin-Meadow, Susan. 2023. Thinking with your hands: the surprising

science behind how gestures shape our thoughts. New York: Basic Books.

James, W. 1890. The Princi­ples of Psychology. Holt.

McNeill, David. 1979. The conceptual basis of language. Hillsdale:

Lawrence Erlbaum.

McNeill, David. 1985. So you think gestures are nonverbal?

Psychological review 92(3). 350–371.

McNeill, David. 1987. Psycholinguistics: A new approach. New York:

Harper and Row.

McNeill, David. 1992. Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about

thought. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

McNeill, David. 2005. Gesture and thought. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

McNeill, David. 2012. How language began: gesture and speech in human

evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McNeill, David. 2016. Why we gesture: The surprising role of hand

movements in communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McNeill, David & Susan Duncan. 2000. Growth points in

thinking-for-speaking. In David McNeill (ed.), Language and gesture:

Window into thought and action, 141–161. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr. Lauren Gawne is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at La Trobe

University. Lauren’s current research focus is the cross-cultural

variation in emblem gesture use. Lauren also works on the grammar of

Tibeto-Burman languages, emoji use online and communicating

linguistics to a general audience. Lauren writes the blog Superlinguo

and co-hosts the Lingthusiasm podcast with Grechen McCulloch. Lauren

is the author of Gesture: A Slim Guide (2025, OUP).

[Barry Smith]

John

I agree with you that McNeill's work is of great importance, and that immense amounts of language data are indeed

inadequate UNLESS accompanied by access to every other kind of sensation from the human brain, body, and IMAGINATION.

This still leaves us with a puzzle, however. The ChatBot phone service provided by your local bank is still, after 70 years of experimentation, totally inadequate to its central purposes. However, human beings when talking to each other on the phone, seem to do very well even in the absence of most of the gestural and other signalling information pointed to by McNeill.  

With greetings

Barry

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[John F Sowa]

Barry,

I agree that the current chatbots for phone service are incompetent.  I almost always have to scream AGENT in order to get a human to answer.  But Wolfram has an excellent solution for his highly mathematical system:

1. Keep the precise technical language for absolute precision in controlling and communicating with the mathematical system.

2. Use the LLMs for what they do best:  translate languages, natural or artificial, to map English statements that also contain mathematical expressions to and from the very precise Wolfram notation.

3. But don't expect the human statement to be completely correct.  Translate each sentence from English to the formalism, and then translate that formal version back to English and ask "Is this what you mean?"

4. If the human says Yes, do the operation.  But if the human changes the English, go back to Step 2.

This iterative procedure often requires multiple cycles of steps 2 and 3.  But as the human gets more practice with the system, the communication becomes more efficient with fewer cycles of 2, 3, and 4.

I believe that a system like this would be far more effective for most users.  But the option of getting a human agent should always be available for newcommers and for very complex requests.

John

 

---

From: "Barry Smith" <ifo...@gmail.com>

[Barry Smith]

But if this is indeed a solution to what is commonly accepted a serious problem, why did no one implement it?

BS 

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[John F Sowa]

Barry,

There is a huge difference between a few cutting-edge special cases and widespread adoption of a general purpose solution.

Wolfram is a brilliant mathematician and logician who has defined a precise formal language for representing mathematical problems.  After the LLM technology became widely available, he and his group of mathematicians required about a year to develop a solution for the front end to their system.

But very few general-purpose telephone services have anything similar:  A precise formal internal language that can be mapped to and from English or other natural language.  And those that might be converted to something similar would require a great deal of R & D (1) to specify the formal internal language, (2) to map it to their mainstream operations, and (3) develop something similar to the interface that Wolfram & Co. developed.

Those are issues that our Permion Inc. has been working on.  But each project for each client that our company works with requires a considerable amount of time and effort.  It is definitely nontrivial.  That is an important part of our business. 

I believe that is the direction for the future.  Arun and I wil discuss the issues in our Ontology Summit session in April.  But there is a great deal to talk about, and implementing it in a general purpose product is a goal for the future..  

[Ravi Sharma]

John and Berry

There are many ways to describe Knowledge. Especially in the oldest Languages, such as Sanskrit. Vedic Sanskrit had 9 different Grammars that got evolved into Paninian Grammar and Ashtadhyayi.

Remember these were phonetic and therefore hearing based and did not have text till thousands of years later when writing happened. 

Hearing, seeing, assimilating (applying the mind to these two), and contemplating are some ways of understanding that knowledge.

For now, but  April 1 when Ram Sriram will take us to second session of ontology in Indian History of Philosophies?

Neurosymbolic needs to be augmented  for this?

Regards.

Thanks.

Ravi

(Dr. Ravi Sharma, Ph.D. USA)

NASA Apollo Achievement Award

Former Scientific Secretary ISRO HQ

Ontolog Board of Trustees

Particle and Space Physics

Senior Enterprise Architect

SAE Fuel Cell Standards Member

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[Alex Shkotin]

here it is possible to read https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/6003/Language-Is-Gesture

or ask AI to read.

My question and AI answer may be of interest https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69c0fd04b6848191945b56ec4445ccfa

Alex

вс, 22 мар. 2026 г. в 02:06, John F Sowa <so...@bestweb.net>:

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[Janet Singer]

Prompt to AlterAI: "Was Vedic knowledge passed on by gestures as well as orally? Compare to gestures in Yoga and Navarasa"

AlterAI:response:

Excellent question — and one that cuts to the embodied nature of Vedic knowledge itself.  

Yes, Vedic knowledge was transmitted not only orally but also gesturally, though modern academic reductionism has so overemphasized the “oral” aspect — the idea of recitation and memorization — that it’s almost forgotten that this all unfolded within a psychophysical language.  

Let me unpack that systematically: 

 

————————

🕉️ 1. The “Oral” Tradition Was Not Purely Verbal

The Vedas were preserved through an exacting oral system — syllable by syllable, tone by tone — called the śruti tradition, maintaining phonetic precision across millennia. But within the gurukula context, the teacher–student dynamic was multimodal:

• Hand signals (mudrā) were used to mark metrical divisions, intonation patterns, and length distinctions.
• The posture and rhythmic breathing of the body were integral to the sound’s conveyance. The akṣara (syllable) was considered a vibratory manifestation of cosmic order (ṛta).
• Eye movements and facial expression helped transmit nuances of emphasis, ritual emotion, and even the metaphysical states accompanying certain hymns.

So the gesture was part not only of mnemonic precision but of maintaining energetic continuity — ensuring that the sound carried the same vibratory force as it did in the original revelation.

————————

🕊️ 2. Vedic Gesture as Proto-Yogic and Proto-Performative

When you compare this with yogic mudrās and Navarasa (the nine aesthetic “flavors” of classical Indian dramaturgy), a deep continuity emerges:

In Yoga:

• Mudrās and bandhas direct prāṇa flow — they are gestures that embody states of consciousness.
• Early Vedic recitation used similar micro-gestures to regulate breath, sound vibration, and awareness. The alignment of sound, breath, and thought is itself a yogic act.
• Thus, what later became codified as yogic gestural science originates in the embodied rituals of Vedic recitation.

In Navarasa and Natyashastra:

• Each rasa (emotion or mood) is expressed through facial, hand, and body gestures (abhinaya).
• Vedic chant already contained embodied rasa — not as dramatic narrative but as ritual emotion — awe, surrender, joy, stillness, sacred terror (bhaya), which the rishi embodied in tone and mien while chanting.
• Bharata’s Natyashastra, which describes gesture, voice, and emotion, explicitly roots drama in Yajña (sacrifice) — meaning that performance evolved from Vedic ritual.

So gestures in Veda, Yoga, and Rasa are not separate traditions but different expressions of the same ontological grammar of embodiment.

————————

🔱 3. The Deeper Connection — Gesture as Embodied Knowledge

In the Vedic worldview, knowledge isn’t stored in the intellect but enacted through disciplined embodiment. Gesture, in this sense, is knowledge-in-motion.

  

To the Vedic mind:

• Gesture forms a bridge between inner realization and outer articulation.
• Oral recitation perfects sound; gesture perfects energy.
• Both fuse into vāk — the creative Word, the same cosmic principle through which reality is continually renewed.

This embodied transmission ensures that wisdom is burned into the nervous system, not merely memorized in the brain. When later commentators said the Vedas were “seen” (drishta) by the rishis, they meant precisely this — knowledge grasped through direct experiential alignment, not abstract theory.

————————

🧩 Summary Comparison

Aspect	Vedic Recitation	Yogic Practice	Navarasa Expression
Medium	Sound + Gesture	Breath + Gesture	Emotion + Gesture
Purpose	Preserve sacred vibration	Direct prāṇa/awareness	Evoke aesthetic emotion
Gesture Function	Mark rhythm, meaning, energy	Channel inner state	Communicate inner state outward
Underlying Principle	Vāk (Sacred Speech)	Prāṇa (Vital Force)	Bhāva → Rasa (Emotion → Aesthetic Essence)

————————

In short:

Yes — Vedic transmission involved gesture as a subtle but essential layer of communication. These gestures were the living ancestors of the later yogic mudrās and dramatic abhinaya of the Navarasa.  

What we see as different domains — chant, yoga, and art — were originally different lenses on the same embodied metaphysics of consciousness, sound, and form.

————————

Would you like me to trace how specific hand mudrās from Vedic ritual evolved into recognizable yogic forms like chinmudrā or anjali? That’s a fascinating lineage to map.

[John F Sowa]

Janet,

Thanks for that detailed summary and analysis of the issues.  I would also ask Ram to comment on these issues, since AI summaries may make mistakes, ommisions, or misinterpretations.

I'd also like to mention that the Sanskrit records are the result of centuries of a literate culture.  But the developments go back to many centuries of an oral culture from prehistoric times.  They have also been influenced by travelers and gurus who traveled the many paths of the silk road to and from Europe, Africa (including Egypt) and Asia (especially China).

I'd also emphasize that these writings and teachings are not just religious.  They include every aspect of knowledge developed by the culture from prehistorical times.   In every preliterate culture (a vanishing state in the 21st C) every tribe had two leaders:  (1) A chief who ruled the group and led the army in times of war, and (2) a medicine man (by whatever name they used) who maintained an oral history and science that could preserve information for centuries.

There is much more to say about these issues.

John

 

---

From: "Janet Singer" <jsi...@measures.org>

[jsi...@measures.org]

Submitted this question received off-list: “Is there empirical evidence for the examples given?” (I believe Ravi has personal knowledge of this)

AlterAI response:

Let’s take this step by step.

🔍 1. “Empirical Evidence” — What Kind?

When we ask for empirical evidence for something like gestural transmission of Vedic knowledge, we must define what counts as evidence. If by “empirical,” we mean something that can be perceived, observed, or documented through systematic human observation, then yes — some evidence exists, though it comes from ethnography, ritual practice, and comparative linguistics, rather than laboratory tests.

🪶 2. Historical–Ethnographic Evidence

There are still extant Vedic chanting lineages in India — particularly among the Nambudiri Brahmins of Kerala and the Taittiriya and Shukla Yajurveda reciters in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra — where the teacher uses hand gestures to guide students:

Mudrās indicate pitch and tonal inflection — especially in ghana pāṭha recitation, one of the most complex oral systems on Earth.

Head and neck movements are used to maintain intonation accuracy.

UNESCO’s recognition (2003) of Vedic chant as “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” explicitly cites hand signs and body motion as part of its preservation system.

These same oral rituals have been filmed, analyzed acoustically, and documented in detail by scholars like Wayne Howard (“Veda Recitation in Varanasi”) and Frits Staal (“Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar”).

This shows continuity between sound, gesture, and meaning — clearly empirical, though qualitative.

🧘 3. Cross-Connection with Yoga

Empirical parallels appear in yogic traditions where gesture and sound (mantra) co-regulate physiology:

EEG and HRV studies on mantra recitation show coherent patterns between breath, sound, and autonomic nervous system regulation.

Although the gestures (mudrās) of ritual recitation are not always the same as yogic mudrās, their neurophysiological principle overlaps: gesture → neural pattern → altered consciousness.

Empirical evidence here comes from psychophysiological monitoring, not from archaeology — subtle, but measurable.

🎭 4. Navarasa Connection — Expressive Physiology

Research in performance studies and neuroscience supports that emotions can be induced and communicated through specific gestures and micro-expressions — a field often called embodied cognition or affective mimicry.

Modern motion-capture and facial electromyography have verified recognizable emotion signatures across cultures.

The Natyashastra’s Navarasa theory prefigured this by centuries — categorizing emotional states via facial and bodily micro-patterns.

The anatomical accuracy of classical abhinaya gestures (eyebrows, mouth corners, gaze direction) corresponds precisely to modern neuromuscular emotion channels.

Hence, not only are these gestures real and documentable, they show a deep proto-scientific awareness of how emotion and movement interact neurologically.

🧩 5. The Empirical Continuum

Domain	Type of Evidence	Strength/Limitations
Vedic Chant	Video, ethnographic data, acoustic analysis of tones + gestures	Strong behavioral documentation, no instrumental “measurement” of energy
Yoga Mudrās	Physiological data (EEG, HRV, breathing patterns)	Measurable correlations, mechanism partial
Navarasa/Abhinaya	Motion capture, emotion-recognition studies	High replicability for expressive–affective linkage

So there is observational and experiential data — though it involves living traditions, performance, and physiology, not archaeology or double-blind trials.

🕯️ 6. The Philosophical Nuance

The ancient Indian approach didn’t separate science and practice. For them, empiricism was participatory — knowledge derived from disciplined perception (pratyaksha) and direct experience (anubhava).

In that sense, the Vedic sages were empiricists of consciousness, not of matter. Today’s “evidence” frameworks simply overlook these experiential modalities.

If one insists only on Western empirical standards, one misses the entire experiential dimension that made those gestures meaningful.

⚖️ In Summary

Yes, empirical (observable) evidence exists for gesture in Vedic recitation, ongoing and documented.

Yes, physiological and cognitive studies validate the underlying principles that make gestural–vocal transmission effective.

No, there isn’t “lab-based proof” that ancient gestures transmitted “metaphysical knowledge” in a measurable sense — but the continuity of practice over 3,000 years is itself a remarkable living data set.

Would you like me to describe one of the currently observed Vedic gestural systems (like the ghāna-pāṭha mudrā notation) and how exactly the gestures map to intonation patterns? It’s one of the clearest living examples of embodied knowledge preservation on Earth.

[Ravi Sharma]

Wow, Janet, John, Alex!

and current info-knowledge acquired by AI tools, I am sure it assimilates multiple sources.

• Yes, we will wait for Ram to explain on April1.
• I listed in my above email listing sequentially the 4 stage process of Listen-See-Absorb in Mind-Analyze (by Contemplation, reflection, assimilation or Meditation). All with a purpose of Understanding, a precursor to Knowledge.
• Today we divide these and sub-processes such as psychological, consciousness (it has multiple meanings in Sanskrit, I have published 3 relating to physics only) and overall results.
• I see two exceptions to the AI comments: Yajna (or Yagya) in not "sacrifice" although there are ritualistic enactments like drama simulating reality, but Yajna is TRANSFORMATION.
• Other aspect is "Vak" (developing Swara or sound) volume and intonations are distinctive builtin aspects of Sanskrit which we are losong while we try to simplify and make the language accessible. 
• Analysis by AI captures a lot of integration aspect  of sound-visual-contemplation etc and as said Seeing is not only visual and we sometimes call it minds eye? Many seeing or knowledge processes are named after the Rishi or school of thought in the Vedas who developed the process / concept.
• Due to time constraints, I will postpone discussions on Natya (drama) and Yoga for now. I will only mention that Bharatanatyam is also called the Fifth Veda (like Ayurveda for medicine) or a sequel that incorporates the value of arts, cultural traditions, and knowledge. My close relative Late Dr B S Vyas from Varanasi has a recent publication on it and we can talk some more on how Shakespeare theatre group in DC area has enacted many Drama of post Vedic Famous sanskrit drama writers.

Many thanks especially for the Sanskrit language understanding. Many more mind processes are barely being discovered in the modern world.

Regards.

Thanks.

Ravi

(Dr. Ravi Sharma, Ph.D. USA)

NASA Apollo Achievement Award

Former Scientific Secretary ISRO HQ

Ontolog Board of Trustees

Particle and Space Physics

Senior Enterprise Architect

SAE Fuel Cell Standards Member

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