In La Fontaine's fable 'The Monkey and the Cat', Bertrand the monkey talks Raton the cat into pulling chestnuts out of the embers. Raton burns his paws; Bertrand eats the chestnuts. So 'tirer les marrons du feu' described the dupe who takes the risk for someone else, like an English 'cat's paw', which comes from the same tale. Today the French often use it backwards, for whoever profits.
In Kuşköy, a mountain village in northern Turkey, people talk across valleys by whistling Turkish. A 2015 study showed that whistled Turkish draws on both hemispheres fairly evenly, whereas spoken Turkish relies mostly on the left. The physical form of the signal, it turns out, matters to the brain.
Speech has no gaps between words. In 1996, researchers played 8-month-old babies a continuous stream of made-up syllables for just two minutes. The infants picked out the 'words' by tracking which syllables tend to follow one another. That's probability calculation, done without a calculator or any visible effort.