Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn how tool use and language go hand in hand,

Cody wrote that one and why black holes are getting bigger

thanks to the expansion of the universe. I actually wrote hand in hand

pun intended HIO but it's close enough.

Let's satisfy some curiosity.

In a series of clever experiments,

researchers have discovered that two seemingly different traits share a lot of hardware in the brain.

Could it be that language and tool use are different expressions of the same thing?

See, once you know how to use a tool,

it's hard to explain how you do it.

I mean, sure, you can describe each step of a process in literal terms, but someone who's mastered a motor skill, like knitting, isn't thinking about that.

They just grab the needles and knit.

It turns out that the cognitive structures that make humans so good with tools have a lot in common with the ones that make us so good at language.

Both skills rely on the ability to process information that's structured in a hierarchy.

Here's what I mean. You pound a nail by picking up a hammer and swinging backward and forward.

But it's not so simple.

Each one of those actions depends on a whole series of sub-actions.

During the forward swing, hand muscles have to maintain the right pressure, and wrist muscles have to hold the correct

angle, and arm muscles have to accelerate and then stop.

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