9 Weirdest Things Science Has Recently Discovered

2. Blind People Still Use Language-Specific Gestures

Throughout the world, people use gestures to emphasize their speech, and different languages tend to be associated with different gestures. This, in itself, is kinda odd, but not as odd as the fact that people who have been blind from birth also appear to conform to this rule, despite the fact that they will never have seen the gestures.

The study, which focussed on congenitally blind English and Turkish speakers, looking at 20 native English speakers and 20 native Turkish speakers, plus 40 sighted speakers of each language, who were all asked to describe a 3D scene that they had been allowed to explore by touch.

They found that, rather than the blind and sighted people using different gestures, the participant's gesture diverged according to what language they were speaking, suggesting that gesture is not simply visual (otherwise blind people would not gesture at all), but is inherently linked to speech in a much deeper way.