Briefing Chat: What tickling a chimpanzee can tell us about the evolution of speech

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0:21Welcome to the Briefing Chat Podcast, the Friday show where we discuss a couple of articles that have been highlighted in the Nature Briefing. And joining me this week to chat science is Maren Hunsberger. Maren, how's it going? Hello, hello. I'm good. I'm a little overly warm, thanks to London's heatwave, but we're here and we're chatting briefing. Yes, it is very hot here in London and across most of Europe. Records are being shattered right now, but that's not the news we've got for you this time. I was reading a story in Nature this week about AI, and it's about whether AI is, well, kind of ruining our skills.

0:58Uh-oh. I don't like the sound of this one, but I bet you I can guess some of the results. Well, the one thing to say is these are early results. And as is something we often like to say on the podcast, more data will be needed, more studies, etc. But this is, as I said, an article in Nature that's taken a dive into the early results that have been coming in around this issue. So you probably heard it said that maybe our skills will atrophy because we're using AI. The idea being that AI will do things for us and we won't need to do them and therefore will lose the skills required to do them. And for physicians and software engineers, that does seem to be the case according to these data.

1:43Uh-oh. Interesting populations to look at. In what scenarios are doctors using AI to replace skills that then they're losing? So this particular study was based in Poland and it was looking at physicians who specialize in endoscopy. so this is like using flexible probes to have a look inside people and in this case these were experts at doing colonoscopies they'd done at least 2 000 in their careers and they were trying to flag precancerous intestinal legions called adenomas and so in this study there was an ai tool that was available some days and not others that would also flag these adenomas and before the tool was introduced, the physicians could identify at least one adenoma during 28.4 % of colonoscopies.

2:29But after the tool was introduced, if they didn't have access to it, that decreased to 22.4%. Wow, it really is use it or lose it. You got to practice or you get out of practice. Yeah, it's interesting as well, because this was during just a three month period after the tool was introduced. So it seemed like quite a rapid and in this case, statistically significant drop in their ability to detect these adenomas. So the study offers say that continuous exposure to such tools could cause clinicians to become less motivated, less focused and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance.

3:07Uh-oh. Indeed, uh-oh. And that wasn't the only study. So there was a preprint, so bear in mind this is not a peer-reviewed study yet, that looked at computer science. And so in this case there was a randomized control trial with 52 individuals so randomized control trial some people do one thing some people don't and you're able to sort of infer the differences and in this case half of the group were encouraged to use ai tools and half were not both groups were able to use the internet to find answers and they were given some sort of rudimentary coding tasks and then were assessed on how much they'd learned at the end with a quiz.

3:47And in the group that were encouraged to use the AI, they scored about 50 % on this quiz, whereas the group that didn't use the AI scored around 67 % on this quiz, which implies that the people not using the AI are actually learning a little bit more, especially because the questions that the AI group did poorly on were those that required them to diagnose errors in the code, which suggests that they had failed to learn the concepts behind the code, even though they just produced it. So it really seems like the learning itself is the thing that's been affected here. Interesting. Yeah, I think I've seen a couple of different studies come out, you know, in neuroscience and psychology journals regarding how much of the brain is actually involved when completing tasks using AI or helped by AI.

4:35And it's really interesting to see where that research is leading in terms of, okay, how involved is our brain in some of these tasks if we use these tools? And is that affecting how much we actually are able to learn? Yeah. And in some ways, this is not anything new as well. There's been lots of studies that have shown that our navigation skills have declined as we've used more tools like GPS or Google Maps or whatever it is you use to find your way. But the worry with these sort of tools, these generative AI tools, is they're really trying to do the sort of like thinking, consideration, interpretation the things that we sort of have in the past at least prided ourselves on as people so the concern is that maybe some of those skills will be eroded and at the moment there's not a good sense of like how to stop that happening or how to get it back after it happens there'll be a lot more research done on this i'm sure to try and understand this this is still early days with many of these tools but the researchers who interviewed in this article did raise this as a concern and basically suggested to people just really think about what you might be losing if you use these AI tools like maybe you don't care about certain things like it's not something you want to be skilled in but if they're core skills to what you want to do then you know really think about it before you use the AI.

5:52Absolutely gotta go to brain gym. Gotta go to brain gym indeed the thing is as well though I just do worry and this is my personal worry about people coming into careers because you know there's a lot of like entry-level positions that used to do some of these tasks that AIs are now really good at and they're never learning to do those skills and they're also expected to be able to perform at a high level because these AI tools will allow you to perform at a high level without necessarily having the skills in the past that would have allowed us to do that so but at the same time you gotta get jobs and do things so I do you know have those concerns about people joining professions at the moment.

6:30Absolutely without being able to actually think for themselves or leverage those skills because they aren't their skills to leverage. It always reminds me of that old adage, never let a computer make a management decision because a computer cannot be held responsible. I feel like this is just more and more proof that we should really adhere to that maxim. No, for sure. It's definitely one that we'll be reporting a lot more on at Nature. And I think, yeah, there'll be more studies on this as researchers try and understand it. It'll be interesting to see what happens. Well, I luckily have a bit of a brighter note for us, Nick, with what I want to share with you, which is a new analysis of primate vocalizations out in communications biology this week, in which the researchers found that tickling a chimpanzee, a gorilla, a bonobo, and a human child results in very similar rhythms in laughter.

7:20I really want to look at the method section of this study and just be like, how exactly did they tickle them? What was the tickling parameters, etc.? That sounds amazing. I completely agree. And actually, I do have examples to share with you. Oh, great. I'm just going to play you two of the different species. So here is the chimpanzee vocalization.

7:40And here is the bonobo vocalization.

7:46All right, well, I can definitely see the sort of similarities there. There is sort of like a same sort of way that they are laughing, I suppose. Yes, exactly. And these researchers examined 140 different sequences of laughter from orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, and human children. And they were measuring the timing between each burst of sound. So you could hear in those recordings, there's little bits of silence or breathing and then an expulsion of sound, basically. And they found in comparing all of these different samples that laughter across these species follows a regular rhythmic pattern.

8:22And aside from helping us feel a little bit closer to our fellow primate relatives, I mean, underneath it all, we're all just apes, right? The researchers propose that this research is going to give us insight into human evolution and possibly into the evolution of speech. Okay. How does one go from, I guess, laughing to speech? Great question, Nick. I'd love to tell you. So because this pattern is seen across all of these species, and some of these species like bonobos are much more closely related to humans than other species like orangutans, the researchers propose that this type of rhythmic laughter probably had been present in a shared common ancestor as long as 15 million years ago.

9:06So we've all inherited it and it's developed in its own way. And the researchers found that human laughter, while it exhibited these same patterns, it tended to be faster than the laughter patterns in the non-human apes, and it had more variability. And this increase in speed and variability can be seen as you get closer and closer to humans in the species. So bonobo laughter was faster and more variable than, say, orangutan laughter. So this is further support that the increase in speed may have happened gradually over the course of evolution from that starting point in the origin of our shared common ancestor.

9:41No laughing matter then. Oh, Nick, that was such a good one. I can't believe I didn't think about that. And now I'm like overthinking my own laughter. I'm not laughing as well. I'm just thinking about my own laugh. But what's interesting is that the researchers saw the similarity in patterns in laughter in response to tickling, which is very different than laughter during social play, which maybe is a little bit more similar to how you and I are laughing right now on this podcast. And that's because the researchers called the laughter that they recorded during social play quite a bit more messy than the laughter in response to tickling, which is maybe more of an innate physiological response.

10:21And that's for many reasons, right? The social play, laughter, you know, lots of different things were going on to induce the laughter. And there was movement that may have affected the breathing patterns and that changes the rhythm of the laughter. But also they found that humans and consequently the apes that were closer to humans all had more control over their laughter during social play and could change it in response to different social situations. And that's what makes these researchers think that the evolution of laughter may be influenced by or may reflect a development of greater vocal control, which obviously has implications in the development of speech.

10:58Well, it's funny to think that, you know, a laughter once could have left to the conversation we're having today. But that's super interesting research. But I think that's all we've got time for on the Briefing Chat podcast this week. if you've enjoyed these stories that we've talked about if they've sent you into fits of laughter then you can find links to them in the show notes and we'll also put a link of where you can sign up to the nature briefing as well so you can get more like them delivered to your inbox and next week we wanted to give you a heads up that the content may be a little bit different it's not going to be the regular nature show and briefing chat that you know and love but there will still be lots of things for you to listen to so make sure you come back and check it out for sure and in the meantime if you want to reach out to us you can we're on email podcast.nature.com or we're on social media at nature podcast i'm nick percha chow and i'm maren hansberger thanks for listening