This paper investigates whether our gestures can help us think and how. Previous work suggests that they can. For this research, students, alone in a room,studied descriptions of environments for later tests of knowledge. The majority of participants spontaneously gestured while reading the descriptions, and most of those also gestured while answering true-false questions. Their gestures laid out the environments, using points to places and lines for paths. Descriptions and questions accompanied by gestures were remembered more accurately. Gestures seem to promote learning by establishing embodied representations of the environments.