Probably Science

So much weird stuff on this office.

Yeah, I've been in this office too long. I've been here too long. I've just been in this building.

Let's just roll straight in off that, because this is a weird office. Welcome to Probably Science on the road.

We are in the UCL Department of Cognitive Neuroscience.

I'm Matt Kirshan, joined by guest host and friend of the show Nick Doody.

Hello.

And yeah, we're on the road.

And so I've stolen briefly some time out of Professor Sophie Scott's busy day

uh hey Sophie how are you I'm fine thank you fine um yeah we we met at numerous

you obviously you do real proper science but also you sometimes sometimes show up at various public engagement things.

And at some of those, they occasionally have comedy on as well, so I'll paths have crossed numerous times.

But what is it you actually do when you're being a real grown-up scientist?

I'm very interested in how we're doing exactly what we're doing now.

So what I want to understand is how our brains both control our voices and what we sound like, so why we sound the way we do, and how that can

change and how that can go wrong. And I'm also interested in how we're dealing with that

information when we hear other people's voices. So I'm interested in what we get out of voices

and how we put that together into like a sort of understanding or many

different sorts of understandings of what's going on. By what we get out of voices, do you mean

as in the tone rather than the linguistic content? Well, I'm interested in this linguistic content

and historically that's what psychology's looked at. We've, you know, somebody's opened their

mouth and started talking and we've assumed that the important thing there was the words.

...