In some, she simply said the phrase without moving her hands. Peel the banana. In others, she made the kind of hand gesture most of us would make when saying that–a sort of banana-peeling mime that matches the content of the phrase. In a third group, she made gestures with her hands that were unrelated to what she was saying. The results? People who got the matching content hand gestures remembered those phrases more effectively than folks who got just the words alone. And folks who got just the words alone did better than folks who got irrelevant hand gestures! What does this show us? We already knew that all the hand-waving we do when we speak isn’t just nervous energy; it serves various functions. Apparently, one of them is to help the listener remember what you’ve said.