Using tools helps you understand language and vice versa

Practising a tool-using task helps people do better in a test of complex language understanding – and the benefits go the other way too. The crossover may happen because some of the same parts of the brain are involved in tool use and language, says Claudio Brozzoli at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Lyon, France. One idea is that language evolved by co-opting some of the brain networks involved in tool use. Both abilities involve sequences of precise physical movements – whether of the hands or of the lips, jaws, tongue and voice box – which must be done in the right order to be effective. Brozzoli's team asked volunteers to lie in a brain scanner while carrying out tasks involving either tool use or understanding complex sentences.