Why don't we gesture when we pray?

I few years ago, I found myself gesturing in prayer. Well, it has happened several times. The first time I found myself shrugging because I didn't know what I wanted to say, what to pray. Another time I recall extending my hands in a gesture of 'sending' -even though everyone else with skin on had their eyes closed. But these incidents (and others like them) only serve to make me ask why it is that gesturing in prayer is relatively rare compared with my normal conversational style (not that I'm a very gesturally exuberant communicator). And why is it almost unknown in prayer meetings for gestural prayer to be part of it?
I think for me it was about what is described in the referenced dialogue:

Gestures are also useful communicatively because they can give information that’s not in the spoken channel.

I'm wondering whether there is a clue in this bit of conversation between a couple of linguists about gesture as part of language.

Lauren: If we had someone speaking into a telephone versus someone – they’re hands-free. We’ll give them their hands – someone speaking into a telephone versus someone in a face-to-face conversation, who would you imagine gestures more? 

Gretchen: Probably the face-to-face conversation. 

Lauren: Yeah, because…? 

Gretchen: Because the other person can actually see the gestures, and they’re useful. 

Lauren: Yeah, we can increase the frequency. Even if we’re speaking into a telephone versus speaking into a Dictaphone that we think no one will ever listen to again, we’re even less likely, for the Dictaphone, to gesture because we don’t think our communication is going to anyone, so we probably just don’t try as a hard to communicate at all.

So my question on the basis of that snippet of information is whether we tend not to gesture in prayer because we don't really frame the experience in terms of God observing our communication visually, only aurally.

This would go, plausibly, hand in hand with the usual posture for prayer in the west: eyes are closed and even covered and people definitely don't look at one another. So maybe it's about being in a situation like being on the phone when we are aware in some way that no-one is actually looking, and, in any case, we're actually talking with God not so much each other.
But it is still a bit strange that we don't seem to think that if we are talking to God that putting over the extra information conveyed by gesture is not necessary. As if God only hears the communication and doesn't see it -like the other skin-on participants.

When you think about it, gesturing could -perhaps should- be as much a part of prayer as speaking may be. Of course God 'sees' and if it helps us to express ourselves before God it can and arguably should be part of our communication in prayer. To say that God can understand us without us needing to do that (I reckon that's a possible objection) would also to be saying that speaking our prayers is not necessary and so we should remain silent. Of course that latter is a perfectly respectable position in Christian spirituality and a lot of people have a real sense of the inadequacy of words in prayer (and I sometimes find I am one of them). However for those times and those people who find words helpful and necessary, finding ways to 'cue' gestural prayer may be a good thing in bringing our whole selves before God and helping us to greater fluency.
Of course, thinking about the necessity of word-use in prayer is a topic worth taking further -but not here and not now ...

Check out: Lingthusiasm • Transcript Episode 30: Why do we gesture when we...