Why do we love to play games?

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Speaker 3 This is the podcast of BBC Inside Science, recorded at Green Man Festival on the 16th of August, 2025.

Speaker 3 Hello, lovely curious-minded listeners and Green Man Festival goers. Welcome to a very special episode of BBC Inside Science at Green Man Festival.
We are here with a live audience.

Speaker 3 Hello, live audience.

Speaker 3 And we are in the stunning Brecon Beacons National Park, or Banai Brecheniag.

Speaker 3 Today, we are exploring the science of games, why we play them, how to win them, and the rise of the gamification in all of our lives.

Speaker 3 And I'm joined by three excellent guests who are all ready to play along and to give us some real insight.

Speaker 3 We have Jilly Forrester, who is Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology at the University of Sussex. We have Dr.

Speaker 3 Katie Steckles, who's a mathematician and an all-round maths communication extraordinaire based in Manchester.

Speaker 3 And Jazz Singh, Jazzatha Christie himself of Traitors Series 2 fame, robbed at the final and now a television and radio broadcaster with a brand new daily show on the BBC Asian network.

Speaker 3 Welcome our panel.

Speaker 3 And since we have a faithful in our midst, and as we steal ourselves for the much anticipated series of celebrity traitors, I want to start by asking you in the audience, our fabulous Inside Science audience, to imagine yourselves in the Traitor's Castle, sitting around the round table for the first time, the inscrutable Claudia Winkelman stalking the room.

Speaker 3 Do you want to be tapped on the shoulder? Would you rather be a traitor or a faithful? If you'd rather be a trusty faithful, shout faithful after three, one, two, three.

Speaker 3 Oh,

Speaker 3 not that many. If you'd rather be a traitor after three, shout traitor, one, two, three.
Traitor!

Speaker 3 Oh, you deceptive bunch. This is amazing.
So we have a pretty good set of a gauge of the level of deception in our audience.

Speaker 3 Maybe some of the scientific insights we'll give you today might just sway you, or it might just sway some of our faithfuls.

Speaker 3 But I want to start with asking our panel why humans are so innately drawn to playing games. Jilly, the evolutionary benefit, evolutionary psychology is something that you study.

Speaker 3 Why do humans want to play games? What's the benefit?

Speaker 4 You said it right there. It's an evolutionary behavior.
So we are not the only animals that play games.

Speaker 4 There are loads of social species that play games because games allow us to practice for the future. It allows us to learn.

Speaker 4 So you might get different kinds of rewards. You might get a cognitive reward.
It teaches you how to solve a problem, or you might get a food reward or a money reward.

Speaker 4 But when we play, it allows us to practice the things in a safe environment that when we go out into the real world, we're better equipped to deal with.

Speaker 4 So it's about developing skills, it's about learning.

Speaker 3 And Jaz, you lived in a game,

Speaker 3 in a pretty intense psychological game. How was that? What were you doing to try to persuade people to trust you?

Speaker 5 I didn't clearly do a good enough job, did I, at the end?

Speaker 5 But I think when it comes to sort of gameplay in general, I mean, for someone that's never played an actual murder mystery game before, but going into a life-size murder mystery experience, we as humans, we need competition to survive.

Speaker 5 We love that adrenaline, that sort of dopamine hit that we continuously want in life.

Speaker 5 But when you actually immerse yourself in a game like that, where the pressure's so high, the stakes are so high, you want to get to the end and you just don't think that anything outside of that game is, you know, important.

Speaker 5 You know, that game is all or nothing, and you want to make sure that you get to the end.

Speaker 3 Katie, you not only play games, but you make puzzles and brain teasers. You know, that's one of your mathematicians' skills.

Speaker 3 So if we look sort of beyond our own evolution, games are an important way of training artificial intelligence as well, aren't they?

Speaker 3 What role did they play in kind of mimicking that human intelligence in the AI world?

Speaker 6 I guess there's different types of games, right? So you can have a game that is purely, it's what we'd call like a perfect information game where every piece of information is known to everyone.

Speaker 6 So something like chess, where everyone knows where all the pieces are and what the rules of the game are. And in that case, you've got a very sort of strategic type of thinking that you need to use.

Speaker 6 And it's about sort of being able to predict and think ahead, but you know exactly what the effect of your move is going to be.

Speaker 6 There are other games where there's maybe probability involved, so it's a bit less easy to think strategically.

Speaker 6 So, you know, you're rolling dice, so you're drawing out cards from a deck, and in that case, you need a little bit of kind of probability understanding to understand what the likelihood of the thing you want coming out is, but also whether it's worth taking a risk or waiting for a particular thing.

Speaker 6 And then there's there's some games where there's the human element as well.

Speaker 6 So much like the traitors, you've got to kind of think about what the other players are doing and what their motivations are and try and work out what they actually mean when they say things.

Speaker 6 And then there are games which combine all of these things in different ways.

Speaker 6 So like a game of poker, you've got the probability there from, you know, not knowing which cards are going to come up, but you also don't have full information, so you're kind of hiding things.

Speaker 6 And I guess when you're training computer systems, like those sort of strategic games are the kind of thing that they're usually really good at because it's just a case of knowing the rules and knowing all the information.

Speaker 6 I imagine they would be less good at the sort of understanding humans and being able to predict what they're going to do.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And Julie, is there an important psychological element to that thinking ahead and planning and strategizing with gameplay that makes it an important part of training artificial intelligence to think more humanly?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think so. I think we often think that solving a problem is going to be linear.
Like

Speaker 4 this is the way, it's a straight line to get to the goal.

Speaker 4 But we know from modeling the way that we solve problems that if we chunk it into sub-goals, so we solve little problems along the way, they don't often go in a straight line.

Speaker 4 In fact, sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards and win.

Speaker 4 And AI is fantastic for helping us understand how that works in an algorithmic way, but also how humans and other animals have learned to solve these sorts of puzzle problems.

Speaker 3 You study that gameplay in other species as well. I wonder what surprises you about gameplay and you look at chimpanzees, one of our closest evolutionary cousins.

Speaker 3 Is there anything that surprises you in your research when you look at gameplay in different species?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think that they are as creative, if not more creative, in the way they go about solving problems than we are.

Speaker 4 And I think that we often think of our human capabilities like our language and the way that we do our maths as being human unique capabilities.

Speaker 5 But actually, if you break them down, they're all just little sub-goals and these problems that are that are puzzle like and jazz in your kind of lived experience in in living inside a game i can't imagine the intensity of that but were you planning ahead all the time were you strategizing your next move was that constantly on your mind must have been exhausting i'll be honest i wanted to be a traitor um like everyone in this room apparently yeah just like the audience um and i suppose you know from from not getting that tap on the shoulder from Claudia day one, it was a moment of quick reflection all my game plan was so focused on having control of that game in order to get to the end as a traitor so to be a faithful and you know to be an effective faithful it required a lot of hard work you know which was listening to absolutely every single conversation that was going on in the castle it was using your eyes and your peripheral vision 24 7 it was getting the dynamics right with the relationships of the other contestants but you are always continuously trying to adapt your game plan in order to get to the end.

Speaker 3 I actually want to bring in the audience now. If you guys, you're here because you're interested in games, you're interested in science.
Does anyone have any questions?

Speaker 3 We have a roving microphone, I think.

Speaker 7 Hello, I'm Bill.

Speaker 7 So children like playing games. What effect does that have on development?

Speaker 4 It's a safe place for them to practice things that might be more dangerous in the real world.

Speaker 4 So they can play fight and things like this, but also solving different kinds of problems that might have real consequences.

Speaker 4 You probably start to develop sorts of understanding economics, equality, and how you kind of gamble with your friends a little bit over maybe not money, but different kinds of resources.

Speaker 4 So, it's really important to understand how those things can pan out over time, who's going to deceive you, who you can trust. I think these things are incredibly important.

Speaker 4 But likewise, on the flip side, aside from deception, games are a wonderful way to build social social bonding, to build good feelings of happiness, and some people really use games as a way to transcend into a different reality.

Speaker 3 And Katie, you know, it's interesting talking about children playing games as well, you know, from kind of the mathematics, the solving strategies, like how much of a benefit is that, doing those puzzles as we grow and develop our brains?

Speaker 6 Yeah, I think it's an incredible benefit, and there's a lot of skills around things like recognizing patterns and about kind of understanding how complicated systems work.

Speaker 6 You know, I've got a little nephew who's six and he can explain exactly how to play the Pokemon trading card game. And it is a horrifically complicated game.

Speaker 6 But because he's motivated to learn it, because it's a fun game that he likes to play, like he's engaged with all of these really complex ideas and ways that things interact with each other and he's got it.

Speaker 6 And it's fantastic, yeah.

Speaker 3 So we were talking a little bit about trust and deception there, and we want to ask in the next part of this conversation if science can help us win the traitors or maybe to deceive somebody.

Speaker 3 You're listening to a special episode of BBC Inside Science, and we are talking about gameplay. I want to focus on the traitors, it's such a compelling game.

Speaker 3 I know we have a lot of fans of the traitors in the room. Shout if you're a viewer.

Speaker 3 And I want to work out why that is the science behind it, and where the science could provide a player with a winning strategy. So, to do that, we're going to start by playing a game.

Speaker 3 So, I have in my pocket two vouchers for a double ice cream. We're going to play a game of share or steal, but you have to play this game with two people.

Speaker 3 So the game we're going to play works like this. I'm going to ask for a volunteer and that volunteer will have a minute to discuss with Jazz Singh whether they're going to share or steal that prize.

Speaker 3 We have cards in front of you, steal and share. So you're going to hold those up while you're talking to each other.
and not reveal what you're going to do.

Speaker 3 So the rules are, if both players decide to share, each of you will get one of the tokens and happily go off and get your ice cream. Jazz will get one and you'll get one.

Speaker 3 If one player decides to steal and the other person shares the one who steals gets everything, gets both ice cream tokens. And if both players decide to steal, both players get nothing at all.

Speaker 3 Is that clear? Are the rules clear?

Speaker 3 Excellent. So can I have a volunteer? Oh, hand shot up here in the front row with an excellent hat on.
Sir, would you like to come up on stage? Give him a round of applause.

Speaker 3 And what is your name, young man? My name is Sam. Well, welcome, Sam.
There are your cards. You hold them so that Jazz can't see them.
Jazz, you have your cards as well.

Speaker 3 Do you have anything, Sam, that you would like to say to Jazz in the next minute, and I'm going to time you that you have to convince him that you are going to share your ice cream tokens with him?

Speaker 3 Go for it, Sam. What would you like to say? Would you really like two ice creams for yourself?

Speaker 5 Feeling a bit hungry, Sam. I think so, buddy.

Speaker 3 A bit greedy.

Speaker 3 You know what?

Speaker 5 Because I'm a Libra and I love balance, I'm happy to share.

Speaker 3 How about you, Sam? Are you going to share? Yeah, I probably will. You're going to share?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'm going to share. Do you have anything you want to ask of Sam, Jazz?

Speaker 5 Yeah, Sam, a couple of questions, my friend. First of all, how hungry are you?

Speaker 3 I'm not that hungry. I had a big breakfast.

Speaker 3 What did you have for breakfast? Um, a bacon and sausage sandwich.

Speaker 5 Ketchup?

Speaker 3 Brown sauce.

Speaker 5 Sounds traitor already.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 Right, hold up your cards, Sam, so that the back of them is to Jazz. Jazz, you do the same.
And can you both look each other in the eye?

Speaker 3 And I'm going to ask you each one at a time whether you're going to share or steal. Just look at Jazz and tell him what you're going to do.
I'm going to share.

Speaker 3 What are you going to do, Jazz?

Speaker 5 I'm definitely going to share, Sam. I think it's the right thing to do.

Speaker 3 Okay, after three, I'm going to ask each of you to reveal to the audience what you have decided to do. Are you going to share? Are you going to steal? One, two,

Speaker 3 three.

Speaker 3 They're both going to share.

Speaker 3 Sam, thank you very much indeed. You can keep your cards as a souvenir if you would like.
Here's your ice cream token for whatever flavour of ice cream, a double that you would like.

Speaker 3 Please leave the stage carefully and don't judge.

Speaker 5 Of course. Sam, I think you can have mine as well.

Speaker 3 Oh,

Speaker 3 faithful to the end.

Speaker 3 Sam, thank you very much. Massive round of applause for Sam.

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Speaker 3 So that was a cheap BBC audio version of the prisoner's dilemma. Katie, you are our strategy mathematician expert.
How does that work?

Speaker 3 What is the best strategy for the share or steal prisoner's dilemma?

Speaker 6 You might think that the sort of human interaction side of this isn't something you can think about mathematically, but actually there's a whole branch of maths called game theory and this is basically the classic problem from game theory it's kind of one of the simplest sort of problems and it's called the prisoner's dilemma because originally it was about two prisoners and they were given the choice of either to you know tell on their colleague and say oh that they did it or to keep quiet and if they tell them that the other person did it that person go to prison if they keep quiet they will both get a reduced sentence but if they both say that the other one did it then they'll both go to prison because they they found out that both of them did it so there's kind of a dilemma in there that do you do the thing that's best for you or do you do the thing that's sort of best for everyone but you're risking the other person choosing effectively to steal and mathematically what's really interesting about this is that the best option strategically is always to steal like in any situation so if you think the other person's gonna share then obviously it's better to steal if you think the other person's gonna steal it's better to steal because then you're not giving them the thing and you go away with nothing.

Speaker 6 You know, if I can't have it, then no one can have it. So kind of thinking mathematically about optimizing the amount of stuff that you gain, it's always better to choose to steal.

Speaker 6 But, you know, there is a situation where both people share and actually everyone's happy. So there's a kind of paradox in there, I guess.
And it's something that is studied really, really thoroughly.

Speaker 6 People have done lots of psychology exam tests on this kind of thing. But in the kind of mathematical principle, there is a best strategy.

Speaker 6 Then just comes down to do you trust the other person and what do you think they're going to do?

Speaker 3 So, let's talk about that trust as well, Jilly. You know, can we talk about deception? That is part of that game, that discussion.

Speaker 3 What are we engaging in when we look to either work out whether to deceive someone or whether we work out whether we trust them, what's happening there?

Speaker 4 There's quite a few things going on. So, we all know that we are what we would call multimodal beings.

Speaker 4 So, when we communicate with other people, you might be speaking to them, but you're also giving them a lot of other communicative signals, right?

Speaker 4 What your eyes are doing, where they're looking, what body posture you have, whether or not you're directing your attention to the person or not.

Speaker 4 And we don't always say what we mean and we don't always mean what we say. So you as the perceiver have to work out which channels am I going to look at? Which ones do I trust?

Speaker 4 And what are the words that they are saying? Are they masking because they have an agenda?

Speaker 4 So are they pretending with parts of their body to be saying one thing when they actually mean something else? Or are they not?

Speaker 4 So one of the strategies to work this out is to remember what they did before.

Speaker 4 So you have a shared history with the individual and you have to remember all the previous experiences that you've had with them and how they've acted previously because people are pretty consistent in their behavior.

Speaker 4 And if you can do that, you've got a pretty good shot of knowing whether or not they're lying. But the other thing is, and this is pretty new research, it's called the minimization effect.

Speaker 4 We get absolutely distracted by all the signals that we put out. So if you can minimize it to one channel, so stop looking at them and just listen to what they're saying.

Speaker 4 In laboratory studies, people are better at spotting the liars by just listening to the words versus looking at the whole picture.

Speaker 3 I just want to bring in audience questions. We have a hand gone up in the third row there, rainbow dress.
Thank you. Hi, I'm Colleen.

Speaker 3 My question was regarding what you just said about body language, which is that body language, you might say that there is a specific way that things are done, but what about when you recognise that people might behave differently in conversations depending on maybe whether they're neurodivergent or something like that?

Speaker 3 Which might mean that they don't fit the normal patterns.

Speaker 5 I think again, it goes down to what sort of what Jilly was saying in terms of what have they demonstrated prior? You know, what have they demonstrated before? Is there a pattern of behavior?

Speaker 5 Is there that consistency? I suppose that helps you determine whether they're being authentic and their authentic self.

Speaker 5 I suppose sort of going into the Traitor's Castle, I was meeting these people, these other contestants, for the first time.

Speaker 5 So with them being defensive, you know, arms crossed, that's because they might be feeling nervous. That doesn't mean that they're a traitor.

Speaker 5 It means that they perhaps might be feeling uncomfortable or overwhelmed with the pressure. So I think time's a good indication of for you to try and understand,

Speaker 5 right, is this person being themselves or have they demonstrated something that they've done before?

Speaker 3 Yeah, and Julie, it strikes me that that feeds into what you were saying about consistency, about looking at how people behave, how individuals behave. Is that part of it, seeing patterns?

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, definitely. So those kind of relationships that you build with people, you will have this historical kind of timeline to look at previous experiences.

Speaker 4 And particularly people who are neurodivergent, we know that there's a high co-occurrence with anxiety and particularly social anxiety.

Speaker 4 and that will certainly affect the way that people attend to you whether or not they'll want to look directly face to face sometimes there's bits of awkward delay because just the timing and conversation is slightly different but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a deceptive or a masking behavior so it's good to be aware that different people there's massive individual variability across all of us but yes for certainly this is why getting to know somebody is quite good and it gives you a good insight into their personality and their intentions.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's shared history. That's really interesting.

Speaker 3 You are listening to a special episode of Inside Science, and for a playful recap of our game-themed episode, we know now that there are very good evolutionary reasons why we play games and why we want to win them.

Speaker 3 And while Snakes and Ladders is always going to come down to look, we've learned a little bit about how we can deploy maths and science to boost our chance of winning certain games.

Speaker 3 Now, though, from fitness apps that give us medals, scoring our sleep, language learning app streaks, it seems like the devices in our pockets are gamifying our lives more and more.

Speaker 3 So how can we keep all this in balance and live our lives playing the games that we find something positive in? Katie, can I ask you as our game theory expert, what does gamification actually mean?

Speaker 6 It's a process whereby people use the reward system, I guess, that's built into games.

Speaker 6 So this idea that when you're playing a game, you can win or you can beat something or you can win a prize or whatever. But building that into other things in real life.

Speaker 6 So, making something into a game. And, you know, this is the kind of thing that people have always done.

Speaker 6 You know, if you want to put all the toys away, let's see who can do it the fastest, and that kind of thing.

Speaker 3 So, this isn't a new thing. I mean, people might think about it as being something that driven in a lot of apps on our phone, but like, this is not a new thing.

Speaker 6 It comes down to the basic principle of taking the structure of a game and applying it to something else. And I guess a nice example is Dmitry Mendeleev, who discovered the periodic table.

Speaker 6 Apparently, the story goes that he was a big solitaire player, and what he did to try and sort of work out where everything needed to go, he made cards for each of the elements.

Speaker 6 At the time, there were sixty-three known elements on the periodic table, a lot less than we have now.

Speaker 6 But he put them all on the table and just spent hours rearranging them and trying to fit them into the different categories. And then he saw the patterns in there.

Speaker 6 Because pattern spotting is a huge part of a lot of different games. And in solitaire, you're arranging things into suits and ranks.

Speaker 6 But obviously, he was organizing it into the groups and periods of the periodic table. And he found a way of doing it that worked, that fit with the science that they knew at the time.

Speaker 6 And this was before we even understood the structure of an atom and why the periods are the way they are.

Speaker 6 So, on the periodic table, there's different numbers of things in each row because of the structure of the atoms and the way those chemical elements behave.

Speaker 3 I'll never look at the periodic table in the same way again. It does look like Solitaire.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah, but he was just playing cards, and he used like that as a sort of structure that he could then use to make it easier to complete this task.

Speaker 4 Do you have sort of a favourite gamified thing, whether it's something that's an app on your phone, or whether it's just just a way of gamifying something that makes it more interesting to participate in Jilly well it's not a favorite one of mine but I think it's a favorite of many people I don't use it but Duolingo is a perfect example of gamifying something that people want to learn so so it adds engagement to a learning process it makes it an enjoyable way to learn and it gives it kind of like a sticking point so it will stay with you and I think those are really good it's a really good example of a gamified version of something that people will do repetitively over and over again because it increases their skill, but they also get enjoyment out of it.

Speaker 3 How about you, Casey?

Speaker 6 I'm a big fan of to-do lists.

Speaker 6 I think that there's something about the psychological thrill of ticking a thing off a list that actually, you know, even having done the thing isn't as good as just crossing it out.

Speaker 3 Because sometimes I write things down I've already done just so I can cross them out.

Speaker 6 Definitely.

Speaker 6 In terms of literally gamifying it, I've heard of an app that you can use as a to-do list, but it lets you assign different levels of difficulty to different tasks, and then you get XP points for having done a thing.

Speaker 6 And if you earn enough, you can buy outfits for your character and this kind of thing. And it's all completely pointless, and none of it is to do with the actual work that you need to get done.

Speaker 6 But it is a motivator, apparently.

Speaker 3 I've not used it much. It's motivating, I love that.
There's some suggestion that you can use gamification for conservation as well.

Speaker 3 So there's a platform called iNaturalist looking at conservation by documenting different species. So it's kind of like Pokemon Go, but for real wildlife and for invasive species.

Speaker 3 It's a really interesting approach.

Speaker 3 Jilly, Jilly, psychologically, why does gamification work so well on us, do you think?

Speaker 4 I think it works so well because it's tapping into the reward system in our brain. So there are chemicals in our brain that gets released when we have a reward.

Speaker 4 So it doesn't have to be a food, it can be a psychological reward as well. And you get a little dopamine hit.
And everybody knows what that feels like.

Speaker 4 And it's not just from gamified versions of things like Duolingo. It can happen when you're online shopping.

Speaker 4 It can happen when you're social networking. It's this little ping, this little yes, I've got a hit, I've got a like.
This is all tapping directly into the brain's reward system.

Speaker 3 We've got time for a couple more audience questions before we wrap up. We have a hands went up here.

Speaker 8 This question for Jazz.

Speaker 8 I was just wondering, so on the traitors, you obviously had had the theory about the eventual winner the whole time and you were trying to convince people the whole time, but you weren't really getting that many people believe in you.

Speaker 5 I was going to ask, so after coming out of the traitors and learning everything you've learned about game theory about psychology what would you do differently this time to make people believe you and get them on side with your theory really good question and you do think you know hindsight's such a great thing but i think i'm probably the only person even though i didn't actually win the money to have no regrets uh in terms of how i play that game i think as faithfuls the odds are against you you don't have the control that the traitors do so you have to work extremely hard in order to get to the end.

Speaker 5 And I feel as though how I executed the game plan as a faithful, to get to the point where I was ducking at the beginning, not saying too much, even though I've got a big mouth on me and I wanted to say so much.

Speaker 5 You almost have to bide your time up until you know the spotlight is on you and you have to make an impact and you have to make an impact with a balanced approach.

Speaker 5 So I'm very, very lucky to say that if I was invited back into the castle, I'd probably do exactly the same thing.

Speaker 5 However, if they choose me as a traitor, then I don't know what I'm gonna do.

Speaker 4 Jilli.

Speaker 4 Adding on to what Jazz is saying there, I think the high pressure of that situation is really interesting, and it very much parallels other ape groups, so chimpanzees and gorilla groups, who are constantly working out what the hierarchy is and where they sit.

Speaker 4 And what it comes down to in order to kind of be a good player is something we call in psychology theory of mind.

Speaker 4 So you know what you think about other people, but you also have to remember what they think about other people. Hold both of those things in your mind.

Speaker 4 So I know that he thinks, that she thinks, that they think, that they think. And like Shakespearean plays are built on seven levels of intentionality.

Speaker 4 So the better you are at remembering that whole nested group of belief systems in your social network, the better you're going to be at maintaining or increasing your hierarchy level.

Speaker 3 Wow, it's fundamental to those social interactions and our culture, right? Thank you all of you and I just want to turn back to our audience now.

Speaker 3 We started by asking if you would rather be a faithful or if you would rather be a traitor.

Speaker 3 I think there was a pretty strong consensus on the traitor side which strategically is the right choice, right? But let's see if the dial has shifted at all.

Speaker 3 If you would prefer to be a faithful in the Traitors Castle after three shout faithful one two three

Speaker 3 that you've convinced some people to join your side charge and if you you would rather be a traitor, after three, shout Traitor. One, two, three.
Traitor!

Speaker 3 Okay, yeah, that's pretty strong. I think that's decisive.
Sadly, that is all we have time for today.

Speaker 3 So I just want to give a huge thank you to our panel, Gilly Forrester, Katie Steckles, and Jaz Singh.

Speaker 3 And thank you, our lovely, winning, fabulous Green Man Festival audience. Please give yourselves a big round of applause.

Speaker 3 Thank you for coming. Enjoy your festival.
See you next time.

Speaker 3 You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill. The producers were Claire Salisbury and Jonathan Blackwell.
Technical production was by Mike Cox.

Speaker 3 The show was made at Green Man Festival by BBC Wales and West.

Speaker 3 To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk, search for BBC Inside Science, and follow the links to the Open University.

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