Episode 139 - Interview with scicomm researcher and evolutionary linguist Dr Hannah Little

Transcript

Jen (00:00:11)

Hello everyone, it's Jen and I am absolutely thrilled to welcome you to another episode of Let's Talk SciComm, as ever my favourite place to be. And that's at least partly because I get to hang out with Dr Michael Wheeler, my most excellent friend and colleague. G'day Michael, how are things today?

Michael (00:00:30)

G'day Jen, they are going very well today. How are you?

Jen (00:00:35)

I'm really well, and you know it always makes me happy when you pronounce g'day so beautifully. I feel like your Australian accent improves every time we speak.

Michael (00:00:44)

I do work hard on it, but I'm not sure it's there yet. But thank you. But I'm very excited.

Jen (00:00:48)

I think you're doing very well.

Michael (00:00:52)

Thank you very much. I'm very excited today Jen. And I know I always say this, but I'm particularly excited. I'm ecstatic today about our guest because we are going to be talking to somebody fascinating, who researches how language has evolved, who thinks seriously about humanity, how humanity might one day talk to aliens, and who's also done stand-up comedy about linguistics.

Our guest is Dr. Hannah Little from the University of Liverpool. Hannah is a linguist, science communication researcher and practitioner and also comedian. Hannah's work looks at how storytelling and cognitive biases shape what people remember and pass on, how we can do that responsibly without sacrificing scientific integrity.

And to give you a little bit of background... And Hannah researches a lot of other things related to science communication as well. And to give you a little bit of background on Hannah, Hannah did a PhD in evolutionary linguistics at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at a place called the Free University of Brussels in Belgium before going on to do a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. And Hannah then spent several years teaching science communication at the Science Communication Unit in UWE Bristol, which I believe you've also visited Jen.

Jen (00:02:21)

Very exciting that we actually met there. It's so great to meet again.

Michael (00:02:27)

Yeah, yeah, it's a small world. Hannah is also a data fellow within the Southwest Creative Technology Network. She sits on the board of directors of the Open Rights Group, which is a UK digital rights advocacy organisation.

And she's a researcher within the SETI Post-Detection Hub at the University of St. Andrews, which is all about figuring out how humanity would respond if we ever made contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.

Hannah's been on the radio, given a TED Talk, and is currently writing a popular science book, all while being a full-time academic. So congratulations for all your productivity Hannah and welcome to the podcast.

Hannah (00:03:13)

Thank you for having me. Yeah, just listening to you talk there made me feel quite tired on behalf of myself.

Jen (00:03:21)

That's where current Hannah gets to thank past Hannah for clearly being such a high achiever. And at some point, hopefully you get to kind of rest on your laurels a bit and say, wow, look at all those fabulous things I did.

Hannah (00:03:33)

Yeah, yeah, I always find it... Yeah, it's quite easy to feel unproductive in the moment, isn't it? But looking back, it's a very useful activity to do every now and then.

Jen (00:03:42)

Absolutely.

Michael (00:03:42)

Yes, 100%. Alrighty Hannah, I'd like to begin actually by asking you, I'm particularly interested in your PhD in evolutionary linguistics. First of all, what is evolutionary linguistics? Can you explain it to me? And how [has] doing a PhD in that area shaped your career?

Hannah (00:04:05)

Yeah, so I'm glad you asked because usually when people say evolutionary linguistics, people think it's about how language changes currently. So they're always talking about, "Oh, are you interested in how, you know, we have new words all the time as a result of the internet and things like that?" And it's nothing to do with that at all.

It's all about how our ancestors first started to develop language and establish communication systems. So at some point our ancestors didn't have human language and then something happened and now we have seven thousand of them. So it's all about how we got from that that place of no language to having some language.

So my project was specifically about how we established speech sounds in our language and created discrete speech sounds. So our larynx is actually a continuous space where you can make continuous sounds. There's no real discrete difference between an E and an R, and you can go from one to the other in the mouth. But we think of them as discrete speech sounds, and I was interested in that process of how that discretisation happened.

Jen (00:05:28)

And how do you study that given that we... there are no records from that period of early humankind? How on earth do you study it? How much of it's physiology and how much of it's something else?

Hannah (00:05:43)

So, really good question, because you're right. You know, before we had writing, there's no record of language. Language does not fossilise. And so we have fossil records of, and even the larynx doesn't fossilise, right? It's soft tissue. So we've just basically got the bones and nothing else.

So what I was doing was actually some experiments with people where I was getting them to communicate using a continuous medium. So if you just ask people to try and create signals with their larynx, they'll just use language. You can't just get them to use their larynx.

So what we did was we got a theremin, which is a musical instrument that... it's kind of like a slide whistle, but you can move your hand in the air to create different pitches and different volumes and tones. If you've ever heard a science fiction movie soundtrack, you will have probably heard a theremin. It's a very kind of eerie noise.

It kind of sounds like... That kind of thing. So we created a theremin and asked people to communicate using these theremins, which is a continuous space. And then as we made the things that they were trying to communicate more and more complex, looked at how they discretise the space and use structure within their signals to get at exactly what it was about communication that was leading them to start using structure rather than just specific shapes or specific tones to communicate different things that they were trying to communicate. Yeah, which sounds bizarre and probably makes me sound a little bit crazy.

Jen (00:07:41)

Not at all.

Hannah (00:07:42)

But yeah, that's the kind of evolutionary linguistics because it's so abstract and so there's no fossil record. And that like links to the alien stuff right? Because it's all about how do you establish a communication with a being that doesn't share a language with you.

So our ancestors didn't share a language. They didn't know what language was. They didn't know what language could be. But how do you start communicating with nothing? And how does that become something?

Michael (00:08:13)

Okay. Well, that's fascinating. I mean, did you have that idea when you undertook this research, you know, before you signed up to a PhD that this is one way of trying to understand how we might make contact with aliens? Or is that some realisation you had after?

Hannah (00:08:32)

Well, it's a realisation. So it wasn't me who came up with this, but quite often those experiments where you get people to come into the lab and start creating communication systems using bizarre experiments or bizarre settings, the premise is often "you have landed on an alien planet".

Michael (00:08:51)

Yeah, yeah.

Hannah (00:08:53)

"Aliens use these weird musical instruments to communicate with each other. You start to try and communicate with the natives". And that's the kind of setup you have to create for participants so they really understand what they're even trying to do.

Because if you kind of say right, "imagine you're a, you know, one of our ancestors", it doesn't really work. And it's through those experiments and kind of seeing the different setups and these scenarios that we give people to try and get at that question of how do you start having a communication system, that I started picking out all of the areas in which these hypothetical science fiction scenarios were influencing linguistic thinking and how we know language works.

Jen (00:09:38)

Michael I think you and I have not been doing, being part of the right experiments.

Michael (00:09:43)

Definitely not.

Jen (00:09:43)

I really want to be in one of those setups. It sounds fascinating. Oh my goodness. But Hannah, I really want to... I mean, I could talk about that stuff with you for hours. I find that incredibly interesting, but I want to jump ahead in terms of humanity and the way we communicate.

And I don't know how many thousands of years we have to jump ahead, but I want to think about storytelling, which is obviously something that's an incredibly important part of our species and something that you've thought a lot about and something that we talk about a lot in science communication training.

So I know that you've recently been involved in some really important and useful research about storytelling and human cognitive biases. So I guess I'd love you to explain to us what do those two things have in common and yeah, can you tell us about the storytelling toolkit that you've developed?

Hannah (00:10:34)

Yeah, so this isn't as far away from evolutionary linguistics as you might think, because the groundwork of my understanding of cognitive biases and storytelling comes from the evolutionary linguistics literature.

So it's all about what information sticks in our heads and gets passed on to somebody else. So one of the most important experimental setups we use in the experiment in evolutionary linguistics is called, something called iterated learning, which is just like a game of telephone that kids play in the playground right?

So I whisper something to you and then you hear that and then you whisper that to somebody else. And then you have a big long chain of people and at the end somebody says something bizarre that's nothing to do with the first thing whispered. But that's basically what the cultural evolution of language looks like, right?

So your parent teaches you language, you learn language and have all sorts of other input from your friends and your peers and your colleagues and your partner and your family. And then you might have children and then pass language on to them. And it's just on and on and on. But you can model that in the lab in an afternoon by just playing a game of telephone, right?

So what people in cultural evolution have been doing is trying to find out how this affects stories. So if you look at folk tales from across the globe, so different cultures have different traditional stories that have been passed on historically through oral traditions, right?

So before we had writing systems, people were passing stories from one person to another. And as you said earlier, we don't have any fossilized record of that. But what we do notice is that these stories have a lot in common with each other, right? There are themes that crop up all the time. There's certain structures that crop up all the time.

And there's this persisting problem of like, how did that happen, right? Was that the result of some kind of people talking to each other or cross-cultural stuff going on? Or was it, or is it just something to do with our brains that we just really love certain types of stories more than others?

So what the cultural evolution literature has been doing is creating stories that have different features. So you can have a story that's very social, it's got lots of human characters interacting with different motivations and different relationships. You can have stories that are really negative, where lots of bad things happen that negatively affect the characters, or really positive, where they positively affect the characters. Or stories that are very surprising, counterintuitive, stories that are very survival-oriented, or not. And they give these to people and put them in these chains where they tell the story to somebody else. They remember the story and then recall it to somebody else and so on. You know, in the lab in an afternoon.

And the resulting stories basically tell you something about which of those stories sticks in people's brains more. And as a result of that experimental work, we've uncovered lots of what people call cognitive biases.

And when I say biases, I don't mean that the information is biased in some way or that it's... the person who's written the story is trying to make the information change or lack scientific integrity. And I'm saying that because this is something science communicators worry about a lot, is they want to keep the story honest and true and not discriminate against any one population or another. It's all about biases that exist in our brain to just pay attention to some stuff more than others.

So through that work what... To kind of summarise a huge body of literature, which is what I try and do in the toolkit is that stories are remembered more by humans if they are social, so if they have human characters versus stories that don't have any characters and no interaction in them. They're just kind of like physical stories without any characters. Stories are remembered... more information from the stories is remembered when they're counterintuitive, so something surprising and out of the ordinary happens. They're remembered more if they're survival oriented. So if there's something about human survival in there, which makes totally, like evolutionary sense...

Jen (00:15:25)

Yeah, it does. I need to pay attention to that because that's going to help me to survive.

Hannah (00:15:31)

Absolutely. And the same thing for negative information actually, which is I think probably the most controversial when I was talking to science communicators about this, these biases. That we remember stories if they have lots of negative implications versus stories with positive. Which makes total sense if, you know, if you've ever been given negative feedback, that will live rent-free in your head for a very very long time. But if somebody says something really lovely to you, you just forget it immediately, right? That's not the thing...

Jen (00:16:00)

Yeah, I mean the negativity bias we know is incredibly strong because we have to pay attention to things that pose a risk to us. That makes absolute sense.

Hannah (00:16:09)

Yeah, and it's so strong that if you give people a neutral story where the events happen, but they don't have a very clear positive or negative effect on the people within that story, when people retell the story to somebody else, they make it negative, right?

Jen (00:16:25)

Really.

Hannah (00:16:26)

So it's not neutral. People make it negative. And so then as you go down the telephone chain, you end up with a very like grim story. And humans will do that.

Jen (00:16:42)

And Hannah, anyone who's listening, I think is like, Oh my goodness, I need to understand this in great detail in order to be a better storyteller. This is in the toolkit, yes? This is what people can read about.

Hannah (00:16:51)

Yes, this is in the toolkit. So this is all based on a paper I published in Public Understanding of Science. So if you're more academically minded and want a list of all of the literature and exactly what that literature did, probably go and see the paper.

But if you're a practitioner and you're just interested in what are these different biases that we have and what will make my information stick in the heads of my audience, the toolkit will do that. Although there is also a bibliography if people want that as well.

Yeah, but the crucial... Oh, sorry.

Jen (00:17:28)

Brilliant... I was going to say brilliant and thank you on behalf of everybody for having done this research and shared it in effective ways because it sounds... Well, not sounds, it is clearly very very important.

Hannah (00:17:41)

Yeah.

Michael (00:17:42)

Yeah, I think it makes total sense, doesn't it? That we all have these cognitive biases, things that our brains are hardwired to kind of focus on. So why not incorporate that into your storytelling? It's really great that you've done this.

And I love the research method as well as a big game of telephone. Yeah, I imagine it's quite fun to do those experiments. And, you know, funny as well. I imagine some of the things that you hear can be quite humorous. And I did also want to ask you about humor.

I know you've looked at humor in some of your research and you've also done stand-up comedy as well. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience of doing the stand-up comedy and then more broadly, what is it about humor that is particularly powerful for reaching people?

Hannah (00:18:34)

Yeah, so I first did stand-up comedy probably back in 2011, so quite a while ago now. And I first started doing it through the Bright Club initiative that launched in the UK. And I think probably, there's definitely Bright Club in Ireland. I'm not sure about Australia.

Jen (00:18:54)

Yeah, we've chatted. We've got a good friend of the podcast, Jessamyn Fairfield, who came and visited us in Melbourne. And we've talked to her on the podcast and she was very involved. I think she actually may have started Bright Club in Ireland. But yeah, we've definitely heard bits about it. It sounds wonderful.

Hannah (00:19:07)

Yeah, so I signed up to do it in Newcastle because I was working there in science communication. I wasn't an academic at the time. And what they do is they pair you up with a working comedian. And you write your set, which is all about your research. So I wrote my set all about evolutionary linguistics and took it to the comedian, and we workshop some stuff. And then I worked with the other people who were going to be on the same night as me. And we kind of helped each other hone our sets. And it was terrifying, but so rewarding when you finally get up there and do it and the audience actually laughs.

And I think that's the thing about Bright Club is that they're a very sympathetic audience who kind of, they go in knowing that it's a bunch of academics and researchers who aren't full-time comedians. So they're not expecting like very very professional polished sets. But people do some incredible stuff through that. And just that experience made me understand that Oh this is something I can do and I basically didn't stop doing it.

So even now, I do stand-up every now and then, but all my stand-up now is about talking to aliens, right? Which is inherently just a hilarious thing to think about, and so many things can go wrong. But through that scenario, you can learn so much about human language and how we communicate and what the concepts of communication are.

So I really love it as a method of you know, making people listen to you. Because they want to listen because you're making them laugh. And that's a very inherently social human thing, you know. You know yourself from you know, talking to your friends down the pub, that the people who, people pay attention to are the people who are telling these stories and making people laugh. And stand-up is a storytelling medium.

But I'm kind of obsessed with the concept... Well like the notion of getting into our most social biases about who we listen to in the pub and tricking people into learning about evolutionary linguistics. Which, you know... Because that's what I love and I just want people to understand it and love it as much as me, which I think is like a social thing that I'm trying to do so.

And I think that's so powerful, thinking about science communication is this social activity rather than in a kind of entirely instrumental role. I think science communicators are often trying to think about things in purely in terms of our objectives and what exactly we're trying to get across.

And there's nothing wrong with that. Obviously that's a really really important part of strategic communication. But embedding, then finding ways to embed that into social processes that people are already engaging in I think is the really powerful thing.

Michael (00:22:18)

Yeah, yeah.

Jen (00:22:20)

Yeah, absolutely. And I think we've had a few conversations with people in this podcast about comedy and science comedy. And it really strikes me something you said earlier about one of the biases that is really good to understand in the context of storytelling is about when something unexpected happens and we really pay attention to that.

And my understanding from some of these conversations that we've had is that that's why comedy is so powerful because people are kind of open to something they weren't expecting. But they're kind of expecting something unexpected, right? Because they're waiting for the punchline.

And that's why it really opens people up in this social setting to have their minds changed or have their opinions extended in some way, which is pretty cool.

Michael (00:23:00)

Yeah, it's almost like you can overthink it now that you've researched it all. You know all the cognitive biases when you're, you know, designing jokes. It's, it must be a very technical process for you.

But of course, you know, alien content is always going to be immediately hilarious or has you know, lots of potential to be hilarious. And I really want to ask you more about aliens.

You know, your involvement with the SETI Post-Detection Hub. It's really an extraordinary thing to be involved with. First of all, have you ever seen a UFO? And secondly, what are some of the questions and challenges that you grapple with in this Post-Detection Hub?

Hannah (00:23:44)

I have not seen a UFO. Well, beyond just sort of weird flashing lights outside of my window at night, but I usually find explanations for that.

Michael (00:23:53)

That counts. Yeah, yep, definitely aliens.

Hannah (00:23:57)

It's usually some rave somewhere. But what the Post-Detection Hub grapples with is... Well, any... So SETI is a very, very old institution in America. And so they're interested in searching. So SETI stands for Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. So they're looking for signs of possible alien life in the universe.

And that can be things called biosignatures, which are looking for evidence of certain gases in the atmosphere of exoplanets. Exoplanets are planets that are good candidates for supporting life. It might be techno signatures. So looking for things like, radio waves or light waves that might, that look like they're not naturally created. So it's just looking at the things that look like they're created by intelligence.

So for ... out there that looks like, looking for frequencies that represent pi or hydrogen, which is one thing that that SETI often look for because hydrogen is the most abundant chemical, um element in the universe and so it's a good candidate for trying to communicate it. Because if there's intelligent life out there they'll know what hydrogen is.

We've worked it out and it's just us kind of going, "Hey, this is hydrogen". And when we have sent up signals to aliens, we usually include something that represents hydrogen. So the golden record that went up on Voyager does that.

So what? But what the? So Post-Detection Hub isn't, is... It's not not interested in looking for extraterrestrials. Of course it is. But it's interested in working out what happens if we find them.

And that means it's not just asking physicists, it's not just asking like people who can differentiate signals. It's asking absolutely across academia, what would this discovery do to your subject? So what would that discovery do to religion? What would it do to our laws? Who would have...? If we found a signal, who would have a responsibility to respond? Is there a legal framework under which that like, how we would respond, what that would look like? So there's philosophy involved, there's psychology involved. What would it do to our sense of self, how we see ourselves? How would it affect our mental health?

I'm really interested in this question of how would it affect how we perceive language and human language and communication? So not just like how would we interpret the signal, which is a fascinating problem. I'm obsessed with it. But how would it affect how we see ourselves and our communicative abilities?

Jen (00:27:00)

And Hannah, is this what your book is about? Because I know you're working on a book called The Alien Linguist. Is this some of what you're exploring in that book? Because I really want to read anything that's called The Alien Linguist.

Hannah (00:27:12)

Yeah. So The Alien Linguist, the book's all about different ways science fiction's influenced linguistic research. But the central premise is this, the power of looking at human language from an outsider. That's the through line of what, how that can help us understand ourselves. And you don't, we don't even need to make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence for that to happen right? It's just a thought experiment, but you just need to kind of push it as far as it'll go.

Michael (00:27:40)

Yeah yeah. So do you think it would be a wonderful thing? I mean, are there also...? Do you explore risks as well? If, you know... this would happen.

Hannah (00:27:49)

Oh, yes. I mean, there are people who are very concerned with risks. I don't think about risks because it stresses me out. Sure, that's not my...

Jen (00:28:01)

Good answer.

Hannah (00:28:02)

So there's so many people from so many different disciplines, including people who are kind of mapping like systems of responsibility and everything.

So there's risks associated with the intentions of the extraterrestrial intelligence of course, but also risks associated with who on Earth ends up with that responsibility. And I'm sure you can think of people on Earth who you would not want to have that responsibility who might end up with it, right?

Michael (00:28:30)

Wow. Would you want to have that responsibility?

Hannah (00:28:35)

I would like to have part of it, which is just the part where I get to look at the language.

Michael (00:28:41)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't want an alien to misinterpret something that you've tried to communicate.

Hannah (00:28:49)

Absolutely. And crafting a signal like this unambiguous and as clear as possible is an art all of its own, which we've been thinking about for a very long time.

Michael (00:29:00)

Yeah wow. It's fascinating. It's really fascinating stuff. And I feel like we could talk about this forever. We are reaching the point in the podcast though Hannah where we do need to round out the interview. And we have a few quick questions that we'd like to ask. So these are the real hard-hitting questions and I hope you're ready.

Michael (00:29:25)

The first question that I would like to ask is: What skill has helped you most in your career that you didn't learn at school or university?

Hannah (00:29:34)

Ooh, what a good question. Probably networking. It's quite a dull answer. But yeah, just talking to people and meeting people and sharing things to be excited about is I think the thing that's driven it forward the most.

Jen (00:29:52)

Oh, I don't think that's a dull answer. I think that's a fantastic answer. I think networking is something we all need to be able to do.

Okay, next question. What motivates you on tough days?

Hannah (00:30:01)

The thought that that might be the day that we make contact with aliens.

Michael (00:30:07)

Yes.

Jen (00:30:08)

I was really hoping you were going to say that. Oh, I love it.

Michael (00:30:13)

All righty Hannah. What is the best question you've ever been asked about your work?

Hannah (00:30:20)

Ooh, the best question. I was giving a talk at the National Space Centre here in the UK which is in Leicester, about... And I was talking about aliens, and a little boy asked me if... if we made contact with aliens tomorrow and you had to choose one human language to use with them, what would, what language would you use?

Michael (00:30:46)

Ooh. Wow. What did you say?

Jen (00:30:46)

That's a great question. I love the fact that a kid asked you.

Hannah (00:30:50)

And my answer was actually I would choose one of the signed languages because signed languages... I wrote a paper quite a while ago actually, about looking at iconicity in sign languages.

So iconicity is where the signal looks a lot like the thing that you're trying to communicate. And a lot of gestures in sign languages are very iconic. We gesture the thing that looks like what we're trying to communicate. And they're much more iconic than spoken languages.

So if you're trying to communicate with somebody who's got no pre-existing idea of what language is, you're going to probably have a lot more communicative success with a signed language than a spoken one.

Michael (00:31:36)

Makes sense.

Jen (00:31:37)

Interesting. Okay, next question is, are you an early bird or a night owl?

Hannah (00:31:43)

Night owl.

Michael (00:31:45)

Oh, well, thank you.

Jen (00:31:46)

It's going to be pretty important if you want to find aliens, right?

Michael (00:31:49)

I bet that's where all the UFO sightings, that's the time that all the UFO sightings happen, in the middle of the night. Yeah. And I'm sure you can get a, you see a lot of interesting things at 4am.

Okay, final question then Hannah. What would be your very top tip for communicating effectively about science?

Hannah (00:32:11)

Try and imagine you're communicating with your best mate. Because I think I always advise my students of this, that if you imagine a really specific audience that you know very well when you're communicating, you immediately start communicating in a way that is broadly enjoyable for many people.

Michael (00:32:39)

Yeah, great.

Jen (00:32:41)

I think that's amazing advice Hannah. Because you're right, when you're thinking about communicating to someone that you care about and who cares about you, there's a whole lot of colour and personality in life that you bring into your communication that you somehow feel might not be appropriate if you're communicating to this amorphous big group of people. I think that's really lovely advice.

And Hannah, I just want to say thank you so much as the night owl who got up early to speak with us this morning. And I think Michael and I, our heads are spinning with a million other questions that we would like to ask you.

But clearly you are doing not only fascinating work, but also really important work in helping us to understand more about language and storytelling and communication and how our brains grapple with different kinds of information.

So we'll obviously put links to your work in our show notes. And yeah, just thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. It was wonderful.

Hannah (00:33:32)

Thanks for having me. It's been great.

Michael (00:33:34)

Thanks Hannah. It's been a pleasure.

Michael (00:33:48)

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