I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear and Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

I've had over the years all of my colleagues and students who had babies and I just say,

you know, nine month revolution, wait for the nine month revolution and between nine

and twelve months of age, it's like clockwork. They start pointing and holding things up and showing

them, which chimps don't do either. Just like picking up a toy and holding it up in the air and showing

it, just to share attention to it. That's Michael Thomas-Cello talking about something we don't think

much about but that maybe at the very heart of relating and communicating, shared attention.

I last met Michael when I interviewed him a few years ago in Leipzig, Germany. He was already

doing experiments that studied the differences between how human children and chimps learned to

communicate. Using technology that chimps may not get to for a while, Michael and I talked through

video conferencing between our studio in New York and his lab at Duke University. Michael, I'm so

glad to be able to talk to you today because we talk all the time about communicating and relating,

conversing with one another. And you've spent a great deal of intellectual resources figuring out

where it all began, where we got that. To the extent that that makes us different from other

animals, I think you've really pointed us toward a new way of looking at it. I'm talking about

pointing. I just said the word pointing. I guess that was an unconscious introduction into your

thing because it seems to begin with pointing, doesn't it? Certainly the unique aspects of human

communication begin with pointing. Pointing is kind of the ure act of reference and it's especially

interesting because if I point for you right now in a certain direction, I'm essentially saying,

look in that direction and you'll know what I mean. The point by itself doesn't have any communicative

content. It just tells you to look somewhere and then get the inferential machinery going and

read my mind. Yeah, it's so interesting. We take pointing for granted. We know instinctively,

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