Exclusive : Prof Sophie Scott will give the 2017 Royal Institution Christmas lectures on the evolution of language - and explain why gifs and emojis aren’t stupidEmojis enhance human interaction by putting “emotional, non-verbal information back in”, argues Prof Sophie Scott, who has been named as the 2017 Royal Institution Christmas lecturer. “People look at emojis or gifs and think ‘They’re stupid’, but they’re trying to address something,” she said. “There are brain systems that are picking up and decoding all that non-verbal information,” said Scott. She describes the Royal Institution’s lectures as a rare “glimpse into the the world of adult science”. It sounds easy because [I’ve] thought about how to communicate it.”And, as technology rapidly evolves, what might the future hold for human communication?

Source: The Guardian August 25, 2017 16:00 UTC