Instant Genius - Christmas lectures past and present

Episode Date: December 21, 2017

Since they were launched by Michael Faraday in 1825, the Royal Institution’s Christmas lectures have become as synonymous with the festive season as mince pies and sherry. In this month’s podcast we look back at classic lectures from Christmases past, and catch up with this year’s presenter, neuroscientist Sophie Scott. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit Name Audio, to learn more. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Daniel Bennett, the editor of BBC Focus magazine. This month, we celebrate the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and take a look back at the classic lectures from Christmas's past.

One that Faraday wrote in particular was the chemical history of a candle. And he just took this familiar, simple object and spun these incredible stories about that thing. how it works, what it's made of, what's actually going on when you light a candle. And that book, I think, has been in print ever since. And we catch up with this year's presenter, neuroscientist and communication expert, Sophie Scott. We laugh as much for social reasons, like to show that we know the people we're with and we like the people we're with or we agree with them and we understand them as we are laughing at sort of abstract aspects of humorous things that they might and might not have said.

So it's, it never loses that social property. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team, with the UK's best-selling Science and Technology Monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Since they were launched by Michael Faraday in 1825, the Royal Institution's Christmas lectures have become as synonymous with the festive season as mint pies and sherry.

In her new book, 11 explorations in 10. Life on Earth, Marine biologist and BBC Focus Q&A expert, Helen Scales, looks back at a century of lectures that have helped us understand the natural world. Here she talks to sciencefocus.com editor Alexander McNamara about how the lectures have changed over their 200-year history, what made them so popular, and why David Attenborough had second thoughts about working with animals. So you've just written a book about the Christmas lectures,

what is it about them that just captures our imagination? It's such a good question because, I mean, I remember being growing up as a kid and being glued to the TV every Christmas really, rushing down to pick out the copy of the radio times and figure out when they were going to be on and circling them in with felt hip pen. And then, yeah, I think maybe it's something to do

with just the way that the presenters that they choose for the Christmas lectures are able to absolutely captivate their audience. and bring to life science and make it just so exciting and just show us that it's kind of all around us and it's all going on, it's all there to be explored for ourselves. Yeah, they're just such great communicators. I always desperately wanted to be in the room, in that wonderful lecture room in London,

the Faraday Lecture Theatre at the Royal Institution, sitting in the audience and, you know, sticking my hand in the air so I could come down and do one of the demonstrations because so many of these lectures are so hands-on. There are loads of exciting experiments and things that the kids can get involved in. And I think altogether it's just a very different and very vibrant way to get kids interested in science.

And they clearly do, and they have done for, is it now, how long have they been going on for a long time? It's a long time. So the first ones were in 1825, and it was Michael Faraday himself, who set them up. He was very keen to get young audiences. He was really keen to get young audiences interested in science.

I mean, the Royal Institution as an institution was set up to really kind of communicate science to people, to the public. And initially really focusing on grown-ups, but yeah, it was Faraday's idea to bring the kids in. So yeah, nearly 200 years, almost every year, I think, since 1825, apart from during the war, there was a bit of a break. And always in that same lecture room, which is rather wonderful.

And yeah, just a real tradition to have these festive time lectures. Usually somewhere between three and six hour-long lectures are given, somewhere over the festive period. Originally, just the kids in the room. But now they're televised. You can watch them on the internet. They get broadcast around the world. So they have a huge audience.

And I think a real loyal following. I mean, not just amongst kids, but grown-ups like me who grew up watching them and are still really, really love, seeing so many different types of science being presented in front of us in such a lovely way. So obviously Faraday started it those 200 years ago. He said there's been lots of different kinds of science. What were the sort of experiments that were being done back then 200 years ago? And obviously compared to now, they must be so wildly different.

Faraday himself gave about, I think, 19 of the lectures. And one of the most, I guess one of the most famous ones and one that he wrote a book about. A lot of the lectures actually did end up writing books after their lectures. And that's for me been a really important source of information for writing the books, kind of looking back at the history of the lectures. But one that Faraday wrote in particular was the chemical history of a candle. And he just took this familiar, simple object and spun these incredible stories about that thing, how it works, what it's made of, what's actually going on when you light a candle.

And that book, I think, has been in print ever since, you know, since it was written back in the 19th century. So pretty cool stuff. And I think in a way, that's, you know, you say all the stuff that they talked about before would be sort of wildly out of date. But I mean, that's the joy of the history of science, really. It's showing us how we've moved on, how how ideas have advanced and new discoveries have been made. But understanding how we got there is really important too and how our ideas of the world and of science have changed. And, you know, and I think in a way, it's wonderful that we have these lectures to show us what we did think about the world back at different times in the past. And still, some of it hasn't changed and when we do move on

and keep those ideas with us. And there's another book actually, my book that I wrote, focused on the natural history and sort of lectures about the natural world. But there's another one by Colin Stewart that came out last year called 13 journeys through space and time. And he wrote about the Christmas lectures that looked into cosmology and looking out into space at the planets and so on. And I know very little about that. That's really not my area of science. So reading that for me was just a wonderful insight into how much, you know, we've changed our views of outer space and discovering planets and, you know, just really extraordinary discoveries have been made in the last 200 years. And I think his book really does show you

how ideas have changed and how technology has changed. One thing that I thought was just delightful about his book is that early on, the lecturers sort of from the 19th century are wondering about, oh, you know, maybe one day people will go into space and who knows what will go on. And then by the final one in 2015, the last one in his book, they're actually talking live on a live link up to Tim Peek up on the International Space Station. It's just like, what would those early lecturers have thought if they'd have known that this is where we were going? So, you know, just delightful stuff. Lovely. But just on that sort of similar vein, you obviously, your specialism is in the natural world.

200 years ago, the theory of evolution was not even around. So that must have changed extraordinary. You must have, in your own research, seen the difference in our understanding of nature as well, just through these Christmas lectures. Well, yes, and that's a really interesting thing, actually, because, I mean, Charles Darwin didn't give a Christmas lecture. He could have done. was never invited to do that. I don't actually know the full ins and outs of the, maybe the personalities of the guys who were running the institution,

possibly there was something going on there politically that meant that he wouldn't be the one to step up on stage. I don't know enough about that. Equally, you know, the theory of evolution was, and continues to be to some extent, but certainly back then was very controversial and was lots of towings and furrings about what he was saying in terms of, well, usually it was mostly linked,

to human evolution and this idea that we had evolved from other animals was quite unacceptable to many people and it flew in the face of many religious beliefs. So Darwin wasn't invited in. In fact, it's kind of remarkable that evolution as a topic wasn't covered in the Christmas lectures until Richard Dawkins came in in 1991. And he gave an explosive series of lectures, quite literally to explore this idea of the theory of evolution. So I don't know why it hadn't been talked about before then. Possibly it was considered to be too trickier subject for a young audience. I don't think it is.

And Dawkins did do a fantastic job of bringing it to life and talking about Darwin and what we know now about evolution. But as you say, it did definitely reframe our view of the natural world. And I think what I saw, even though the lectures early on weren't about evolution, but what I saw as a shift in those natural history lectures from early on to the more kind of modern day was we were really moving away from just a descriptive science. So natural history really used to be about just going out and finding new species and venturing out into the world and understanding what was out there, which has its place and is still really important. but gradually moving on to a kind of more holistic view as a science of looking at connections between species and understanding how ecosystems work and how this whole living world fits together like a jigsaw puzzle rather than just finding species and giving them names and sticking them in museums. And then gradually moving on to understanding how humans are impacting the natural world as well.

So we have shifted that view to some extent and emerged with this kind of a bigger picture of the world around us. How has the sort of style of the lectures changed over the course of the last 200 years to sort of really bring this understanding towards the children? It's a really good question and a little bit hard to know for sure how the lecturers kind of delivered their material early on because obviously there's no film or kind of audio footage, which is such a shame. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall. some of those early ones. We do have things at the books the lecturers wrote. And actually, early on, a really valuable resource for me, as I was digging into the past, were newspaper reports. And it seems that it was quite common for some of the national newspapers to actually give a kind of daily report on what happened in each of the lectures. So that gave me a really rich

view as to what happened and how the audience responded. And I mean, I'm sure to some extent the lecturers were probably not quite as, I don't know, aware of how to speak to kids and to make it brilliantly exciting and not just to kind of drone on about the stuff they know about. But clearly, even right from the beginning, so the first lecture in my book is 1911. It was the first lecture called The Childhood of Animals and by a guy called Peter Chalmers Mitchell, who was head of London Zoo at the time. And he did what basically every single lecturer in my book did, which was bringing live animals into the lecture theatre. And with, you know, some level of chaos probably, but also just clearly engaging the kids incredibly, kind of vividly with these real creatures right in front of them.

And certainly early on, I don't know these days whether the kids are allowed to come up and play with them, but there are lots of lovely photos of kids and drawings, actually, from the early ones, drawings of kids rushing up and petting. the pet line, well not a pet line, but the cats line, baby lion, and things like that. So I think certainly with these, yeah, these kind of ecological natural history lectures, having live specimens in the audience and in the room was something that really brought things alive to kids. And there was, you know, reports of ooze and ars and oh, no, and sort of scared responses from kids seeing great big snakes and all sorts of bits and pieces, you know, add birds for like flapping around the room and all this kind of stuff. So that's something I think that sort of leads all the way through my lectures.

It's this bringing the wildlife into the room has definitely helped to engage kids. But nowadays, I mean, I think the lecture is giving the Christmas lectures these days. I do an amazing job of just so many demonstrations and kind of hands-on things. I think it's something insane, like every six minutes they have to do something different rather than just talking. So they work really hard to get these lectures to be. be as dynamic and as involved as they can be. And actually talking to the lecturers who I, who I featured in the book, who was still

around, they said that was a challenge, but the kind of most exciting part of it was to find ways to do those sorts of experiments and in front of the kids and to make it really dynamic and exciting. Did you get a feel from them the process they had to go through to actually come up with these incredible lectures? All of them were such fabulous communication. and lecturers. I think they were all bursting with material they wanted to talk about. Possibly they didn't manage to get in everything they wanted to. I think it was Lloyd Peck from the

British Antarctic Survey who gave his lectures in 2004 about Antarctica. And I think he said, he basically realized that he had to kind of basically sort of, he wasn't going to get through all the material he was hoping to. So even though they look entirely packed and they see, you know, completely packed full of wonderful information. They don't get everything and they want to. So I think finding stuff to talk about isn't not a problem. It's just, I guess, really thinking about what the kids will engage with and how they'll be, you know, what excites them and what kind of depth to go into.

Certainly, watching back, because that was the other lovely thing I got to do, which was watch back all the lectures that are available on tape, which goes back to David Attenborough at 1973 and coming forward from there. So I had all of those lectures to watch back, which was really, really good fun. That was a great part of this job. But the latest one of my book, Sue Hartley gave lectures in 2009 about plants and insects. And hers are just absolutely full of really hilariously funny and brilliant demonstrations and experiments. She brings something that could be completely out of sight, like tiny insects eating plants,

sounds a bit boring. But she does such a great job. And speaking to her, she does. She clearly just had an absolute wow of a time, just brilliant fun interacting with the kids and just having a hoot, basically. So it was just a joy to watch back. The foreword of your book is by David Attenborough, and it sounds like he was sitting on the fence a bit as to whether to do it. Yes, it's a lovely story, actually. I mean, it obviously all worked out in the end, but he claims that basically a couple of weeks before the lectures themselves, he panicked and got incredibly cold feet,

realizing that what he was doing was doing the two things he had told not to do on TV which is work with children and with animals. And the kids were obviously fine, but all these live animals, he was convinced we're not going to do what he wanted them to do. And this was on live TV. They'd broadcast them live back then.

Now, I think they do record them. So if anything does go just disastrously wrong, they can redo it. And I had a few stories of things that went wrong from some of the lecturers more recently. But, yeah, so I think Attenborough was just terrified. And kind of the ironic thing was that he was control of BBC too. And I think he was really pivotal in getting the lectures on television and getting the whole thing televised.

And he said, no, they must be live. We need to have that immediate kind of feeling of us all being in the room together. And then, of course, it came around and sort of bit him on the bum a bit because he was then the one doing the lectures. Apparently they sat him down, though, and said, don't be silly, you can do it. And it all did go pretty much to plan. And the stuff that didn't, it's just quite fun, you know, when the animals don't quite do what they're supposed to. There's a porcupine that won't come out of its box. And you can see the look on Artem's face of like, I knew this would happen. This is exactly what I was expecting.

And a few little experiments, there's one where he's talked, because his lectures were about the languages of animals. So he's talking about how animals communicate with each other. And one was an experiment playing the sounds of a mother hen and the chicks. He brought out these cute little cheeping chip chicks that were supposed to respond. sort of scurry across the room at the sound of this hen. But they completely ignored it. They don't play any attention at all. So he was the one that sort of organised it to go live on TV.

Is that when it really became so popular and so ingrained in British society about the Christmas lectures? I imagine it probably was actually, because up until that point, it was only those lucky kids who got to go into the room, the 100 or 200, however many it is, that fit in the lecture theatre. So yes, I think putting it on TV was a brilliant idea because it really opened it up to so many more people. And yeah, and it just sort of became this – well, certainly, I think for me and for loads of people I've spoken to, it just became that thing you look forward to every year. You knew it was going to be on sometime between Christmas and New Year. You knew it was going to be some new subject, whether it was biology, physics, chemistry, all sorts of things.

So, you know, it was something always to look forward to, you know. And I always liked the ones that were about the things that I knew I was most interested in. So there's natural world stuff. But then it always found my brain being exploded when it was stuff that I didn't know anything about as well. You know, sort of the other aspects of science, all this cosmology stuff and everything else has always been so fascinating. So, yeah, so no, I think it really has. It's become, you know, alongside the Queen's speech. I think it's really an institution at Christmas time.

For all the kids that watch it, you know, I've watched them when I was a wee young lad. It's just so inspirational as a program. That will continue, won't it? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think the Royal Institution does a brilliant job of finding people to do the lectures and who are talking about stuff in really innovative ways now. I think, you know, often a lot of the lectures now bring in lots of aspects of technology and how that's affecting our lives and really bringing science into the world, you know,

bang up to date right around us at the moment. So I think they will absolutely continue to be incredibly inspirational and really reflecting on our times and what's going on and discoveries, you know, linking up to space and all these sorts of amazing things that we can do now. But still grounded in the tradition of basically a series of lectures, which in itself, I think, is again kind of wonderful that this hasn't, they haven't going to move. moved off and turned it into some sort of flashy documentary series. It's basically still about a brilliant science communicator given the chance to tell the audience about their subjects and

bring it to life just by talking to them, essentially, and bringing in, you know, wonderful ideas for experiments and everything else. But, you know, essentially it's the same idea, which I think is really great. And in another 200 years, we'll be looking back at it. I hope so. Yes, who knows. And who knows what changes will track in the time. as well. It's this history in the making, really, I guess, isn't it? It's as tracking science as it happens. Because, again, all of the lectures that I looked at, a lot of them would feature discoveries that have just been made. And that's really wonderful. So we had lectures from the 50s about how animals move, and the guy was invited in who had just discovered that fish can see with

electricity, and they live in these murky rivers in Africa, and they use electricity like a bat, uses sound. And he'd only just discovered that the previous year. Attenborough had various bits of new science. He had a thing about how someone had just worked out that unhatched birds, eggs, the chicks inside, will listen to each other and coordinate so they will hatch at the same time. And these were things that, you know, it was like literally that year that had been discovered. So I really think this is a great way of bringing science in a really immediate way to kids too. So yeah, who knows? Who knows what we'll discover in the next 200 years? How exciting. That was Helen Scales there, talking about the history of the Christmas lectures.

Now, taking on the mantle this year is Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at University College London. In her lectures, she'll be looking at the language of life in all its forms, from the strange science of laughter to the way in which technology is transforming how we interact. Our staff writer James Lloyd caught up with Sophie to find out more. So Sophie, your Christmas lectures are all about communication. I guess my first question was how much of our communication is linked to the actual words that we speak? Well, obviously the words that we're saying are absolutely critical element of our communication, but it's not the only thing that we're using to both express what we mean and also to decode what somebody else is intending to tell us.

So as soon as you have, for example, somebody speaking, you've got the words they're saying, but there's also a voice. So you can't see me, but you could have a good guess at my aim. and my geographical origins and my mood and my health, all from the way that I'm talking. So there's a whole other kind of channels of information there. And that will start to interact. So if you know a talker, it's easy for you to understand that talker because you map onto their particular idiosyncrasies of production.

So it's actually being, you're not just treating them as independent channels. you're actually thinking this is, you know, using person identity to help you track someone's speech. So what kind of things are we listening to then when we're trying to guess people's age or, you know, where they're from? What are the kind of signals that we're giving off in our voice? Some of them are kind of unavoidable aspects just of our physical bodies. So as we grow up from being children, our voices change because we just get taller and we get lower-pitched voices with the biggest range, just as we get, you know, we've run physically larger. And then in adolescence, you get this divergence where boys' voices break.

And what that means in practice is their larynx descend. You get this lowered larynx, a secondary lowering of the larynx in human men that gives men an even longer pipe to make the sounds of speech. They have a bigger spectral range and larger larynx. They produce a lower-pitched sound. So in adulthood, you get this further differentiation based on sex. So it's starting to interact with your age. and then as we get older you find around the menopause women's voices start to show some of this breaking characteristics so women's voices start to get lower in pitch so you get quite a complex pattern going across the lifespan and it's still not completely independent of kind of social and cultural factors so if you look at children prior to puberty you find that boys and girls physically the same height talk with different pitches although they theoretically should talk to

the same pitch voices because they're the same size. The boys will speak with lower pitches because they are picking up characteristics of the adult men around them. And if you look at women in the West, Western societies over the last 50 years, they've started to use the pitch of their voices in a lower pitched way. And that seems to reflect women coming into the workplace. So women are kind of reacting to a different social role, if you like, in public life. And they're doing that by minimizing or trying to minimize different sorts. between themselves and the men that they're joining in the workplace.

If you go to parts of the world where women aren't as well integrated into public life, you tend to find that if anything, the difference is exaggerated in the voices. In your lectures, as well as the words that we say and our voices, you also talk about the other ways that we communicate with each other. So what are the signals that we're given off with our bodies, for example? Yes. So we're going to be talking a bit about facial expressions of emotion and how those work and how we perceive them.

and we'll be talking about eye movements and eye gaze, but we'll also talk about body movements and how you can use information from that. And in fact, we'll also be talking about kind of more general, sort of more, you know, taking a wider perspective on sort of animals in nature, things like smell and coloration and how those can be used communicatively. So it won't just be talking about what humans do. And how much, when it comes to humans, how much of this body language and these extra ways of communication happen without us even realizing?

How much is at a kind of subconscious level? A lot of it is what we euphemistically term outside of awareness. So it can be hard to completely pick up on what's happening because your memory tends to be distorted by and affected by the words. So if you go away from a conversation, you tend to remember the general semantic meaning, you know, the meaning of what was said. In fact, you know, you don't often remember the words themselves. You just remember the gist of what people said. And maybe some of that kind of emotional stuff is a sort of tone, but at the time it completely impacts on your understanding of what somebody's saying. But it can be a lot harder to actually pull out an exact understanding of what's going on.

So if you've ever had a phone call with somebody and you know there's something wrong. They're going, no, I'm fine. And I know there's something off. There's something off in the speed that they're replying to me with and there's something off about exactly how they're using their voice and how they're replying to me. But it can be hard to articulate what that is. And so obviously it's a lot easier to pick up on these things

when we're face to face. It can be, although it can still be hard to necessarily be completely aware of it. So there can be aspects of emotional process or emotional signs people are giving off can be quite, brief and you might get a sense of what they're going on without being able to necessarily articulate that they happened, you know, to say, oh, at that point then they did this. So you can kind of go away with, again, with a sort of an sense of maybe something being different than maybe you thought it was, but without being able to absolutely spell it out, as you probably

would do in terms of their meanings, the words they said. And so if we wise up a little bit and we kind of know the things that people do, you know, with their bodies or the way that people give off these signals. Is there a way then that we can kind of train ourselves to decipher what people really mean to kind of go beyond the words almost? Well, you can certainly learn more about what they're doing. So there's a technique called facial affect coding where you can learn to really pull apart people's facial expressions and pick up very transient facial expressions. But that still only tells you about their emotions. It doesn't necessarily tell you anything about why they're doing what they're doing. So I suppose really, if you think about the

you know, we tend to emphasize in communication, you know, having something that you want to share with people, there's a message you want to send, there's an interaction you want to have, but that somebody's correct interpretation of that is going to be as much to do with their appraisal of you and the words you're saying, as well as aspects of that interaction,

that can be, you know, somebody might go away with an impression, you never meant to give them based on how they've interpreted your action. So it's always slightly hard, you know, there's no necessarily absolutely, loose about that interaction that you can say, well, I've got that all right or I've got that all wrong. Does that make sense? Yeah. I was going to ask if you put some of these skills into practice in your daily life, now that you know some of these tips for communication, do you use

them at all? I think the main one, and only because I got interested in it, the more I started working on non-verbal expressions of emotions, sort of these things like, you know, screams and laughs. I started paying more attention to when those happened, and then the more I've worked on laughter, I started paying more and more attention to that. So I've got quite good at, like, well, not necessarily good. I tend to pay a lot of attention to when and how people laugh and think about what they were doing in a way that we don't normally do. You don't need to deal with laughter that way to understand people.

So have you become quite good at telling when a laugh is genuine and when it's perhaps someone laughing but not really finding it funny? I have. It's made me slightly psychopathic, I think, but it's, it's, I try not to let it, like, overwhelm things, but it is quite interesting when you just realize how much, how much laughter we choose to give people, basically, when you think about laughter as being, like opposed laugh as being bad,

but actually it's a really positive thing. You're trying to give somebody a nice socially acceptable positive sign. So actually it's normally meant with very good intention. Are there any, any kind of giveaway clues that they'll tell you when someone is, you know, fake laughing? I think one of the big ones is if you think back to the last time that you could not stop laughing. Can you remember that? Now, that's a really, that's the most spontaneous kind of laughter when you just can't stop it when the behaviour begins.

And then it's just going to have to work its way through. You are lost to the laughter for a while. So if that's the kind of the tell, I think a lot of laughter, if laughter stops and starts quite quickly, then it's being used more communicatively. It's not helpless, absolutely uncontrollable laughter. Yeah. But I suppose there are times when laughing, even if you don't find something that funny, laughing is kind of a, it's almost like a social lubricant, isn't it? It's a polite thing to do sometimes as well. Absolutely. It's an incredibly useful way of dealing with mildly difficult situations. So I was buying coffee for myself and my partner at the weekend. And I've got a broken arm at the moment. And it was slightly hard for me to put the coffee into the coffee, you know, those little sleeves they give you. And my partner had gone to the loo. And there was a man standing next to me.

And I said, I'm sorry, can you help me with this? I've only really got one hand at the moment. Can you help me put these sleeves on? And there's men helping me, and my partner came back. And he was like, I'm here now. And I laughed. And the man I was talking to laughed. And instead of just like, with Sophie, what are you doing collecting men here at the coffee shop,

it became like, okay. It was, it was deal. But he wasn't, you know, like I turned my back for a second. He started talking to other men, asking them for help, I would have helped you. You know, it wasn't like that. And the laughter, me laughing, him laughing. this completely strange man laughing just made it that it's fine. You know, a slightly difficult situation is absolutely fine.

And we use laughter as this way of kind of changing the emotional nature of an interaction and managing it into a sort of positive, safe space quite efficiently. I think it's a lot of what we mean by social skill is people who can do that. So when you think about it, laughing is actually quite a strange thing. And it's very unique, isn't it, to every person. Everyone has a slightly different laugh. Well, I think so. It's very hard to determine that because actually it's very, very hard to.

do studies on like at a population level on laughter because it's hard to get people to laugh in their lap as I've discovered to my cost. But I certainly, because, particularly with involuntary laughter, you make such strange noises and it can be so uncontrolled. You know, you're not, you know, you're not sort of modulating it necessarily in like we normally change our voices depending on where we are and who we're talking to, that it can be highly at it's idiosyncratic. And have you looked at all into why laughing came about in the first place? Is it that you've there's some kind of evolutionary origin to it? There seems to be a strong evolutionary role in that we're not the only animals that laugh.

You find animals from rats through to gorillas, laughter's been found. And there's probably more laughter out there. We just haven't been looking for it, really. There's not much research into laughter. But wherever you find laughter, it's associated initially. It's first seen when babies are tickled by their parents. And its initial appearance, therefore, is something that always happens in interactions. You can't tickle yourself.

it has to happen. There has to be somebody else there to trigger it. And its initial role seems to be social bonding. And then it becomes firmly associated with play. And all mammals play. So possibly this is why I think they may well be more laughter out there. The man who did the work with the rats pointed out that it may be at its heart, laughter is always an invitation to play.

Let's do this fun, silly activity where we can learn and find out about our social roles without there being anything serious and no one's going to hurt anybody. no one's going to ask anything else of anybody. And that probably scales up. So it keeps those characteristics even for human adults where we think we laugh at jokes and humor and we do laugh at jokes and humor. But Robert Provine in the US has found

we still primarily laugh when we're with other people. It remains a social behaviour. And we laugh as much before social reasons like to show that we know the people we're with and we like the people we're with or we agree with them and we understand them as we are laughing at sort of abstract aspects of humorous things that they might and might not have said. So it's, it never loses that social property. So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's evolutionary role seems to be

a kind of social bonding play signifying activity that then we use in this very complex way for interactions. Okay. I wanted to ask you something more about body language actually, which is something I think you'll be covering the lectures. It seems to be becoming more common for politicians to get training for their body language. Yes. And as we've seen, naming no names, the results don't always look that natural. Yes. Do you think it's really possible to learn how to use body language, you know, to kind of win people over and for kind of influence,

or is it just something that can't really be, it can't really be learnt? Well, it must be learnable because if you look at other disciplines, people can learn to do it. So if you look at actors and you look at performers and, you know, dancers and singers, they learn physical skills alongside using their voices that they are using to sort of convey their performance. So one of the things that I think we pick up on with people who've had a bitter training isn't the fact that they've had training is that you can sort of see the effort.

It's not been, you know, one of the things that we like in acting and singing and that kind of performance is an authenticity where you get the feeling that somebody's been able to just throw off their performative elements of being themselves and they become some other person and they become some other person. and it becomes some of the role and that's, it's kind of, it frees you up to believe that they're doing that because you're not getting any suggestions that it's wrong.

Whereas with someone who's doing it and it's not quite right, the same would be true for bad acting, I assume. You pick up on the, you pick up on that lack of authenticity. You pick up on the, you see the effort, you see them working. It's almost the uncanny valley type thing, isn't it? Where it's just not quite right. Yes, yes, absolutely. And you, we're so good at trying to use these cues to work out somebody,

estate. And as I say, it can be one of the things we really enjoy, even if we know somebody is faking it, you know, we enjoy going to the theatre. We don't sit there going, oh, hang on, her husband's not really dead. So why she crying? You know what I mean? We're very happy to follow the story if they make it doable for us. But when there's mismatches, exactly, like we were saying before, as soon as there's something not right about how the stuff's fitting together, then we pick up on it. And even, I mean, very famously, Margaret Thatcher was told to lower the pitch of her voice in the 70s, otherwise, you know, people would somehow fail to take a woman seriously. And bearing in mind, lots of other women around her were doing that. You know, women, that was already, that was

already when women were starting to drop the pitch of their voices. But one of the things that's quite noticeable when you listen to her now is you can hear the effort. You can hear her working hard to do something with her voice that she wouldn't necessarily naturally do. So it's not, you know, it's the sort of seeing the working out, seeing somebody trying quite hard, gives you a different signal than if they are just able to drop into it effortlessly. And that's, you know, so I can't knock the politicians for trying to do it because lots of people try and do it. But it's, you know, we pick up on when it's not quite working, when it's not quite there yet.

Yeah, and then it kind of backfires. Yes, I think so. Yeah. Okay. I want to ask you a little bit about communication in the modern age, because it seems to be, the ways in which we communicate seems to be changing faster than ever. obviously we're speaking now without actually seeing each other. We're just kind of disembodied voices.

I was going to ask what kind of impact do you think modern technology is having on communication? Is it a force for the good? Is it a negative impact? Is it a bit of both? Well, I think generally, as soon as we had our first technological advances, as soon as a human was able to put a mark on a wall and use that to represent stuff symbolically, then we've been using other modes than face-to-face interactions to manage communication. You know, my grandparents' generation lived at a time when the post is so quick. You could

send postcards back and forth in a day. You could have like several, there'd be many different posts during the day and you could have whole interactions like emails now, but via the post. Of course, that's gone because the telephone came along. We didn't need to do that anymore, so we could then talk to each other. And then mobile telephones came along. Very quickly, the main thing we started doing with mobile telephones was sending text messages, which no one's sort of coming. And we are very, very good at exploiting new things available to us. So the whole kind of, you know, I never thought I would be somebody who would end up using emojis, but I find myself using them quite often now because there's simply different possibilities offered to me

when I'm writing a message than I had even, you know, 10 years ago on my phone. So it's more to do with, you know, humans are excellent at exploiting and developing. technology to help us get to our aims and communication is incredibly important drive. We want to make ourselves understood. We want to share messages. We want people to hear us, want people to understand this. We want to understand what other people are doing. So it's going to keep shifting. I think the only thing we can say for short is it will keep shifting. The basic aspects of it, though, is it's always going to be rooted in face-to-face interaction because that's actually what happens when you're born, how people interact with you. Everything

you learn to do with your voice as a baby, you know, learn to understand what's said to you, learn to produce your own speech, you learn in conversation, you learn in interaction sort of face to face. So it's all still going to be grounded in that. And for example, everything we do with written speech is completely parasitic on normal speech. So, you know, be able to hear speech, be able to produce spoken words. So it's, it's, the route will always be seeing and hearing the speaker. Technology seems to be making it easier though, I guess. guess to communicate without having to be face-to-face. Do you think we should be making an effort, a conscious effort to kind of, you know, have more face-to-face contact with people and

communication? Well, it's interesting. There's some data from Robin Dunbar's lab showing that if you look at how long people talk for, how happy they are afterwards, and how much they laugh across different kinds of interactions, then you find that face-to-face interaction, live or on a screen is the best in terms of you talk for the longest, your happiest afterwards, and you laugh most. As soon as you go down to just one modality, listening to each other like us now, you talk for slightly less long,

you laugh a little bit less, you're a little bit less happy afterwards. And then it drops off again for just text-based interactions. But that study was done a few years ago, and I wonder if now with all the different sort of way people use gifts and emojis, would that change, you know? Is it that we've got,

our technology is giving us a better tool, for actually being able to exploit different possibilities in the written stuff such that we can add some of that facial information back in there. So I can't say for sure. Probably the important thing is that we're communicating with each other, but it's at least possible that it may not be quite as dire as it sounds just to communicate with text. I was going to ask you about emojis as well,

because they're obviously quite a modern phenomenon. Do you think emojis can be an effective way to communicate emotions with people, or are they just a bit of a throwaway kind of a bit of fun? Well, if you look at the history of writing systems, people have been trying to use punctuation to affect how their words can be read, you know, right from the outset. We use, you know, when people use underlining or asterisks or exclamation points on,

and I sat agonised about using an exclamation mark in an email, about, you know, because I'm on to, I said, well, have I used too many? I had that thought this morning. Hang on every sentence here ends in an exclamation. And it's because I'm trying to give it a particular emotional tone. So it's all you've got really with emoticons and then emojis is a wider range of tools. And you're still going to find ones that you find comfortable with.

I mean, I'm very unlikely to start sending messages to my dean full of emojis. But then that's because like all interactions, you're managing it in a particular way. You want to give a particular impression. And I do think it is quite interesting how it can sort of reflect you things you didn't know you needed. So one of the things that I've found striking about the kind of current, not the new iPhone, but the more, you know, the last few years of emojis, people, I didn't know we needed a series of signifiers of approval, like, but people do. Those 100% signs or the little like okay fingers or clapping hands.

Thumbs up. And how people, yeah, exactly, how people use that and kind of, oh, that's perfect. Oh, lovely, good job, that kind of thing. It's really, really interesting. And I didn't know we were suffering because we were suffering because we were. we didn't have it until we were suddenly available to it. So you think, well, this is great. I can really give somebody a nice bit of feedback

without having to write a long essay and why I thought that was a funny tweet. That was Sophie Scott talking about the science of communication. You can watch this year's lectures on BBC 4 on the evenings of the 26th, 27th and 28th of December. Thanks for listening to the Science Focus podcast. In our Christmas issue, which is on sale now, we speak to the scientists who grow brains without a body,

We report on how mathematicians are taking on terrorism, and we ask Gary Kasparov whether AI really is a threat to our existence. And of course, much, much more. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal.

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