Podd: Many Minds

From the archive: The octopus and the android

25 december 2024 | 86 min

Happy holidays, friends! We will be back with a new episode in January 2025. In the meantime, enjoy this favorite from our archives!

-----

[originally aired Jun 14, 2023]

Have you heard of Octopolis? It’s a site off the coast of Australia where octopuses come together. It’s been described as a kind of underwater "settlement" or "city." Now, smart as octopuses are, they are not really known for being particularly sociable. But it seems that, given the right conditions, they can shift in that direction. So it's not a huge leap to wonder whether these kinds of cephalopod congregations could eventually give rise to something else—a culture, a language, maybe something like a civilization.

This is the idea at the center of Ray Nayler's new book, The Mountain in the Sea. It's both a thriller of sorts and a novel of ideas; it’s set in the near future, in the Con Dao archipelago of Vietnam. It grapples with the nature of intelligence and meaning, with the challenges of interspecies communication and companionship, and ultimately with what it means to be human.

Here, Ray and I talk about how he got interested in cephalopods and how he came to know the Con Dao archipelago. We discuss some of the choices he made as an author—choices about what drives the octopuses in his book to develop symbols and about what those symbols are like. We consider the major human characters in his book, in particular two ambitious researchers who embody very different approaches to understanding minds. We also talk a fair bit about AI—another central character in the book, after all, is a super-intelligent android. Along the way, Ray and I touch on Arrival, biosemiotics, the nature of symbols, memory and storytelling, embodiment, epigenetics, cephalopod camouflage, exaptation, and the sandbox that is speculative fiction.

This episode is obviously something a little different for us. Ray is a novelist, after all, but he’s also an intellectual omnivore, and this conversation, maybe more than any other we’ve had on the show, spans three major branches of mind—human, animal, and machine. If you enjoy this episode, note that The Mountain in the Sea just came out in paperback, with a jaw-droppingly cool cover, I’ll add. I highly recommend that you check it out.

One more thing, while I have you: If you're enjoying Many Minds, we would be most grateful for your help in getting the word out. You might consider sharing the show with a friend or a colleague, writing us a review on Apple Podcasts, or leaving us a rating on Spotify or Apple. All this would really help us grow our audience.

Alright friends, on to my conversation with Ray Nayler. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

8:30 – For the review of The Mountain in the Sea in question, see here.

14:00 – Con Dao is a national park in Vietnam.

17:00 – For our previous episode about cephalopods, see here.

19:00 – For a book-length introduction to biosemiotics, see here.

24:00 – A video of Japanese macaques washing sweet potatoes.

26:30 – For discussion of the human case, in which environmental pressures of some kind may have propelled cooperation, see our episode with Michael Tomasello.

29:00 – A popular article about RNA editing in cephalopods.

35:00 – A video of the “passing cloud” phenomenon in cuttlefish. A brief article about the phenomenon. A video showing other forms of camouflage in octopuses.

41:00 – An experimental exploration of the movement from “iconic” to “symbolic” communication in humans.

44:00 – A popular article about the communication system used in the movie Arrival.

49:00 – One source of inspiration for Ray’s book was Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think.

1:00:00 – An article on the idea of “architects” and “gardeners” among writers.

1:05:00 – Ray’s story ‘The Disintegration Loops’ is available here.

1:11:00 – Ray’s story ‘The Summer Castle’ is available here.

1:13:00 – A popular article about the phenomenon of highly superior autobiographical memory. An essay about the idea that faulty memory is a feature rather than a bug.

1:18:00 – Ray’s story ‘Muallim’ is available here.

Recommendations

Ways of Being, by James Bridle

Living in Data, by Jer Thorp

Follow Ray on Twitter.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Your brain on language

12 december 2024 | 93 min

Using language is a complex business. Let's say you want to understand a sentence. You first need to parse a sequence of sounds—if the sentence is spoken—or images—if it's signed or written. You need to figure out the meanings of the individual words and then you need to put those meanings together to form a bigger whole. Of course, you also need to think about the larger context—the conversation, the person you're talking to, the kind of situation you're in. So how does the brain do all of this? Is there just one neural system that deals with language or several? Do different parts of the brain care about different aspects of language? And, more basically: What scientific tools and techniques should we be using to try to figure this all out?

My guest today is Dr. Ev Fedorenko. Ev is a cognitive neuroscientist at MIT, where she and her research group study how the brains supports language and complex thought. Ev and her colleagues recently wrote a detailed overview of their work on the language network—the specialized system in our brain that underlies our ability to use language. This network has some features you might have expected, and—as we’ll see—other features you probably didn't.

Here, Ev and I talk about the history of our effort to understand the neurobiology of language. We lay out the current understanding of the language network, and its relationship to the brain areas historically associated with language abilities—especially Broca's area and Wernicke's area. We talk about whether the language network can be partitioned according to the subfields of linguistics, such as syntax and semantics. We discuss the power and limitations of fMRI, and the advantages of the single-subject analyses that Ev and her lab primarily use. We consider how the language network interfaces with other major neural networks—for instance, the theory of mind network and the so-called default network. And we discuss what this all tells us about the longstanding controversial claim that language is primarily for thinking rather than communicating.

Along the way, Ev and I touch on: some especially interesting brains; plasticity and redundancy; the puzzle of lateralization; polyglots; aphasia; the localizer method; the decline of certain Chomskyan perspectives; the idea that brain networks are "natural kinds"; the heart of the language network; and the question of what the brain may tell us—if anything—about how language evolved.

Alright friends, this is a fun one. On to my conversation with Dr. Ev Fedorenko. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – The article by a New York Times reporter who is missing a portion of her temporal lobe. The website for the Interesting Brains project.

5:30 – A recent paper from Dr. Fedorenko’s lab on the brains of three siblings, two of whom were missing portions of their brains.

13:00 – Broca’s original 1861 report.

18:00 – Many of Noam Chomsky’s ideas about the innateness of language and the centrality of syntax are covered in his book Language and Mind, among other publications.

19:30 – For an influential critique of the tradition of localizing functions in the brain, see William R. Uttal’s The New Phrenology.

23:00 – The new review paper by Dr. Fedorenko and colleagues on the language network.

26:00 – For more discussion of the different formats or modalities of language, see our earlier episode with Dr. Neil Cohn.

30:00 – A classic paper by Herbert Simon on the “architecture of complexity.”

31:00 – For one example of a naturalistic, “task-free” study that reveals the brain’s language network, see here.

33:30 – See the recent paper arguing “against cortical reorganization.”

33:00 – For more on the concept of “natural kind” in philosophy, see here.

38:00 – On the “multiple-demand network,” see a recent study by Dr. Fedorenko and colleagues.

41:00 – For a study from Dr. Fedorenko’s lab finding that syntax and semantics are distributed throughout the language network, see here. For an example of work in linguistics that does not make a tidy distinction between syntax and semantics, see here.

53:30 – See Dr. Fedorenko’s recent article on the history of individual-subject analyses in neuroscience.

1:01:00 – For an in-depth treatment of one localizer used in Dr. Fedorenko’s research, see here.

1:03:30 – A paper by Dr. Stephen Wilson and colleagues, describing recovery of language ability following stroke as a function of the location of the lesion within the language network.

1:04:20 – A paper from Dr. Fedorenko’s lab on the small language networks of polyglots.

1:09:00 – For more on the Visual Word Form Area (or VWFA), see here. For discussion of Exner’s Area, see here.

1:14:30 – For a discussion of the brain’s so-called default network, see here.

1:17:00 – See here for Dr. Fedorenko and colleagues’ recent paper on the function of language. For more on the question of what language is for, see our earlier episode with Dr. Nick Enfield.

1:19:00 – A paper by Dr. Fedorenko and Dr. Rosemary Varley arguing for intact thinking ability in patients with aphasia.

1:22:00 – A recent paper on individual differences in the experience of inner speech.

Recommendations

Dr. Ted Gibson’s book on syntax (forthcoming with MIT press)

Nancy Kanwisher, ‘Functional specificity in the human brain’

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Nestcraft

27 november 2024 | 80 min

How do birds build their nests? By instinct, of course—at least that's what the conventional wisdom tells us. A swallow builds a swallow's nest; a robin builds a robin's nest. Every bird just follows the rigid template set down in its genes. But over the course of the last couple of decades, scientists have begun to take a closer look at nests—they've weighed and measured them, they've filmed the building process. And the conventional wisdom just doesn't hold up. These structures vary in all kinds of ways, even within a species. They're shaped by experience, by learning, by cultural tradition. When we look at a bird's nest, we're looking at the product of a flexible mind.

My guest today is Dr. Susan Healy. Sue is a Professor in the School of Biology at the University of St Andrews and an expert in birds—their behavior, their cognition, and their evolution. For more than a decade now, Sue has been pioneering a new chapter in the study of birds' nests.

Here, Sue and I talk about some of the most impressive nests (as well as some of the least impressive). We do a bit of Birds' Nests 101—the different forms they take, the functions they serve, which sex does the building, how these structures evolved, and more. We dig into the mounting evidence that birds are in fact quite flexible in their building practices, that they learn from others and from their own experience. We discuss recent evidence from Sue's team that cultural traditions shape the weaver nests of the Kalahari. And we talk about what nests might have in common with songs and tools. Along the way, we touch on: pigeon nests and hummingbird nests, dinosaur nests and chimpanzee nests; Alfred Russel Wallace; commonalities in the techniques of human weavers and weaver birds; whether bird personality might be reflected in nest style; the brain basis of nest-building; and a whole lot else.

Hope you enjoy this one, friends. On to my conversation with Dr. Sue Healy.

A transcript of this episode is availalble here.

Notes and links

2:30 – An example of a post on the (seemingly inadequate) nests of pigeons.

7:30 – An article featuring a variety of weaverbird nests.

10:30 – Alfred Russel Wallace’s essay on birds' nests is available here.

15:00 – A paper from another branch of Dr. Healy’s work, on hummingbirds.

16:00 – The 1902 book by Charles Dixon on the science of “caliology.”

17:00 – An example of research done by the Colliases on weavers.

19:00 – For an up-to-date primer on birds’ nests—covering a number of the questions we discuss here—see Dr. Healy’s recent primer.

22:30 – An article about hummingbird eggs.

28:30 – A paper by Dr. Healy and colleagues on the use of human materials in birds’ nests. Our episode on animal medication is here.

31:30 – An article about bowerbirds and how they decorate their bowers.

35:00 – An article on the evolution of birds’ nests, covering the question of what dinosaur nests were like.

43:00 – A paper by Dr. Healy and colleagues on the impact of temperature and earlier breeding success on nest size.

51:00 – For more discussion of personality in animals, including in clonal fish, see our episode with Kate Laskowski.

55:00 – A study by Dr. Healy and colleagues showing that zebra finches build nests that match the color of the walls.

58:00 – A study by Dr. Healy and colleagues looking at how zebra finches learn aspects of nest-building from familiar individuals.

59:00 – A study by Dr. Healy and colleagues, led by Maria Tello-Ramos, about architectural traditions in an African sociable weaver species.

1:07:00 – An article by Michael Arbib, Dr. Healy, and colleagues on connections between tool use, language, and nest-building.

1:11:00 – An initial study on the brain basis of nest-building in zebra finches. A further study on the same topic.

1:12:30 – A paper by Hopi E. Hoekstra and colleagues on the genetics of burrow-building in deer mice.

1:14:00 – An exploration of the idea that humans initially learned their weaving skills from weaver birds.

Recommendations

Books by Mike Hansell (see here, here, and here)

Birds’ nests, Charles Dixon

Avian architecture, Peter Goodfellow

Animal architects, James Gould & Carol Gould

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Animal, heal thyself

14 november 2024 | 68 min

What happens to animals when they get sick? If they’re pets or livestock, we probably call the vet. And the vet may give them drugs or perform a procedure. But what about wild animals? Do they just languish in misery? Well, not so much. It turns out that animals—from bees to butterflies, porcupines to primates—medicate themselves. They seek out bitter plants, they treat wounds, they amputate limbs, they eat clay—the list goes on. This all raises an obvious question: How do they know to do this? How do they know what they know about healing and medicine? It also invites a related question: How do we humans know what we know?

My guests today are Dr. Jaap De Roode and Dr. Michael Huffman. Jaap is a biologist at Emory University, and has studied animal medication in insects; he’s also the author of a forthcoming book about animal medication across the tree of life. Mike is a primatologist at the University of Nagasaki, and made some of the very first observations about animal self-medication in chimpanzees in the 1980s.

Here, Jaap, Mike, and I talk about how they found their way into this field, in both cases kind of by accident. We discuss what defines animal medication generally as well as what defines its more specific subtypes—social medication, allomedication, prophylactic medication, and others. We consider how animals know what they know about healing—whether these medicinal behaviors are mostly driven by innate tendencies, by individual experimentation, by social learning, or by some combination. We talk about the evidence that many of the medical insights that humans have had over the years actually began with observations of animals. Along the way, we touch on medicinal amputation and medicinal cannibalism, geophagy, leaf-folding in primates, animal quackery, bear medicine, why lemurs rub themselves with millipedes, and the anti-parasitic power of cigarette butts.

Alright, friends, this is a fun one. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – A paper describing how birds in Mexico City line their nests with cigarette butts. A follow-up experiment showing that they do so in response to increased presence of parasites.

7:30 – Dr. Huffman’s original study of self-medication by a chimpanzee, using Vernonia amygdalina in Tanzania.

15:00 – Dr. de Roode’s study on “transgenerational medicine” in monarch butterflies.

20:00 – For an overview of animal medication, including definitions and examples of its subtypes, see this recent primer by Dr. de Roode and Dr. Huffman.

25:00 – The recent study on “medicinal amputation” in ants. The recent study on “medicinal cannibalism” in ants.

30:00 – For an overview of medication in insects, see this recent paper by Dr. de Roode and colleagues.

34:00 – The paper by Mascaro and colleagues showing that chimpanzees treat wounds (to the self and others) by applying insects.

38:00 – A recent review of geophagy—soil eating—in primates by Paula Pebsworth, Dr. Huffman, and colleagues.

43:00 – A paper by Dr. Huffman and colleagues on chimpanzee leaf-swallowing in the wild. Dr. Huffman later did a series of experimental studies on this behavior, investigating the role of social learning—see here and here.

46:00 – An article on how goats learn to eat what they eat.

52:00 – An article describing the medicinal properties of Vernonia amygdalina.

54:00 – A study showing that lemurs rub each other with millipedes in a possible case of animal medication.

57:00 – A paper by Dr. Huffman in which he describes the use of mulengelele by a sick porcupine. A recent review by Dr. Huffman of what traditional healers have learned from observations of animal medication.

1:01:00 – An article about propolis and its medicinal use in bees; an article about its medicinal potential in humans.

Recommendations

Doctors by Nature, Jaap de Roode (forthcoming)

Wild Health, Cindy Engel

Nourishment, Fred Provenza

‘Five clever animals that treat and prevent their own illnesses,’ National Geographic

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

The rise of machine culture

31 oktober 2024 | 80 min

The machines are coming. Scratch that—they're already here: AIs that propose new combinations of ideas; chatbots that help us summarize texts or write code; algorithms that tell us who to friend or follow, what to watch or read. For a while the reach of intelligent machines may have seemed somewhat limited. But not anymore—or, at least, not for much longer. The presence of AI is growing, accelerating, and, for better or worse, human culture may never be the same.

My guest today is Dr. Iyad Rahwan. Iyad directs the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Iyad is a bit hard to categorize. He's equal parts computer scientist and artist; one magazine profile described him as "the Anthropologist of AI." Labels aside, his work explores the emerging relationships between AI, human behavior, and society. In a recent paper, Iyad and colleagues introduced a framework for understanding what they call "machine culture." The framework offers a way of thinking about the different routes through which AI may transform—is transforming—human culture.

Here, Iyad and I talk about his work as a painter and how he brings AI into the artistic process. We discuss whether AIs can make art by themselves and whether they may eventually develop good taste. We talk about how AIphaGoZero upended the world of Go and about how LLMs might be changing how we speak. We consider what AIs might do to cultural diversity. We discuss the field of cultural evolution and how it provides tools for thinking about this brave new age of machine culture. Finally, we discuss whether any spheres of human endeavor will remain untouched by AI influence.

Before we get to it, a humble request: If you're enjoying the show—and it seems that many of you are—we would be ever grateful if you could let the world know. You might do this by leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, or maybe a comment on Spotify. You might do this by giving us a shout-out on the social media platform of your choice. Or, if you prefer less algorithmically mediated avenues, you might do this just by telling a friend about us face-to-face. We're hoping to grow the show and the best way to do that is through listener endorsements and word-of-mouth. Thanks in advance, friends.

Alright, on to my conversation with Dr. Iyad Rahwan. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – Images from Dr. Rahwan's ‘Faces of Machine’ portrait series. One of the portraits from the series serves as our tile art for this episode.

11:30 – The “stochastic parrots” term comes from an influential paper by Emily Bender and colleagues.

18:30 – A popular article about DALL-E and the “avocado armchair.”

21:30 – Ted Chiang’s essay, “Why A.I. isn’t going to make art.”

24:00 – An interview with Boris Eldagsen, who won the Sony World Photography Awards in March 2023 with an image that was later revealed to be AI-generated.

28:30 – A description of the concept of “science fiction science.”

29:00 – Though widely attributed to different sources, Isaac Asimov appears to have developed the idea that good science fiction predicts not the automobile, but the traffic jam.

30:00 – The academic paper describing the Moral Machine experiment. You can judge the scenarios for yourself (or design your own scenarios) here.

30:30 – An article about the Nightmare Machine project; an article about the Deep Empathy project.

37:30 – An article by Cesar Hidalgo and colleagues about the relationship between television/radio and global celebrity.

41:30 – An article by Melanie Mitchell (former guest!) on AI and analogy. A popular piece about that work.

42:00 – A popular article describing the study of whether AIs can generate original research ideas. The preprint is here.

46:30 – For more on AlphaGo (and its successors, AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero), see here.

48:30 – The study finding that the novelty of human Go playing increased due to the influence of AlphaGo.

51:00 – A blogpost delving into the idea that ChatGPT overuses certain words, including “delve.” A recent preprint by Dr. Rahwan and colleagues, presenting evidence that “delve” (and other words overused by ChatGPT) are now being used more in human spoken communication.

55:00 – A paper using simulations to show how LLMs can “collapse” when trained on data that they themselves generated.

1:01:30 – A review of the literature on filter bubbles, echo chambers, and polarization.

1:02:00 – An influential study by Dr. Chris Bail and colleagues suggesting that exposure to opposing views might actually increase polarization.

1:04:30 – A book by Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen, who are often credited with developing the idea of “generalized Darwinism” in the social sciences.

1:12:00 – An article about Google’s NotebookLM podcast-like audio summaries.

1:17:3 0 – An essay by Ursula LeGuin on children’s literature and the Jungian “shadow.”

Recommendations

The Secret of Our Success, Joseph Henrich

“Machine Behaviour,” Iyad Rahwan et al.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

How should we think about IQ?

17 oktober 2024 | 94 min

IQ is, to say the least, a fraught concept. Psychologists have studied IQ—or g for “general cognitive ability”—maybe more than any other psychological construct. And they’ve learned some interesting things about it. That it's remarkably stable over the lifespan. That it really is general: people who ace one test of intellectual ability tend to ace others. And that IQs have risen markedly over the last century. At the same time, IQ seems to be met with increasing squeamishness, if not outright disdain, in many circles. It's often seen as crude, misguided, reductive—maybe a whole lot worse. There's no question, after all, that IQ has been misused—that it still gets misused—for all kinds of racist, classist, colonialist purposes. As if this wasn't all thorny enough, the study of IQ is also intimately bound up with the study of genetics. It's right there in the roiling center of debates about how genes and environment make us who we are. So, yeah, what to make of all this? How should we be thinking about IQ?

My guest today is Dr. Eric Turkheimer. Eric is Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He has studied intelligence and many other complex human traits for decades, and he's a major figure in the field of “behavior genetics.” Eric also has a new book out this fall—which I highly recommend—titled Understanding the Nature-Nurture Debate. In a field that has sometimes been accused of rampant optimism, Eric is—as you'll hear—a bit more measured.

In this conversation, Eric and I focus on intelligence and its putatively genetic basis. We talk about why Eric doubts that we are anywhere close to an account of the biology of IQ. We discuss what makes intelligence such a formidable construct in psychology and why essentialist understandings of it are so intuitive. We talk about Francis Galton and the long shadow he’s cast on the study of human behavior. We discuss the classic era of Twin Studies—an era in which researchers started to derive quantitative estimates of the heritability of complex traits. We talk about how the main takeaway from that era was that genes are quite important indeed, and about how more recent genetic techniques suggest that takeaway may have been a bit simplistic. Along the way, Eric and I touch on spelling ability, child prodigies, the chemical composition of money, the shared quirks of twins reared apart, the Flynn Effect, the Reverse Flynn Effect, birth order, the genetics of height, the problem of missing heritability, whether we should still be using IQ scores, and the role of behavior genetics in the broader social sciences.

Alright folks, lots in here—let's just get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Eric Turkheimer. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:30 – The 1994 book The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein a Charles Murray, dealt largely with the putative social implications of IQ research. It was extremely controversial and widely discussed. For an overview of the book and controversy, see the Wikipedia article here.

6:00 – For discussion of the “all parents are environmentalists…” quip, see here.

12:00 – The notion of “multiple intelligences” was popularized by the psychologist Howard Gardner—see here for an overview. See here for an attempt to test the claims of the “multiple intelligences” framework using some of the methods of traditional IQ research. For work on EQ (or Emotional Intelligence) see here.

19:00 – Dr. Turkheimer has also laid out his spelling test analogy in a Substack post.

22:30 – Dr. Turkheimer’s 1998 paper, “Heritability and Biological Explanation.”

24:30 – For an in-passing treatment of the processing efficiency idea, see p. 195 of Daniel Nettle’s book Personality. See also Richard Haier’s book, The Neuroscience of Intelligence.

26:00 – The original study on the relationship between pupil size and intelligence. A more recent study that fails to replicate those findings.

31:00 – For an argument that child prodigies constitute an argument for “nature,” see here. For a memorable narrative account of one child prodigy, see here.

32:00 – A meta-analysis of the Flynn effect. We have previously discussed the Flynn Effect in an episode with Michael Muthukrishna.

37:00 – James Flynn’s book, What is Intelligence? On the reversal of the Flynn Effect, see here.

40:00 – The phrase “nature-nurture” originally comes from Shakespeare and was picked up by Francis Galton. In The Tempest, Prospero describes Caliban as “a born devil on whose nature/ Nurture can never stick.”

41:00 – For a biography of Galton, see here. For an article-length account of Galton’s role in the birth of eugenics, see here.

50:00 – For an account of R.A. Fisher’s 1918 paper and its continuing influence, see here.

55:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer’s paper on the “nonshared environment”—E in the ACE model.

57:00 – A study coming out of the Minnesota Study of Twins reared apart. A New York Times article recounting some of the interesting anecdata in the Minnesota Study.

1:00:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer’s 2000 paper on the “three laws of behavior genetics.” Note that this is not, in fact, Dr. Turkheimer’s most cited paper (though it is very well cited).

1:03:00 – For another view of the state of behavior genetics in the postgenomic era, see here.

1:11:00 – For Dr. Turkheimer’s work on poverty, heritability, and IQ, see here.

1:13:00 – A recent large-scale analysis of birth order effects on personality.

1:16:00 – For Dr. Turkheimer’s take on the missing heritability problem, see here and here.

1:19:00 – A recent study on the missing heritability problem in the case of height.

1:30:00 – On the dark side of IQ, see Chapter 9 of Dr. Turkheimer’s book. See also Radiolab’s series on g.

1:31:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer’s Substack, The Gloomy Prospect.

Recommendations

The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden

Intelligence, Stuart Ritchie

Intelligence and How to Get It, Richard Nisbett

‘Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents’’ (Ted talk), James Flynn

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Rethinking the "wood wide web"

3 oktober 2024 | 77 min

Forests have always been magical places. But in the last couple decades, they seem to have gotten a little more magical. We've learned that trees are connected to each other through a vast underground network—an internet of roots and fungi often called the "wood wide web". We've learned that, through this network, trees share resources with each other. And we've learned that so-called mother trees look out for their own offspring, preferentially sharing resources with them. There's no question that this is all utterly fascinating. But what if it's also partly a fantasy?

My guest today is Dr. Justine Karst. Justine is a forest ecologist at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on mycorrhizas—these are the symbioses formed between fungi and plant roots that are thought to be the basis of the "wood wide web." Last year, Justine and colleagues published a perspective piece in which they argued that some of the claims around the wood wide web have gotten out of hand. These new ideas about forests, they argued, have gotten decoupled from the actual on-the-ground—or under-the-ground—science. In reality, it’s a field still riddled with unknowns and mixed findings.

Here, Justine and I do a bit of mycorrhiza 101—we talk about what mycorrhizas are, how they evolved, and what the structures actually look like. We discuss the original 1997 study that inspired the term "wood wide web." We consider why it's so hard to figure out what's actually going on, mechanistically, under the forest floor. We discuss the increasingly popular notion of plant intelligence and what it means to empirical researchers in this area like Justine. We talk about why people—both members of the public and scientists themselves—have found wood wide web ideas so charming. And, finally, we discuss the question of whether a little bit of hype is really so bad—particularly if it gets people excited about forests, about science, and about conservation.

I got as excited about the "wood wide web" as anyone. The idea totally captured my imagination a couple of years ago. So I was intrigued—if also a little dismayed—to learn recently that these ideas were getting some pushback. And I knew immediately we should talk to one of the researchers leading that pushback.

Alright friends, let's get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Justine Karst. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

5:00 – Popular treatments sometimes mentioned as over-hyping the wood wide web (and associated ideas) include The Hidden Life of Trees, Finding the Mother Tree, and the novel The Overstory.

9:30 – The landmark 1997 paper by Simard et al. that kicked off interest in the so-called wood wide web.

11:00 – A study showing that fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants.

11:30 – For more on the new interest in “plant intelligence” see our previous episodes here and here. On the notion of “fungal intelligence,” see here.

18:00 – A 1975 paper presenting a hypothesis about the origins of land plants.

20:00 – The California “mushroom bible” mentioned.

23:00 – A brief post (and infographic) on the differences between arbuscular mycorrhizas and ectomycorrhizas.

23:30 – Richard Powers’ influential novel, The Overstory. Note that the novel doesn’t exclusively focus on the wood wide web; it covers ideas and findings about trees and forests, many of which are uncontroversial.

36:00 – Dr. Karst co-authored her perspective piece in Nature Ecology & Evolution with Dr. Melanie Jones and Dr. Jason Hoeksema.

50:00 – For more on aspens and how they constitute clonal organisms, see here.

52:00 – The “mother tree” idea was popularized in Dr. Suzanne Simard’s book, Finding the Mother Tree.

1:04:00 – Another recent critique of the wood wide web and mother tree idea is here. In it the authors write: “Reaching out to the general public to make people care about forests is certainly a praiseworthy goal, but not when it involves the dissemination of a distorted view of the plant world. In other words: the end does not justify the means.”

1:05:30 – Others influenced by The Overstory include Barack Obama and Bill Gates.

1:09:00 – A primer on myco-heterotrophic plants.

1:13:00 – See a recent presentation by Dr. Jared Farmer on trees and “chronodiversity” here.

Recommendations

‘Seeing plants anew,’ Stella Stanford

‘Mother trees and socialist forests: Is the ‘wood-wide web’ a fantasy?’, Daniel Immerwahr

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Electric ecology

19 september 2024 | 93 min

There's a bit of a buzz out there, right now, but maybe you haven’t noticed. It's in the water, it's in the air. It's electricity—and it's all around us, all the time, including in some places you might not have expected to find it. We humans, after all, are not super tuned in to this layer of reality. But many other creatures are—and scientists are starting to take note.

My guest today is Dr. Sam England. Sam is a sensory ecologist at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, and one of a handful of scientists uncovering some shocking things about the role of electricity in the natural world.

Here, Sam and I have a wide-ranging conversation about electroreception—which is the perception of electrical stimuli—and electric ecology—which is the study of the ecological roles of electricity. We talk about how an interest in electroreception first got started, and why it's recently resurged. We discuss aquatic electroreception versus aerial electroreception, active electroreception versus passive electroreception. We talk about how electroreception is actually kind of easy to evolve. Along the way, we consider electrolocation and, its analog in sound, echolocation. We touch on dolphins, sharks, echidnas, ticks, caterpillars, bees, and spiders. We zoom in on electrostatic pollination, and what is inarguably the coolest sounding anatomical structure known to biology: the ampullae of Lorenzini.

I think you'll enjoy this one, friends. As Sam describes here, electroreception is one of those "alien senses"—it really challenges the imagination. And electric ecology is one of those frontiers in our understanding of the natural world. So without further ado, here's my chat with Dr. Sam England. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – For many of the topics discussed in this episode, see this comprehensive recent review of electroreception and electric ecology by Dr. England and a colleague.

7:30 – A paper reviewing the (contested) phenomenon of electromagnetic hypersensitivity in humans.

9:30 – An encyclopedia article on electroreception in monotremes.

13:00 – An early study of electrolocation in “weakly electric” fish.

17:00 – A popular article about the discovery of electroreception in sharks.

20:30 – A 2013 study showing that bumblebees detect the electric fields around flowers.

23:30 – A recent review of electroreception and its evolution in fish.

25:00 – A study demonstrating electroreception in the Guiana dolphin.

34:00 – A recent study by Dr. England and colleagues showing that static electricity pulls ticks onto hosts.

43:00 – For more on echolocation, see our earlier episode on bats.

47:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Ryan Palmer, examining the theoretical possibilities of electroreception in air.

52:30 – A (controversial) 2022 paper on possibly language-like communication in fungi via electricity.

55:00 – Another 2013 study on electroreception in bees, this one in honeybees.

56:30 – An animated video describing the role that electricity plays in spider ballooning.

1:00:00 – Dr. England’s recent study showing that caterpillars can detect the electric fields around wasps.

1:03:00 – A discussion of triboelectric effects.

1:11:00 – Dr. England’s recent study of electrostatic pollination in butterflies and moths.

1:19:00 – A study arguing that the sexual organs of flowers may have evolved to take advantage of electrostatic pollination.

1:25:00 – For more on spider eyes, see our recent episode all about spiders.

Recommendations

‘Electroreception, electrogenesis and electric signal evolution,’ William Crampton

An Immense World, Ed Yong (a previous guest!)

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

The nature of nurture

5 september 2024 | 77 min

The idea of a "maternal instinct"—the notion that mothers are wired for nurturing and care—is a familiar one in our culture. And it has a flipside, a corollary—what you might call “paternal aloofness.” It's the idea that men just aren't meant to care for babies, that we have more, you know, manly things to do. But when you actually look at the biology of caretaking, the truth is more complicated and much more interesting.

My guest today is Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. She is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis and the author of the new book, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies. In it, she examines paternal care, the biology that supports it, and the norms and practices that sometimes suppress it.

In this conversation, Sarah and I set her new book, Father Time, in the context of her four previous books. We discuss the surprising prevalence of male care in fish and amphibians. We talk about how Charles Darwin noted the plasticity of caretaking in animals, only to ignore that plasticity when talking about humans. We consider how time in intimate proximity with babies activates capacities for nurturing—not just in fathers, but in caretakers of all kinds. Along the way, we touch on langurs and owl monkeys; emus and cassowaries; cichlid fish and fairy shrimp; prolactin and oxytocin; patriarchy and patriarchal notions. We talk about what seems to be distinctive about the human capacity for care; and about what happens when males spend too much time competing for status, and not enough time snuggling babies.

You'll probably get a sense for this from our conversation, but there are very few researchers who take both biology and culture as seriously as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy does. She does not shy away from digging deep into either domain. And she does not shy away from trying to trace the tangled links between the two.

Alright friends, I hope you enjoy this one. On to my conversation with Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – A classic paper on male parental care in fishes.

7:00 – Dr. Hrdy’s previous books include The Langurs of Abu, The Woman that Never Evolved, Mother Nature, and Mothers and Others.

13:00 – A academic article on “cooperative breeding” in birds.

16:30 – The full text of Charles Darwin’s book, The Descent of Man.

21:00 – Read about Caroline Kennard and her correspondence with Darwin here.

23:30 – A review of a recent book on Nancy Hopkins and her (quantitative) efforts to expose sexism at MIT.

26:00 – The 2014 paper on the brains of fathers in different caretaking roles.

37:00 – A paper by Larry Young and a colleague on the role of ancient peptides (like oxytocin) in sociality.

40:00 – The lab of Dr. Lauren O’Connell, who studies physiology and social behavior in poison dart frogs.

42:00 – A review of paternal care in primates.

47:00 – For more on Michael Tomasello’s “mutualism hypothesis”—and a lot else—see our earlier episode with Dr. Tomasello.

49:00 – For more on the costliness of the human brain, see our earlier episodes here and here.

58:00 – The 2007 study by Esther Herrmann, Michael Tomasello, and colleagues on the human specialization for social cognition.

59:00 – A study of children’s early “ostensive gestures” of showing and offering.

1:02:00 – An obituary for the ethnographer Lorna Marshall.

1:09:00 – An overview of ostracods and the traces they leave in the fossil record.

Recommendations

The Parental Brain, Michael Numan

Silas Marner, George Eliot

Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Sean Carroll

Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin

Brave Genius, Sean Carroll

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

The space of (possibly) sentient beings

22 augusti 2024 | 67 min

We may not know what it's like to be a bat, but we're pretty confident that it's like something—that bats (and other mammals) are sentient creatures. They feel pleasure and pain, cold and warmth, agitation and comfort. But when it comes to other creatures, the case is less clear. Is a crab sentient? What about a termite, or a tree? The honest answer is we just don't know—and yet, despite that uncertainty, practical questions arise. How should we treat these beings? What do we owe them?

My guest today is Dr. Jonathan Birch. Jonathan is a Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics and the author of the new book The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI. In it, he presents a framework for thinking about which beings might be sentient and about how our policies should account for this.

Here, we talk about Jonathan's work at the nexus of philosophy, science, and policy—in particular, his role in advising the UK government on the welfare of cephalopods and decapods. We discuss what it means to be sentient and what the brain basis of sentience might be. We sketch his precautionary framework for dealing with the wide-ranging debates and rampant uncertainty around these issues. We talk about several prominent edge cases in the natural world. And, finally, we consider whether AI might become sentient and, if so, by what route. Along the way, Jonathan and I touch on: plants, crayfish, bees, larvae, and LLMs. We talk about "sentience candidates" and the "zone of reasonable disagreement"; about Jonathan's stances on octopus farming and live-boiling of crabs; about the “run-ahead principle” and the “gaming problem”; and about the question of whether all conscious experience has a valence.

Jonathan's book is a remarkably clear and compelling read—if you find yourself intrigued by our conversation, I definitely recommend that you check out The Edge of Sentience as well. Alright friends, without further ado, on to our sixth season of Many Minds and on to my conversation with Dr. Jonathan Birch. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – The full report prepared by Dr. Birch and colleagues for the UK government is available here.

4:30 – Listen to our earlier episode with Dr. Alex Schnell here.

7:00 – Dr. Birch’s 2017 book, from an earlier chapter of his career during which he focused on kin selection and social behavior.

11:00 – A paper by Dr. Birch on the UK government’s response to the pandemic.

16:00 – A classic 1958 paper on sentience by the philosopher Herbert Feigl.

20:30 – Read Dr. Birch’s general audience essay on the case of live-boiling crabs.

28:30 – Advocates of the idea that regions of the midbrain support sentience include Antonio Damasio, Jaak Panskepp (whose work we discussed in this earlier episode), and Bjorn Merker (whose work we discussed in this earlier episode).

31:30 – A discussion of the possibility of sentience in plants, with former guest Paco Calvo.

34:30 – Peter Godfrey Smith’s recent book, Metazoa.

35:30 – A paper by Dr. Birch and colleagues titled ‘Dimensions of animal consciousness.’

39:30 – A study reporting conditioned place avoidance in octopuses.

40:30 – A study reporting anxiety-like states in crayfish.

42:00 – A primer on "nociception" (which Kensy mispronounces in this segment).

44:00 – A popular article by Dr. Birch and colleagues arguing against octopus farming.

47:00 – A paper about welfare concerns in farmed insects.

49:00 – A paper showing that bees will selectively groom an antenna that was touched with a heat probe.

51:00 – The OpenWorm project.

1:02:00 – A recent piece by Dr. Birch and former guest Kristin Andrews about developing better markers for understanding AI sentience. The question of defining “markers” of conscious experience was also a central topic of our recent episode with Tim Bayne.

Recommendations

Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith

The Mind of a Bee, Lars Chittka

Justice for Animals, Martha Nussbaum

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

From the archive: Cities, cells, and the neuroscience of navigation

7 augusti 2024 | 78 min

Hi friends, we're still on a brief summer break. We'll have a new episode for you later in August. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives!

----

[originally aired September 21, 2022]

If your podcast listening habits are anything like mine, you might be out for a walk right now. Maybe you’re wandering the neighborhood, just blocks from home, or maybe you’re further afield. In either case, I’m guessing you’re finding your way without too much trouble—you’re letting some intuitive sense steer you, track how far you’ve gone, tell you where to go next. This inner navigator of yours is doing all in the background, as your mind wanders elsewhere, and magically it gets it all right. Most of the time, anyway. But how is it doing it? What allows us to pull this off?

My guest today is Dr. Hugo Spiers, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. His lab studies how our brains "remember the past, navigate the present, and imagine the future.” In recent years Hugo and his group have used a wide variety of methods—and some astonishingly large datasets—to shed light on central questions about human spatial abilities.

Here, Hugo and I do a quick tour of the neuroscience of navigation—including the main brain structures involved and how they were discovered. We talk about research on a very peculiar population, the London taxi driver. We discuss the game Sea Hero Quest and what it's teaching us about navigation abilities around the world. We also touch on what GPS might be doing to us; whether the hippocampus actually resembles a seahorse; the ingenious layout of our brain's inner grids; navigation ability as an early sign of Alzheimer's; how “place cells” actually map more than just place; and how the monarch butterfly finds its way.

Super excited to share this one folks—this is an episode that's been on our wish list for some time. For mobile organisms like us, navigation is life or death—it’s as basic as eating or breathing. So when we dig into the foundations of these spatial abilities, we’re really digging into some of the most basic foundations of mind.

So let’s get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Hugo Spiers. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

4:00 – A brief documentary about a person with developmental topographical disorder.

8:00 – There have been a slew of popular articles about the question of whether GPS is undermining our navigation abilities—see here and here.

12:00 – A classic academic article about path integration in mammals.

14:00 – The classic academic article by Edward Tolman on the idea of “cognitive maps.”

16:00 – A side-by-side comparison of a human hippocampus and seahorse. The resemblance is indeed striking.

18:00 – A classic academic article reporting “place cells” in rats.

21:00 – A research article on seasonal changes in hippocampus size across different species.

22:00 – A recent academic article on interactions between the hippocampus and the striatum in navigation.

23:30 – An article reviewing the first decade of research on “grid cells.” A video showing the activity of grid cells in a rat.

26:00 – The long struggle to calculate longitude is subject of a much-beloved book by Dava Sobel.

27:00 – The press release announcing the Nobel prize for the discovery of grid cells and place cells.

31:00 – A popular article about ‘The Knowledge’—a famed test for London taxi drivers.

33:30 – The celebrated original study by Eleanor Maquire and colleagues on structural changes in the brains of London taxi drivers. The (also-celebrated) follow-up study that Dr. Spiers was part of, comparing London taxi and bus drivers.

37:00 – More about the Taxi Brains project can be found here.

41:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Spiers’ team, led by Eva-Maria Griesbauer, reviews the cognitive neuroscience studies on London taxi drivers and dives deep into the learning techniques the drivers use.

44:30 – A paper by Dr. Spiers and team providing an overview of Sea Hero Quest and the studies it has been used for to date. A video demo of the game, and a popular article describing its motivation. Dr. Spiers developed the idea for the game in collaboration with Michael Hornberger.

50:00 – A recent research article looking at the value of Sea Hero Quest in detecting those at risk for Alzheimers.

53:00 – One of the first studies by Dr. Spiers and colleagues using Sea Hero Quest to test a vast sample and examine effects of variables like age, gender, and nationality.

54:30 – A more recent paper by Dr. Spiers and colleagues examining the effect of growing up in cities that are more or less “griddy.”

57:00 – A study by Dr. Spiers and colleagues showing a relationship between real-world navigation ability and navigation performance in Sea Hero Quest.

1:04:00 – The website of the International Orienteering Foundation. A video showing the sport.

1:06:00 – A review paper by Dr. Spiers and colleagues about the potential roles of cognitive maps in navigation and beyond.

1:07:00 – A review of “concept cells”, aka “Halle Berre cells.”

1:08:00 – A recent opinion piece by Dr. Spiers on the question of how many maps—and of what kind—the hippocampus implements.

1:10:30 – A recent research article on “time cells” in the hippocampus.

1:14:30 – A recent review article about monarch butterfly navigation.

Dr. Spiers recommends:

Human Spatial Navigation, by Ekstrom, Spiers, Bohbot, and Rosenbaum

‘The Cognitive Map in Humans: Spatial Navigation and Beyond,’ by Epstein, Patai, Julian, and Spiers

You can read more about Dr. Spiers work on his website and follow him on Twitter.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).

You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

**You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!**

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

From the archive: What does ChatGPT really know?

24 juli 2024 | 55 min

Hi friends, we're on a brief summer break at the moment. We'll have a new episode for you in August. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives!

----

[originally aired January 25, 2023]

By now you’ve probably heard about the new chatbot called ChatGPT. There’s no question it’s something of a marvel. It distills complex information into clear prose; it offers instructions and suggestions; it reasons its way through problems. With the right prompting, it can even mimic famous writers. And it does all this with an air of cool competence, of intelligence. But, if you're like me, you’ve probably also been wondering: What’s really going on here? What are ChatGPT—and other large language models like it—actually doing? How much of their apparent competence is just smoke and mirrors? In what sense, if any, do they have human-like capacities?

My guest today is Dr. Murray Shanahan. Murray is Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London and Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind. He's the author of numerous articles and several books at the lively intersections of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and philosophy. Very recently, Murray put out a paper titled 'Talking about Large Language Models’, and it’s the focus of our conversation today. In the paper, Murray argues that—tempting as may be—it's not appropriate to talk about large language models in anthropomorphic terms. Not yet, anyway.

Here, we chat about the rapid rise of large language models and the basics of how they work. We discuss how a model that—at its base—simply does “next-word prediction" can be engineered into a savvy chatbot like ChatGPT. We talk about why ChatGPT lacks genuine “knowledge” and “understanding”—at least as we currently use those terms. And we discuss what it might take for these models to eventually possess richer, more human-like capacities. Along the way, we touch on: emergence, prompt engineering, embodiment and grounding, image generation models, Wittgenstein, the intentional stance, soft robots, and "exotic mind-like entities."

Before we get to it, just a friendly reminder: applications are now open for the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (or DISI). DISI will be held this June/July in St Andrews Scotland—the program consists of three weeks of intense interdisciplinary engagement with exactly the kinds of ideas and questions we like to wrestle with here on this show. If you're intrigued—and I hope you are!—check out disi.org for more info.

Alright friends, on to my decidedly human chat, with Dr. Murray Shanahan. Enjoy!

The paper we discuss is here. A transcript of this episode is here.

Notes and links

6:30 – The 2017 “breakthrough” article by Vaswani and colleagues.

8:00 – A popular article about GPT-3.

10:00 – A popular article about some of the impressive—and not so impressive—behaviors of ChatGPT. For more discussion of ChatGPT and other large language models, see another interview with Dr. Shanahan, as well as interviews with Emily Bender and Margaret Mitchell, with Gary Marcus, and with Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT).

14:00 – A widely discussed paper by Emily Bender and colleagues on the “dangers of stochastic parrots.”

19:00 – A blog post about “prompt engineering”. Another blog post about the concept of Reinforcement Learning through Human Feedback, in the context of ChatGPT.

30:00 – One of Dr. Shanahan’s books is titled, Embodiment and the Inner Life.

39:00 – An example of a robotic agent, SayCan, which is connected to a language model.

40:30 – On the notion of embodiment in the cognitive sciences, see the classic book by Francisco Varela and colleagues, The Embodied Mind.

44:00 – For a detailed primer on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, see here.

45:00 – See Dr. Shanahan’s general audience essay on “conscious exotica" and the space of possible minds.

49:00 – See Dennett’s book, The Intentional Stance.

Dr. Shanahan recommends:

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, by Melanie Mitchell

(see also our earlier episode with Dr. Mitchell)

‘Abstraction for Deep Reinforcement Learning’, by M. Shanahan and M. Mitchell

You can read more about Murray’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).

You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

**You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!**

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

From the archive: Medieval monks on memory, meditation, and mind-wandering

10 juli 2024 | 62 min

Hi friends, we're on a brief summer break at the moment. We'll have a new episode for you in August. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives!

_____

[originally aired May 17, 2023]

You know the feeling. You're trying to read or write or think through a project, maybe even just respond to an email, when your attention starts to drift. You may not even notice it until you've already picked up your phone or jumped tabs, until your mind has already wandered way off-piste. This problem of distraction has become a bit of a modern-day obsession. We now fret about how to stay focused, how to avoid time-sucks, how to use our attention wisely. But it turns out this fixation of ours—contemporary as it may seem—is really not so new.

My guest today is Dr. Jamie Kreiner, Professor of History at the University of Georgia. Jamie is the author of a new book titled The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell us about Distraction. In the book, Jamie shows that Christian monks in late antiquity and the early middle ages were—like us—a bit obsessed with attention. And their understanding of attention fit within a broad and often remarkably detailed understanding of the mind.

In this conversation, Jamie and I talk about why monks in this era cared so much about distraction. We discuss how they understood the relationship between mind and body; how they conceptualized memory, meditation, and mind-wandering. We discuss some of the mnemonic techniques they used, some of the graphical and textual devices that helped keep them focused, and some of the metaphors and visualization techniques they innovated. Along the way we also touch on fasting, sleep, demons and angels, the problem of discernment, the state of pure prayer, the Six Wings mnemonic device, metacognitive maneuvering, and much more.

I’ll just say I really enjoyed The Wandering Mind. As Jamie and I chat about here, the book illuminates an earlier understanding of human psychology that feels deeply familiar in some ways, and delightfully strange in others. I think you definitely get a sense of that in this conversation.

Alright friends, on to my chat with Dr. Jamie Kreiner. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

4:00 – A webpage devoted to the Ark of Hugh of Saint Victor.

6:30 – For a detailed (and positive) review essay about The Wandering Mind, see here.

11:30 – The Redwall books, by Brian Jacques, are well known for featuring elaborate feasts. An article about some of the best of these.

18:30 – For more on how the body was understood in the early Christian world, see The Burden of the Flesh.

26:30 – Text written continuously is known as scripta continua.

27:30 – Articles that celebrate medieval marginalia can be found here, here, and here.

40:00 – An article about the Six Wings mnemonic. For more on mnemonic techniques in the medieval world, see Mary Carruthers’ book.

53:00 – On the idea of “pure prayer,” see the book, The Ladder of Prayer and the Ship of Stirrings.

57:30 – Dr. Kreiner’s next book, which comes out in January 2024, is a translation of some of John Cassian’s work on distraction.

Dr. Kreiner’s book recommendations can be found in a recent article here.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

A new picture of language

26 juni 2024 | 115 min

If you've taken Linguistics 101, you know what language is. It's a system for conveying meaning through speech. We build words out of sounds, and then complex ideas out of those words. Remarkably, the relationship between the sounds and the meanings they convey is purely arbitrary. Human language consists, in other words, of abstract symbols. Now, of course, there are also sign languages, but these operate in the same way, just in a different medium. This, anyway, is the view of language that has dominated and defined linguistics for many decades. But some think it gets some pretty fundamental things pretty wrong. Some think we need a new picture of language altogether.

My guest today is Dr. Neil Cohn. Neil is Associate Professor at the Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication, in the Netherlands; he is also the director of the Visual Language Lab at Tilburg. For about two decades, Neil has been studying the rich properties of graphic systems—especially comics—and has built an argument that some constitute full-blown languages. His latest book, co-authored with, Joost Schilperoord, is titled A Multimodal Language Faculty. It challenges that longstanding, deeply held view of what language is. Instead, the book argues that the human language capacity combines three different modalities—the vocal modality (as in speech), the bodily modality (as in gesture), and the graphic modality (as in comics and other visual narratives). And each of these modalities is naturally able to support full-blown languages.

Here, Neil and I talk about the basic assumptions of modern linguistics and where those assumptions come from. We discuss the idea that there are three expressive modalities that come naturally to humans, with each modality optimized for certain kinds of meaning. We talk about Neil's career, not only as an academic, but as an illustrator. We discuss cross-cultural differences and similarities in comics, and how comics have changed over the last century. And, finally, we consider how Neil's framework challenges current theorizing about the evolution of language. Along the way, Neil and I touch on sign languages and homesign systems, visual style vs visual language, Peircean semiotics, animal tracks, cave art, emoji, upfixes, sand drawing, Manga, the refrain "I can't draw," and the idea that the graphic modality is the only one that's truly unique to our species.

After this episode we'll be taking a bit of a summer break, but we'll be posting some old favorites to tide you over. Alright friends, hope you enjoy this one. On to my conversation with Neil Cohn. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:30 – An earlier paper by Dr. Cohn on the well-worn refrain “I can’t draw.” His more recent Twitter thread covering the topic.

9:00 – An overview of research on homesign systems. For a broader discussion of differences between gesture, homesign systems, and established sign languages, see here.

15:00 – A comic, ‘Chinese Room,’ commissioned by the philosopher Dan Dennett and drawn by Dr. Cohn.

19:30 – The webpage of Dr. Cohn’s graduate mentor, Ray Jackendoff.

25:00 – A brief overview paper by Dr. Cohn and Dr. Schilperoord on the need to “reimagine language.”

25:30 – The classic book, based on lecture notes, by Ferdinand de Saussure, ‘Course in General Linguistics.'

44:00 – For an overview of “bimodal bilingualism,” see here.

50:00 – A study by Dr. Cohn and colleagues on the processing of emoji substituted for words.

56:00 – A recent study by Dr. Cohn and colleagues on anaphora in visual narratives.

58:30 – For our previous audio essay on animal (and human) tracks, see here.

1:01:30 – For examples of scholarship on non-Western methods of visual storytelling, including Aboriginal Australian sand drawing, see Dr. Cohn’s earlier edited volume here. For a deeper dive into sand drawing, see the monograph by Jenny Green here.

1:03:00 – Dr. Cohn also recently published a book on cross-cultural aspects of comics, The Patterns of Comics. The book is the fruit of his lab’s TINTIN project.

1:11:00 – For a video of Aboriginal Australian sand drawing, see here.

1:13:00 – See Dr. Cohn’s earlier book, Who Understands Comics ?

1:15:00 – A study on “upfixes” by Dr. Cohn and a colleague.

1:22:00 – A popular article by Dr. Cohn on the linguistic status of emoji.

1:31:00 – For a deep dive into Peircean semiotics, see here.

1:36:00 – For my own general-audience treatment of “gesture first” theories of language evolution and the “modality transition” problem, see here.

1:37:00 – A paper by Dr. Jackendoff and Eva Wittenberg outlining their “complexity hierarchy.”

1:50:00 – For the Getty museum exhibit associated with Dr. Cohn’s lecture, see here.

Recommendations

The Texture of the Lexicon, by Jenny Audring and Ray Jackendoff

Battle in the Mind Fields, by John Goldsmith and Bernard Laks

History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, hosted by James McElvenny

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Climate, risk, and the rise of agriculture

12 juni 2024 | 71 min

It's an enduring puzzle. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors were nomadic, ranging over large territories, hunting and gathering for sustenance. Then, beginning roughly 12,000 years ago, we pivoted. Within a short timeframe—in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas—humans suddenly decided to settle down. We started to store our food. We domesticated plants. We set off, in other words, down a path that would reshape our cultures, our technologies, our social structures, even our minds. Yet no one has yet been able to account for this shift. No one has been able to fully explain why agriculture happened when it happened and where it happened. Unless, that is, someone just did.

My guest today is Dr. Andrea Matranga. Andrea is an economist at the University of Torino, in Italy, with a focus on economic history. In a new paper, he puts forward an ambitious, unifying theory of the rise of agriculture in our species. He argues that the key trigger was a spike in seasonality—with certain parts of the world, particularly parts of the northern hemisphere, suddenly experiencing warmer summers and colder winters. This led risk-averse humans in these places to start to store food and, eventually, to experiment with farming.

In this conversation, Andrea and I talk about how he developed his theory, in steps, over the course of almost 20 years. We consider the weaknesses of earlier explanations of agriculture, including explanations that focused on climate. We discuss how he wrangled vast historical datasets to test his theory. And we talk about some of the downstream effects that agriculture seems to have had. Along the way we touch on: salmon, wheat, taro, and milk; agriculture as a franchise model; Milankovitch Cycles; risk-aversion and consumption-smoothing; interloping in the debates of other disciplines; the possibility of a fig-based civilization; and how we inevitably project our own concerns onto the past.

Alright friends, I hope you enjoy this one. As I said at the top, the origins of agriculture is just one of those irresistible, perennial puzzles—one that cuts across the human sciences. And, I have to say, I find Andrea's solution to this puzzle quite compelling. I'll be curious to hear if you agree. Without further ado, on to my conversation with Andrea Matranga. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

8:00 – Various versions of the fable ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ are compiled here.

13:00 – One of the last remaining ziggurat complexes is Chogha Zanbil.

16:00 – The classic paper by anthropologist Alain Testart on food storage among hunter-gatherers.

19:30 – An influential study emphasizing that agriculture occurred after the Ice Age due to warming conditions. Other studies have posited that other features of climate may have led to the rise in agriculture (e.g., here).

21:00 – An (illustrated) explanation of Milankovitch Cycles.

27:00 – For Marshall Sahlins’ discussion of ‘The Original Affluent Society,’ see here.

32:00 – Jared Diamond’s popular article, ‘The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.’

33:00 – A paper criticizing the particularistic focus of many archaeological treatments of the origins of agriculture.

36:30 – Dr. Matranga used a variety of data sources to test his theory, including a dataset compiling dates of agricultural adoption.

42:00 – A report detailing evidence of agriculture in Kuk Swamp in New Guinea.

43:00 – The book Cuisine and Empire, by Rachel Laudan.

44:00 – A paper by Luigi Pascali and collaborators on the rise of states and the “appropriability” of cereals.

1:01:00 – A paper about the Natufian culture, which is considered to occupy an intermediate step on the road to agriculture.

Recommendations

What We Did to Father (republished as The Evolution Man), by Roy Lewis

The Living Fields, by Jack Harlan

Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers, by Richard Lee and Irven Devore

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Consider the spider

30 maj 2024 | 78 min

Maybe your idea of spiders is a bit like mine was. You probably know that they have eight legs, that some are hairy. Perhaps you imagine them spending most of their time sitting in their webs—those classic-looking ones, of course—waiting for snacks to arrive. Maybe you consider them vaguely menacing, or even dangerous. Now this is not all completely inaccurate—spiders do have eight legs, after all—but it's a woefully incomplete and drab caricature. Your idea of spiders, in other words, may be due for a refresh.

My guest today is Dr. Ximena Nelson, Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand. Ximena is the author of the new book, The Lives of Spiders. It’s an accessible and stunningly illustrated survey of spider behavior, ecology, and cognition.

In this conversation, Ximena and I do a bit of ‘Spiders 101’. We talk about spider senses—especially how spiders use hairs to detect the minutest of vibrations and how they see, usually, with four pairs of eyes. We talk about web-making—which, by the way, the majority of spiders don't do—and silk-making—which all do, but for more reasons than you may realize. We talk about how spiders hunt, jump, dance, pounce, plan, decorate, cache, balloon, and possibly count. We talk about why so many spiders mimic ants. We take up the puzzle of “stabilimenta”. We talk about whether webs constitute an extended sensory apparatus—like a gigantic ear—and why spiders are an under-appreciated group of animals for thinking about the evolution of mind, brain, and behavior.

Alright friends, this one is an absolute feast. So let's get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Ximena Nelson. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – A general audience article about our “collective arachnid aversion” to spiders.

8:00 – An academic article by Dr. Nelson about jumping spider behavior.

8:30 – In addition to spiders, Dr. Nelson also studies kea parrots (e.g., here).

12:00 – A popular article about the thousands of spider species known to science—and the thousands that remain unknown.

16:30 – A popular article about a mostly vegetarian spider, Bagheera kiplingi.

18:00 – For the mating dance of the peacock spider, see this video.

20:00 – A recent study on spider “hearing” via their webs.

24:00 – The iNaturalist profile of the tiger bromeliad spider.

29:30 – A recent study of extended sensing in humans during tool use.

33:00 – A popular discussion of vision (and other senses) in jumping spiders.

40:00 – An earlier popular discussion of spider webs and silk.

45:00 – For a primer on bird’s nests, see here.

48:00 – An article describing the original work on how various drugs alter spiders’ webs.

49:00 – A recent salvo in the long-standing stabilimenta debate.

54:00 – A video about “ballooning” in spiders.

57:00 – An article by Dr. Nelson and a colleague about jumping spiders as an important group for studies in comparative cognition.

1:01:00 – A study of reversal learning in jumping spiders, which found large individual differences.

1:07:00 – A study of larder monitoring in orb weaver spiders.

1:10:00 – A study by Dr. Nelson and a colleague on numerical competence in Portia spiders.

1:16:00 – An academic essay on the so-called insect apocalypse.

Recommendations

Spider Behaviour: Flexibility and Versatility, by M. Herberstein

‘Spider senses – Technical perfection and biology,’ by F. Barth

‘Extended spider cognition’, by H. Japyassú and K. Lala

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Can we measure consciousness?

16 maj 2024 | 70 min

A cluster of brain cells in a dish, pulsing with electrical activity. A bee buzzing its way through a garden in bloom. A newborn baby staring up into his mother's eyes. What all these entities have in common is that we don't quite know what it’s like to be them—or, really, whether it's like anything at all. We don't really know, in other words, whether they’re conscious. But maybe we could know—if only we developed the right test.

My guest today is Dr. Tim Bayne. Tim is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He’s a philosopher of mind and cognitive science, with a particular interest in the nature of consciousness. Along with a large team of co-authors, Tim recently published an article titled 'Tests for consciousness in humans and beyond.' In it, they review the current landscape of consciousness tests—or “C-tests”, as they call them—and outline strategies for building more and better tests down the road.

Here, Tim and I discuss what consciousness is and why theories of it seem to be proliferating. We consider several of the boundary cases that are most hotly debated right now in the field—cases like brain organoids, neonates, and split-brain patients. We sketch a few of the most prominent current consciousness tests: the command following test, the sniff test, the unlimited associative learning test, and the test for AI consciousness. We talk about how we might be able to inch our way, slowly, toward something like a thermometer for consciousness: a universal test that tells us whether an entity is conscious, or to what degree, or even what kind of conscious it is. Along the way, Tim and I talk about zombies, chatbots, brains in vats, and islands of awareness. And we muse about how, in certain respects, consciousness is like temperature, or perhaps more like happiness or wealth or intelligence, and maybe even a bit like fire.

I think you'll enjoy this one, friends—it's a thought-provoking conversation on a foundational topic, and one that takes us far and wide. So without further ado, here's my interview with Dr. Tim Bayne. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

4:45 – The philosopher Dan Dennett, who passed away in April, was known for his writings on consciousness—among them his 1991 book, Consciousness Explained.

7:00 – The classic paper on the neural correlates of consciousness, by Francis Crick and Christof Koch.

9:00 – A recent review of theories of consciousness by Anil Seth and Dr. Bayne.

10:00 – David Chalmers’ classic paper on the “hard problem” of consciousness.

13:00 – Thomas Nagel’s classic paper on what it’s like to be a bat.

20:00 – A recent paper by James Croxford and Dr. Bayne arguing against consciousness in brain organoids.

23:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Bayne and colleagues about the emergence of consciousness in infants.

27:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Bayne and colleagues about consciousness in split-brain patients. An earlier paper by Dr. Bayne on the same topic.

30:00 – A paper by Dr. Bayne, Dr. Seth, and Marcello Massimini on the notion of “islands of awareness.”

35:00 – The classic paper using the “(covert) command following test” in a patient in a so-called vegetative state.

38:00 – A 2020 paper introducing the “sniff test.”

40:00 – A recent primer on the “unlimited associative learning” test.

43:00 – An essay (preview only), by the philosopher Susan Schneider, proposing the AI consciousness test.

50:00 – The history of the scientific understanding of temperature is detailed in Hasok Chang’s book, Inventing Temperature.

53:30 – Different markers of consciousness in infants are reviewed in Dr. Bayne and colleagues’ recent paper.

1:03:00 – The ‘New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness’ was announced in April. Read about it here.

Recommendations

Being You, Anil Seth

Into the Gray Zone, Adrian Owen

Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Rehabilitating placebo

2 maj 2024 | 39 min

Welcome back friends! Today we've got a first for you: our very first audio essay by... not me. I would call it a guest essay, but it's by our longtime Assistant Producer, Urte Laukaityte. If you're a regular listener of the show, you've been indirectly hearing her work across dozens and dozens of episodes, but this is the first time you will be actually hearing her voice.

Urte is a philosopher. She works primarily in the philosophy of psychiatry, but also in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of biology, the history of medicine, and neighboring fields. She's particularly interested in a colorful constellation of psychiatric phenomena—phenomena like hypnosis, mass hysteria, psychogenic conditions, and (the topic of today's essay) the placebo effect.

There's almost certainly more to placebo than you realize—it's a surprisingly many-layered phenomenon. Here, Urte pulls apart those layers. She talks about what placebo can and cannot do, the mechanisms by which it operates, the ethical dimensions of its use, its evil twin nocebo, how it is woven through the history of medicine, and a lot more. She argues that, though we've learned a lot about the placebo in recent decades, we have not yet harnessed its full potential.

As always, we eagerly welcome your comments about the show. Feel free to find us on social media, or send us a note at [email protected]. We would love to hear your suggestions for future episodes, your constructive criticisms, really your feedback of whatever kind.

Alright friends, now on to our audio essay—'Rehabilitating placebo’—written and read by Urte Laukaityte. Enjoy!

A text version of this episode will be available soon.

Notes and links

3:30 – A research paper describing the FIDELITY trial.

8:00 – For a neuroscientific overview of placebo research, see this review article. The landmark 1978 study is here.

9:00 – The study using naloxone in rats.

10:30 – A review of placebo effects in Parkinson’s disease.

13:00 – The study showing placebo effects in allergy sufferers. For more on placebo and conditioning in the immune system, see here.

13:30 – An overview of the results on whether placebo “can replace oxygen.”

16:00 – For the “milkshake” study, see here.

20:00 – A perspective piece on open-label placebos. A review of the efficacy of open-label placebos.

22:00 – A review of nocebo-induced side effects within the placebo groups of trials.

24:00 – On the idea of “good placebo responders,” see here.

27:30 – The book Medical Nihilism, by Jacob Stegenga.

28:00 – A review and meta-analysis of the use of placebo by clinicians.

29:30 – A paper on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and placebo.

30:30 – A review of factors modulating placebo effects.

34:00 – For the “signaling theory of symptoms,” see here.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Cosmopolitan carnivores

18 april 2024 | 62 min

They tend to move under the cover of darkness. As night descends, they come for your gardens and compost piles, for your trash cans and attic spaces. They are raccoons, skunks, and coyotes. And if you live in urban North America, they are a growing presence. Whether you consider them menacing, cute, fascinating, or all of the above, you have to grant that they are quite a clever crew. After all, they've figured out how to adapt to human-dominated spaces. But how have they done this? What traits and talents have allowed them to evolve into this brave new niche? And are they still evolving into it?

My guest today is Dr. Sarah Benson-Amram. Sarah is Assistant Professor of Forest and Conservation Sciences and Zoology at the University of British Columbia; she also directs the Animal Behavior & Cognition Lab at UBC. Sarah's research group focuses on the behavioral and cognitive ecology of urban wildlife. They ask what urban wildlife can teach us about animal cognition more generally and try to understand ways to smooth human-wildlife interactions.

Here, Sarah and I talk about her work on that trio I mentioned before: raccoons, skunks, and coyotes. These three species are all members of the mammalian order of carnivora, a clade of animals that Sarah has focused on throughout her career and one that has been underrepresented in studies of animal cognition. We discuss the traits that have allowed these species—and certain members of these species—to thrive in dynamic, daunting urban spaces. We also talk about the big picture of the evolution of intelligence—and how urban adapter species might shed light on what is known as the cognitive buffer hypothesis. Along the way, we touch on: the neophilia of raccoons and the neophobia of coyotes, puzzle boxes, the Aesop's fable task, hyenas and elephants, brain size, individual differences, human-wildlife conflict, comparative gastronomy, and the cognitive arms race that might be unfolding in our cities.

If you have any feedback for us, we would love to hear from you. Guest suggestions? Topics or formats you'd like to see? Blistering critiques? Effusive compliments? We're open to all of it. You can email us at manymindspodcast at gmail dot com. That's manymindspodcast at gmail. Though, honestly, if it's really an effusive compliment, feel free to just post that publicly somewhere.

Alright friends, on to my conversation with Sarah Benson-Amram. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

8:50 – A study of manual dexterity in raccoons.

11:30 – A video featuring raccoon chittering, among other vocalizations.

12:00 – A recent academic paper on the categorization of wildlife responses to urbanization—avoider, adapter, exploiter—with some critical discussion.

14:00 – A study of how animals are becoming more nocturnal in response to humans.

18:00 – An encyclopedia article on the Social Intelligence Hypothesis, by one of its originators, Richard Byrne. A recent appraisal of how the hypothesis has fared across different taxa.

18:30 – A recent review article by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues surveying carnivore cognition.

25:00 – On the question of urban vs rural animals, see the popular article, ‘Are cities making animals smarter?’

28:00 – A study by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues using puzzle boxes to study behavioral flexibility in captive raccoons. See also her follow-up study, conducted with a large team of neuroscience collaborators, examining the brains of raccoons who successfully solved the puzzle boxes.

34:30 – An earlier study by Dr. Benson-Amram on innovative problem solving in hyenas.

36:30 – Our earlier episode on animal personality with Dr. Kate Laskowski.

39:00 – A study by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues exploring raccoons’ ability to solve the Aesop’s Fable task. She has also used this task with elephants.

44:00 – A study by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues examining reversal learning in raccoons, skunks, and coyotes.

49:00 – An article articulating the “cognitive buffer hypothesis.”

51:00 – A paper discussing—and “reviving”—the so-called ecological intelligence hypothesis.

53:00 – A study by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues comparing brain size and problem-solving ability in mammalian carnivores.

56:00 – A paper by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues on cognition in so-called nuisance species, in which they discuss the idea of a "cognitive arms race."

57:30 – A paper on bin-opening in cockatoos and how it might be leading to an “innovation arms race.”

Recommendations

How Monkeys See the World, Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans De Waal

An Immense World, by Ed Yong (featured in a previous episode!)

Urban Carnivores, by Stanley D. Gehrt, Seth P. D. Riley, and Brian L. Cypher

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

From the archive: Myths, robots, and the origins of AI

4 april 2024 | 65 min

Hi friends, we're busy with some spring cleaning this week. We'll have a new episode for you in two weeks. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives!

_____

[originally aired Nov 30, 2022]

When we talk about AI, we usually fixate on the future. What’s coming next? Where is the technology going? How will artificial intelligences reshape our lives and worlds? But it's also worth looking to the past. When did the prospect of manufactured minds first enter the human imagination? When did we start building robots, and what did those early robots do? What are the deeper origins, in other words, not only of artificial intelligences themselves, but of our ideas about those intelligences?

For this episode, we have two guests who've spent a lot of time delving into the deeper history of AI. One is Adrienne Mayor; Adrienne is a Research Scholar in the Department of Classics at Stanford University and the author of the 2018 book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology. Our second guest is Elly Truitt; Elly is Associate Professor in the History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the 2015 book, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art.

In this conversation, we draw on Adrienne's expertise in the classical era and Elly's expertise in the medieval period to dig into the surprisingly long and rich history of AI. We discuss some of the very first imaginings of artificial beings in Greek mythology, including Talos, the giant robot guarding the island of Crete. We talk about some of the very first historical examples of automata, or self-moving devices; these included statues that spoke, mechanical birds that flew, thrones that rose, and clocks that showed the movements of the heavens. We also discuss the long-standing and tangled relationships between AI and power, exoticism, slavery, prediction, and justice. And, finally, we consider some of the most prominent ideas we have about AI today and whether they had precedents in earlier times.

This is an episode we've been hoping to do for some time now, to try to step back and put AI in a much broader context. It turns out the debates we're having now, the anxieties and narratives that swirl around AI today, are not so new. In some cases, they're millennia old.

Alright friends, now to my conversation with Elly Truitt and Adrienne Mayor. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

4:00 – See Adrienne’s TedEd lesson about Talos, the “first robot.” See also Adrienne’s 2019 talk for the Long Now Foundation.

7:15 – The Throne of Solomon does not survive, but it was often rendered in art, for example in this painting by Edward Poynter.

12:00 – For more on Adrienne’s broader research program, see her website; for more on Elly’s research program, see her website.

18:00 – For more on the etymology of ‘robot,’ see here.

23:00 – A recent piece about Aristotle’s writings on slavery.

26:00 – An article about the fact that Greek and Roman statues were much more colorful than we think of them today.

30:00 – A recent research article about the Antikythera mechanism.

34:00 – See Adrienne’s popular article about the robots that guarded the relics of the Buddha.

38:45 – See Elly’s article about how automata figured prominently in tombs.

47:00 – See Elly’s recent video lecture about mechanical clocks and the “invention of time.” For more on the rise of mechanistic thinking—and clocks as important metaphors in that rise—see Jessica Riskin’s book, The Restless Clock.

50:00 – An article about a “torture robot” of ancient Sparta.

58:00 – A painting of the “Iron Knight” in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

Adrienne Mayor recommends:

The Greeks and the New, by Armand D’Angour

Classical Traditions in Science Fiction, edited by Brett Rogers and Benjamin Stevens

In Our Own Image, by George Zarkadakis

Ancient Inventions, by Peter James and Nick Thorpe

Elly Truitt recommends:

AI Narratives, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon

The Love Makers, by Aifric Campbell

The Mitchells vs the Machines

You can read more about Adrienne’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter. You can read more about Elly’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).

You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

**You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!**

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

The borderlands of perception

21 mars 2024 | 96 min

We've all seen those illusions. The dots seem to dance, when in fact they're completely still. The lines look like they bend, but in reality they're perfectly straight. Here's the thing: It doesn't matter that you know the ground truth of these illusions—the dancing and bending won't stop. And that we see the world one way, even though we know it's actually another way, is a fascinating quirk of our minds—and maybe a telling one. It suggests that there's a chasm between perceiving and thinking, that these may be two independent provinces of the mind. But, if so, we're faced with another question: Where does perception end and thinking begin?

My guest today is Dr. Chaz Firestone. Chaz is an Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, and Director of the Perception and Mind lab there. He and his research group study perceiving, thinking, and the interface between the two.

Here, Chaz and I talk about his background in philosophy and how it continues to animate his research. We sketch the differences between perception and cognition and why the two are best considered separate faculties. We consider the idea of so-called "top-down" effects on perception. We discuss the fact that, even if perception and cognition are separate, there's much more to perception than meets the eye. We seem to see things like causes and social interactions; we perceive things like silences and absences. Along the way, Chaz and I touch on the modular view mind, skeletal shapes, the El Greco fallacy, stubborn epistemology, birders and radiologists, retinotopy and visual adaptation, adversarial images, human-machine comparisons, and the case of the blue banana.

This is a fun one, friends. But before we get to it, one humble request. If you've been enjoying Many Minds, now would be a great time to leave us a rating or review. You can do this on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. It would really help us grow and get the word out! It actually looks like our last review on Apple Podcasts is about 10 months old—so, if you have a minute, that could really use some freshening up.

Alright folks, on to my conversation with Chaz Firestone. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – Dr. Firestone’s early paper reporting the Times Square experiment and the “skeletal shape” phenomenon.

8:00 – A visual explanation of the “missing bullet holes” graphic.

13:00 – Dr. Firestone has collaborated intensively with the philosopher Ian Phillips.

15:00 – A recent book by Ned Block, The Border Between Seeing and Thinking.

24:00 – Visual illusions are legion, as are inventories of them. See, for instance, this catalogue on Wikipedia or this Reddit thread.

25:00 – An obituary for Jerry Fodor, who died in 2017. The classic book by Zenon Pylyshyn, Computation and Cognition.

28:00 – A paper by Dr. Firestone about the history of the El Greco fallacy. An empirical paper by Dr. Firestone and Brian Scholl showing the El Greco fallacy at work in perception research.

35:00 – A target article (with commentaries) in Behavioral and Brain Sciences by Dr. Firestone and Dr. Scholl about claims of “top-down” effects on perception. Dr. Firestone has published other work on this theme, e.g., here, here, & here.

41:00 – A paper with discussion (and illustration) of the classic Dalmation Mooney image.

45:00 – A study of rapid visual pattern recognition in expert chess players.

50:30 – A paper by J.J. Valenti and Dr. Firestone about the case of the blue banana.

54:00 – A review paper by Alon Hafri and Dr. Firestone reviewing evidence that people actually perceive high-level relations like causality, support, and social interaction.

56:00 – A study by Martin Rolfs and colleagues about the perception of causality.

1:02:00 – A study by Liuba Papeo and colleagues about the perception of social interactions. A related paper showing an inversion effect.

1:04:00 – A paper by Alon Hafri and colleagues on the perception of roles in an interaction.

1:06:00 – A widely cited paper by J. Kiley Hamlin and colleagues on the recognition of social interactions in preverbal infants.

1:06:30 – A review paper on reading in the brain.

1:10:00 – A paper by Rui Goh, Dr. Phillips, and Dr. Firestone on the perception of silence.

1:18:00 – A recent review paper by Jorge Morales and Dr. Firestone about the dialogue between philosophy of perception and psychology, which discusses the perception of absence (among other case studies).

1:22:00 – A recent perspective piece by Dr. Firestone about human-machine comparisons.

1:25:00 - An empirical paper by Zhenglong Zhou and Dr. Firestone on the deciphering of adversarial images by humans.

1:28:00 – For a review of the mirror self-recognition test, see our earlier audio essay.

1:35:00 – Other interesting work going on in Dr. Firestone’s research group has investigated representational momentum, beauty, and epistemic actions, among other topics.

Recommendations

The Modularity of Mind, by Jerry Fodor

The Contents of Visual Experience, by Susanna Siegel

Psych, by Paul Bloom

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Social memory in our closest cousins

7 mars 2024 | 65 min

If you want to have a rich social life, you're going to need to know who's who. You'll need to distinguish friend from foe, sister from stranger. And you're going to need to hold those distinctions in your head— for at least a little while. This is true not just for humans but—we have to assume—for other social species as well. But which species? And for how long can other creatures hold on to these kinds of social memories?

My guests today are Dr. Laura Lewis and Dr. Chris Krupenye. Laura is a biological anthropologist and postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley; Chris is a comparative psychologist and an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins. Along with a larger team, Laura and Chris recently authored a paper on memory for familiar faces in chimpanzees and bonobos. In it, they show that our closest cousins remember their groupmates for decades.

Here, we chat about the paper and the backstory behind it. We consider the anecdotes about long-term memory in great apes—and how Laura and Chris decided to go beyond those anecdotes. We talk about the evidence for complex social memory across the animal kingdom. We discuss the use of eye-tracking with primates and its advantages over earlier methods. We also talk about why long-term social memory might have evolved. Along the way, we touch on dolphins, ravens, and lemurs; voices, gaits, and names; the different gradations of recognition; and how memory serves as a critical foundation for social life more generally.

Alright friends, without further ado, here's my conversation with Laura Lewis and Chris Krupenye. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

4:30 – Dr. Lewis and Dr. Krupenye worked together in the lab of Dr. Brian Hare, a former guest on the podcast.

8:30 – The video of Mama and the primatologist Jan van Hooff.

12:00 – For research on the remarkably long social memories of dolphins, see here.

14:00 – For research on long-term voice recognition in bonobos, see here.

19:30 – Another collaborator on the paper we’re discussing was Dr. Fumihiro Kano, affiliated with the Kumamoto Sanctuary.

29:30 – For more on the use of eye-tracking with primates, see a recent review paper by Dr. Lewis and Dr. Krupenye.

34:00 – For the previous study by Dr. Lewis, Dr. Krupenye, and colleagues about how bonobos and chimpanzees attend to current groupmates, see here.

41:00 – A popular article reviewing bonobo social behavior.

54:30 – A research paper on individual recognition by scent in chimpanzees.

55:30 – A research paper on individual recognition by butt in chimpanzees.

Recommendations

‘Long-term memory for affiliates in ravens’

‘Decades-long social memory in bottlenose dolphins’

‘Enduring voice recognition in bonobos’

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Fermentation, fire, and our big brains

22 februari 2024 | 66 min

Brains are not cheap. It takes a lot of calories to run a brain, and the bigger your brain, the more calories it takes. So how is it that, over the last couple million years, the human brain tripled in size. How could we possibly have afforded that? Where did the extra calories come from? There's no shortage of suggestions out there. Some say it was meat; others say it was tubers; many say it was by mastering fire and learning to cook. But now there's a newer proposal on the table and—spoiler—it's a bit funky.

My guests today are Katherine Bryant, Postdoctoral Fellow at Aix-Marseille University, and Erin Hecht, Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. Katherine, Erin, and another colleague are the authors of a new paper titled 'Fermentation technology as a driver of human brain expansion.' In it, they argue that fermented foods could have provided the caloric boost that allowed our brains to expand.

Here, we talk about how the human body differs from the bodies of other great apes, not just in terms of our brains but also in terms of our bowels. We discuss the different mechanisms by which fermented foods provide nutritional benefits over unfermented foods. We consider how fermentation—which basically happens whether you want it to or not—would have been cognitively easier to harness than fire. Along the way, we touch on kiviaq, chicha, makgeolli, hákarl, natto, Limburger cheese, salt-rising bread, and other arguably delectable products of fermentation.

This is a fun one friends. But before we get to it: a friendly reminder about this summer's Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute. This a yearly event in St Andrews, Scotland; it features a rich program of lectures and events devoted to the study of cognition, mind, and intelligence in all its forms. If you have a taste for cross-disciplinary ferment and bubbly conversation, DISI may be for you. The application window is now open but is closing soon. You can find more info at DISI.org. That's D-I-S-I.org.

Alright, friends, on to my conversation with Erin Hecht and Katherine Bryant. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – A popular science article about the “infectiously delicious confection” that is salt-rising bread. A recipe for the bread.

6:00 – An article about makgeolli, a Korean rice wine. An article about chicha, the traditional corn-based fermented beverage that has been banned in some places.

11:30 – An article about the role of the arcuate fasciculus in language processing. A recent paper by Dr. Bryant and colleagues comparing the arcuate in humans and chimpanzees.

12:30 – A recent article by Dr. Hecht and colleagues on the evolutionary neuroscience of domestication.

13:00 – For discussions of the encephalization quotient (aka EQ) and of human brain evolution, see our previous episodes here and here.

15:00 – The classic paper on the “expensive tissue hypothesis.”

22:00 – An article about the role of meat in human evolution; an article about the role of tubers. The cooking hypothesis is most strongly associated with Richard Wrangham and his book, Catching Fire.

26:00 – A recent article on evidence for the widespread control of fire in human groups by around 400,000 years ago.

31:30 – A paper on how fermenting cassava reduces its toxicity.

38:30 – There have been various claims in the ethnographic literature that the control of fire has been lost among small groups, such as in Tasmania. See footnote 2 in this article.

44:30 – A popular article about kiviaq.

45:00 – The article from the New Yorker, by Rebecca Mead, about the foodways of the Faroe Islands.

53:00 – For more discussion of the so-called drunken monkey hypothesis, see our previous episode about intoxication.

1:00:30 – A popular article about hákarl, which is fermented Greenland shark.

Recommendations

The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan

The Art of Fermentation, by Sandor Katz

Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Katz

“How humans evolved large brains,” by Karin Isler & Carel van Schaik

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Of molecules and memories

8 februari 2024 | 75 min

Where do memories live in the brain? If you've ever taken a neuroscience class, you probably learned that they're stored in our synapses, in the connections between our neurons. The basic idea is that, whenever we have an experience, the neurons involved fire together in time, and the synaptic connections between them get stronger. In this way, our memories for those experiences become minutely etched into our brains. This is what might be called the synaptic view of memory—it's the story you'll find in textbooks, and it's often treated as settled fact. But some reject this account entirely. The real storehouses of memory, they argue, lie elsewhere.

My guest today is Dr. Sam Gershman. Sam is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and the director of the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab there. In a recent paper, he marshals a wide-ranging critique of the synaptic view. He makes a compelling case that synapses can't be the whole story—that we also have to look inside the neurons themselves.

Here, Sam and I first discuss the synaptic view and the evidence that seems to support it. We then talk about some of the problems with this classic picture. We consider, for example, cases where memories survive the radical destruction of synapses; and, more provocatively, cases where memories are formed in single-celled organisms that lack synapses altogether. We talk about the dissenting view, long lurking in the margins, that intracellular molecules like RNA could be the real storage sites of memory. Finally, we talk about Sam's new account—a synthesis that posits a role for both synapses and molecules. Along the way we touch on planaria and paramecia; spike-timing dependent plasticity; the patient H.M.; metamorphosis, hibernation, and memory transfer; the pioneering work of Beatrice Gelber; unfairly maligned ideas; and much, much more.

Before we get to it, one important announcement: Applications are now open for the 2024 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (or DISI)! The event will be held in beautiful, seaside St Andrews, Scotland, from June 30 to July 20. If you like this show—if you like the conversations we have and the questions we ask—it's a safe bet that you'd like DISI. You can find more info at disi.org—that's disi.org. Review of applications will begin on Mar 1, so don't delay.

Alright friends, on to my conversation about the biological basis of memory with Dr. Sam Gershman. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

4:00 - A general audience article on planarian memory transfer experiments and the scientist who conducted them, James V. McConnell.

8:00 - For more on Dr. Gershman’s research and general approach, see his recent book and the publications on his lab website.

9:30 - A brief video explaining long-term potentiation. An overview of “Hebbian Learning.” The phrase “neurons that fire together wire together” was, contrary to widespread misattribution, coined by Dr. Carla Shatz here.

12:30 - The webpage of Dr. Jeremy Gunawardena, Associate Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard University. A recent paper from Dr. Gunawardena’s lab on the avoidance behaviors exhibited by the single-celled organism Stentor (which vindicates some disputed, century-old findings).

14:00 - A recent paper by C. R. Gallistel describing some of his views on the biological basis of memory.

19:00 - The term “engram” refers to the physical trace of a memory. See recent reviews about the so-called search for the engram here, here, and here.

20:00 - An article on the importance of H.M. in neuroscience.

28:00 - A review about the phenomenon of spike-timing dependent plasticity.

33:00 - An article, co-authored by former guest Dr. Michael Levin, on the evidence for memory persistence despite radical remodeling of brain structures. See our episode with Dr. Levin here.

35:00 - A study reporting the persistence of memories in decapitated planarians. A popular article about these findings.

36:30 - An article reviewing one chapter in the memory transfer history. Another article reviewing evidence for “vertical” memory transfer (between generations).

39:00 - For more recent demonstrations of memory transfer, see here and here.

40:00 - A paper by Dr. Gershman, Dr. Gunawardena, and colleagues reconsidering the evidence for learning in single cells and describing the contributions of Dr. Beatrice Gelber. A general audience article about Gelber following the publication of the paper by Dr. Gershman and colleagues.

45:00 – A recent article arguing for the need to understand computation in single-celled organisms to understand how computation evolved more generally.

46:30 – Another study of classical conditioning in paramecia, led by Dr. Todd Hennessey.

49:00 – For more on plant signaling, see our recent episode with Dr. Paco Calvo and Dr. Natalie Lawrence.

56:00 – A recent article on “serial reversal learning” and its neuroscientific basis.

1:07:00 – A 2010 paper demonstrating a role for methylation in memory.

Recommendations

The Behavior of the Lower Organisms, by Herbert Spencer Jennings

Memory and the Computational Brain, by C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King

Wetware, by Dennis Bray

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Energy, cooperation, and our species' future

25 januari 2024 | 81 min

Welcome back folks! The new season of Many Minds is quickly ramping up. On today’s episode we’re thrilled to be rejoined by Dr. Michael Muthukrishna. Michael is Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics. He’s an unusually wide-ranging and rigorous thinker; though still early in his career, Michael has already made key contributions to our understanding of culture, intelligence, evolution, innovation, cooperation and corruption, cross-cultural variation, and a bunch of other areas as well.

We wanted to have Michael back on—not just because he was an audience favorite—but because he’s got a new book out. It’s titled A theory of everyone: The new science of who we are, how we got here, and where we’re going. In this conversation, Michael and I talk about the book and lay out that grand theory mentioned in the title. We discuss energy and how—since the very origins of life—it’s proven to be a fundamental, unshakeable constraint. We talk about the nature of human intelligence and consider the dynamics of human cooperation and innovation. We also delve into a few of the implications that Michael’s “theory of everyone” has for the future of our species. Along the way, we touch on carrying capacity, nuclear fusion, inclusive fitness, religion, the number line, multiculturalism, AI, the Flynn effect, and chaos in the brickyard.

If you enjoy this one, you may want to go back to listen to our earlier chat as well. But more importantly, you may want to get your hands on Michael’s book. It’s ambitious and inspiring and we were barely able to graze it here.

Alright friends, without further ado, on to my second conversation with Dr. Michael Muthukrishna. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

8:30 – Dr. Muthukrishna completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia, where he was advised by Joseph Henrich. He also worked with Ara Norenzayan, Steven Heine, and others.

9:30 – Previous books on dual-inheritance theory and cultural evolution mentioned here include The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich, Not by Genes Alone by Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, and Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony by Kevin Lala.

16:30 – Dr. Muthukrishna’s paper on the theory problem in psychology, drawn from his dissertation.

17:10 – The classic paper ‘Chaos in the Brickyard,’ about the need for theory-building in science.

22:00 – For a brief overview of Dr. Muthukrishna’s understanding of human intelligence and human uniqueness, see this recent paper. For an overview of cumulative culture in comparative perspective, see here.

23:00 – For the 2005 issue of Science magazine showcasing 25 big unanswered questions, see here.

23:30 – For the review paper on cooperation by Dr. Muthukrishna and Dr. Henrich, see here.

26:00 – For Dr. Muthukrishna’s empirical work that attempts to induce corruption in the lab, see here.

28:00 – The scholar Robert Klitgaard, mentioned here, is well-known for his research on corruption.

29:00 – See the preprint by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues titled ‘The size of the stag determines the level of cooperation.’

33:30 – A video laying out the RNA world hypothesis.

45:00 – For more on the evolution of human brain size, see our earlier conversation with Dr. Muthukrishna, as well as our conversation with Jeremy DeSilva.

47:00 – For the metric known as Energy Return on Investment (EROI), see here.

54:00 – For more on the cross-cultural variation in numeracy, see here.

55:20 – To correct the record, according to this review of rare numeral systems, there is only a single known base 8 system in the world’s languages.

57:15 – In our earlier conversation (around 42:00), we discussed the work by Luria on ‘If P, then Q’ reasoning.

57:30 – For more on the so-called WEIRD problem, see our earlier audio essay.

1:00:30 – For some experimental evidence consistent with the idea that language improves the transmission of cultural information, see here.

1:07:00 – For data on the acceleration of urbanization, see here.

1:16:00 – For a brief primer on land value taxes, see here.

1:18:30 – For the idea that Machiavelli’s The Prince was satire, see here.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Dawn of the smile

11 januari 2024 | 16 min

And we’re back! It’s been a while, friends. Hope you enjoyed your fall and your holidays. Thanks so much for re-joining us—we’re super excited to be kicking off a brand-new season of the Many Minds podcast. We thought we’d get things started this year with an audio essay, one partly inspired by some musings and mullings from my parental leave. Hope you enjoy it folks—and we’ll see you again in a couple weeks with our first interview of 2024.

Now on to ‘Dawn of the smile.’ Enjoy!

A text version of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – Darwin describes his children’s first smiles in his 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

4:10 – On so-called Duchenne smiles, see this classic investigation.

5:00 – For a summary of “basic emotions” theory, see any number of Paul Ekman’s writing (e.g., here, here). For a recent articulation of the “social tools” theory, see writings by Alan J. Fridlund (e.g., here). For another influential recent critique of “basic emotions” theory, see here.

6:00 – For the classic bowling study, see here.

7:00 – For a recent review of facial expressions in blind people, see here.

7:45 – For a review of smiling and gender (and the importance of “rules and roles”), see here. For one of the studies linking smiliness to historical migration patterns, see here.

8:30 – For the historical shift in smiling—and its possible relation to the Kodak company—see here. For the yearbook photo analysis, see here.

9:30 – See Darwin’s discussion of infant laughter in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

10:30 – For Darwin’s observations of laughter and smiles in primates, again, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. See Jan van Hooff’s classic study here.

11:30 – For the study comparing laughter across the Great Apes, see here. For the study of an “ape-like” stage in human laughter, see here.

12:30 – For a review of play vocalizations and laughter across species, see here.

13:20 – For the Marina Davila-Ross’s suggestion that laughter and smiles share a common evolutionary source, see here.

13:30 – For research on human infants’ open-mouthed smiles, see here.

14:00 – For the idea of the “acoustic origin” of the smile, see here.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

From the archive: The point of (animal) personality

27 december 2023 | 45 min

Hi friends! We've been on hiatus for the fall, but we'll be back with new episodes in January 2024. In the meanwhile, enjoy another favorite from our archives!

----

[originally aired November 2, 2022]

Some of us are a little shy; others are sociable. There are those that love to explore the new, and those happy to stick to the familiar. We’re all a bit different, in other words—and when I say “we” I don’t just mean humans. Over the last couple of decades there's been an explosion of research on personality differences in animals too—in birds, in dogs, in fish, all across the animal kingdom. This research is addressing questions like: What are the ways that individuals of the same species differ from each other? What drives these differences? And is this variation just randomness, some kind of inevitable biological noise, or could it have an evolved function?

My guest today is Dr. Kate Laskowski. Kate is an Assistant Professor of Evolution and Ecology at the University of California, Davis. Her lab focuses on fish. They use fish, and especially one species of fish—the Amazon molly—as a model system for understanding animal personality (or as she sometimes calls it “consistent individual behavioral variation”).

In this episode, Kate and I discuss a paper she recently published with colleagues that reviews this booming subfield. We talk about how personality manifests in animals and how it may differ from human personality. We zoom in on what is perhaps the most puzzling question in this whole research area: Why do creatures have personality differences to begin with? Is there a point to all this individual variation, evolutionarily speaking? We discuss two leading frameworks that have tried to answer the question, and then consider some recent studies of Kate’s that have added an unexpected twist. On the way, we touch on Darwinian demons, combative anemones, and a research method Kate calls "fish Big Brother."

Alright friends, I had fun with this one, and I think you’ll enjoy it, too. On to my conversation with Kate Laskowski!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – A paper by Dr. Laskowski and a colleague on strong personalities in sticklebacks.

5:30 – The website for the lab that Dr. Laskowski directs at UC-Davis.

7:00 – The paper we focus on—‘Consistent Individual Behavioral Variation: What do we know and where are we going?’—is available here.

11:00 – A brief encyclopedia entry on sticklebacks.

13:00 – A video of two sea anemones fighting. A research article about fighting (and personality) in sea anemones.

15:00 – A classic article reviewing the “Big 5” model in human personality research.

17:00 – The original article proposing five personality factors in animals.

22:30 – A recent special issue on the “Pace-of-Life syndromes” framework.

27:00 – A recent paper on evidence for the “fluctuating selection” idea in great tits.

29:00 – A 2017 paper by Dr. Laskowski and colleagues on “behavioral individuality” in clonal fish raised in near-identical environments.

32:10 – A just-released paper by Dr. Laskowski and colleagues extending their earlier findings on clonal fish.

39:30 – The Twitter account of the Many Birds project. The website for the project.

Dr. Laskowski recommends:

Innate, by Kevin Mitchell

Why Fish Don’t Exist, by Lulu Miller

The Book of Why, by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

From the archive: A smorgasbord of senses

13 december 2023 | 48 min

Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!

----

[originally aired July 20, 2022]

The world is bigger than you think. I don’t mean geographically, though maybe that too. I mean in terms of its textures and sounds and smells; I mean in terms of its hues and vibrations. There are depths and layers to the world that we don’t usually experience, that we might actually never be able to experience. Our senses just aren’t wired to take it all in. We’re simply not tuned to all the dimensions of reality’s rich splendor. But there is a way we can appreciate these hidden dimensions: with a flex of the imagination, we can step into the worlds of other creatures; we can try out different eyes and noses; we can voyage into different perceptual universes. Or at least we can try.

My guest today is Ed Yong, author of the new book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Arounds Us. Ed is a science writer for The Atlantic and the author of an exceptional earlier book on the microbiome called I Contain Multitudes. This new book tours the wide diversity of animal senses. It asks what it’s like to be a bat, sure, but also what it’s like to be a star-nosed mole, a manatee, or a mantis shrimp. Informed by some truly extraordinary science, the book considers how it might feel to electrolocate around the ocean, to hear through the threads of a web, or to be tugged by the earth's magnetic field.

There’s a lot of praise I could lavish on this book, but I’ll just say this: it really makes you feel more alive. Reading it makes everything, in fact, seem more alive. It makes the world seem richer, more vivid, somehow more technicolor and finely textured. It makes you realize that every organism, all the creatures we share this planet with, possesses a kind of vibrant genius all their own.

After this episode we will be on a short holiday, and then we’ll be gearing up for Season 4. If you have guests or topics you want us to cover, please send us a note. And, of course: if you’ve enjoyed the show so far, we would be most grateful if you would leave us a rating or a review. I know I say this all the time, and it’s probably a bit annoying: but it really, truly helps, and I would personally, very much appreciate it!

Alright friends, now to my conversation with Ed Yong. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:30 – One of our earlier audio essays—'Me, my umwelt, and I’—profiled von Uexküll and his concept of an Umwelt.

6:00 – The classic Nagel article ‘What is it like to be a bat?’; Mike Tomasello’s recent variant, ‘What is it like to be a chimpanzee?’, which we discussed just last episode.

10:00 – One of many articles by Ed about COVID-19. He was awarded a Pulitzer prize for his coverage of the pandemic.

14:30 – A popular article on proprioception.

19:00 – A research article on the evolution of opsin proteins.

20:00 – A primer on echolocation.

25:00 – A brief article on heat-sensitive pits in snakes.

26:30 – An academic article about the “star” of the star-nosed mole. A video showing the star-nosed mole in action.

31:00 – A popular article about the eyes of starfish.

32:00 – A collection of research articles about the Ampullae of Lorenzini.

35:00 – A very recent article about spider webs as “outsourced” hearing.

38:00 – A research article about aspects of bird song that humans can’t hear.

40:00 – A study by Lucy Bates and colleagues about how elephants operate with a spatial model of where their kin are.

You can read more about Ed’s work at his website, catch up on his stories in The Atlantic, or follow him on Twitter.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

From the archive: Children in the deep past

29 november 2023 | 59 min

Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!

----

[originally aired May 25, 2022]

When we think about ancient humans, we often imagine them doing certain kinds of things. Usually very serious things like hunting game and making tools, foraging for food and building fires, maybe performing the occasional intricate ritual. But there was definitely more to the deep past than all this adulting. There were children around, too—lots of them—no doubt running around and wreaking havoc, much as they do today. But what were the kids up to, exactly? What games were they playing? What toys did they have? What were their lives like?

My guest today is Dr. Michelle Langley, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Michelle grapples with questions about children, play, and childhood in the deep past. In recent work, she draws on ethnographic reports to assemble a picture of what children have in common all across the globe. She then uses that understanding to cast new light on the archaeological record, to make fresh inferences about what kids must have been doing, making, and leaving behind.

In this conversation, Michelle and I talk about the kinds of basic activities that have long been a mainstay of childhood everywhere—activities like playing with dolls, keeping pets, collecting shells, and building forts. We discuss how archaeologists often assume that hard-to-interpret objects have ritual purpose, when, in fact, those objects could just as easily be toys. We talk about how children seek out and engineer “secret spaces”. We also touch on how a male-centric bias has distorted archaeological discussions; how the baby sling may have been the primordial container; and how otters stash their favorite tools in their armpits.

This is a super fun one, folks. But first a tiny bit of housekeeping: in case you missed the news, we have new newsletter. Seriously, who wouldn’t want a monthly dose of Many Minds right in their inbox? You can find a sign-up link in the show notes.

Alright friends, on to my conversation with Dr. Michelle Langley. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

2:30 – A 15,000 year old horse figurine from Les Espélugues cave in France.

6:00 – A classic paper by Conkey & Spector that helped initiate a wave of feminist archaeology.

7:30 – Dr. Langley’s first paper to examine children’s leavings in the archaeological record.

8:30 – See here for discussion and examples of perforated batons or bâton percés.

9:30 – Dr. Langley’s paper, co-authored with Mirani Litster, ‘Is it ritual? Or is it children?’

14:00 – An influential discussion of ethnographic analogies in archaeology.

18:30 – A paper on the interpretation of Dorset miniature harpoon heads.

23:30 – An article on the Neanderthal ornamental use of raptor feathers.

29:00 - Dr. Langley’s paper on identifying children’s secret spaces in the archaeological record.

30:30 – A book by David Sobel on children’s special spaces.

34:00 – A website about the site of Étiolles.

40:00 – A figure showing the layout of the Bruniquel Cave, including the secondary structures.

41:00 – More information about the mammoth bone huts of Ukraine.

44:00 – A paper by Dr. Langley and Thomas Suddendorf on bags and other “mobile containers” in human evolution.

47:00 – A video showing a sea otter using their underarm “pocket” to store objects.

50:00 – The “carrier bag theory of evolution” was proposed by Elizabeth Fisher in Women’s Creation. This later inspired Ursula Le Guin to propose the “carrier bag theory of fiction.”

51:30 – An experimental study by Dr. Langley and colleagues on children’s emerging intuitions about the use of containers and bags.

55:30 – A paper by Dr. Langley and colleagues on early symbolic behavior in Indonesia.

Dr. Langley recommends:

Growing up in the Ice Age, by April Nowell

You can read more about Dr. Langley’s work at her website and follow her on Twitter.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

From the archive: The puzzle of piloerection

15 november 2023 | 13 min

Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. This week's episode is in our audio essay format. Enjoy!

----

[originally aired May 26, 2021]

Welcome back folks! We’ve got an audio essay for you this week. It touches on art, music, the skin, the spine, individual differences, vestigial responses, tiny muscles. There’s even some Darwin thrown in there. It’s a fun one. Hope you enjoy it!

A text version of this essay is available on Medium.

Notes and links

1:30 – The novel that very recently gave me goosebumps.

2:00 – A brief discussion of Nabokov and his ideas about the tell-tale tingle.

2:45 – Some terms for goosebumps in other languages.

3:00 – A primer on skin anatomy.

4:00 – A paper on the thermoregulatory function of piloerection in primates and other animals.

4:25 – Read Darwin’s Expression here.

5:00 – A paper about “nails on chalkboard chills.” A paper that discusses claims that piloerection attends awe (but which fails to find evidence for this association in a lab setting). A paper on goosebumps in religious experiences. A paper that references mathematicians getting goosebumps when seeing proofs.

5:30 – The 1980 paper by Goldstein on “thrills.”

6:45 – The Darwin passage is quoted in McCrae 2007.

7:00 – A 1995 paper by Panskepp, as well as his 2002 study with a co-author.

7:40 – A recent paper on chills in response to films; another on poetry.

9:15 – The paper by McCrae reporting the association between “openness to experience” and chills.

10:00 – A paper by Fiske and colleagues on kama muta, the “sudden devotion emotion.”

11:10 – Panskepp’s “separation call” hypothesis is perhaps best described in his 2002 study.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

From the archive: The scents of language

1 november 2023 | 74 min

Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!

----

[originally aired June 23, 2021]

You’ve no doubt heard that—as humans—our sense of smell is, well, kind of pathetic. The idea goes all the way back to Aristotle, that we have advanced senses—especially sight and hearing—and then lowly, underdeveloped ones—taste and smell. It’s an idea that has been repeated and elaborated over and over, throughout Western intellectual history. Along with it comes a related notion: that smells are nearly impossible to talk about, that odors simply can’t be captured in words. These ideas may be old, but are they actually true?

A number of researchers would say they're ripe for reconsideration. And my guest is one such researcher, Asifa Majid. She’s Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of York in the UK. For a decade now, Asifa’s been pioneering a new wave of research on human olfaction, especially how it interfaces with language, thought, and culture.

In this conversation we talk about the general notion that some kinds of experience are harder to put into words than others. We discuss Asifa’s fieldwork with hunter-gatherer groups in the Malay peninsula, as well as her studies with wine experts in the west. We talk about whether learning special smell terms seems to sharpen one’s ability to discriminate odors. And we venture beyond Asifa’s own work, to touch on a bunch of recent highlights from the broader science of olfaction.

This was such a fun conversation, folks! I’ve admired Asifa’s work on this topic since her very first paper. She’s a truly interdisciplinary thinker and, as you’ll hear, she’s got a nose for fun examples and deep questions.

Without further ado, on to my conversation with Dr. Asifa Majid! Enjoy.

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:40 – A paper on the 19th century rise of the myth that humans are poor smellers.

6:00 – A paper estimating that humans can discriminate possibly a trillion different odors.

7:30 – A theoretical paper by Dr. Majid and a collaborator on “differential ineffability” and the senses.

9:20 – Dr. Majid’s collaborator in her work on Jahai, a Malaysian language, was Niclas Burenhult.

11:00 – A classic book on the idea of “basic terms” in the domain of color, which provide an analogy for basic terms in the domain of smell.

12:30 – A first paper by Dr. Majid and Niclas Burenhult describing the language of olfaction in Jahai.

14:45 – Dr. Majid’s first experiment comparing odor naming (and color naming) in Jahai and English.

20:00 – Dr. Majid has also examined smell lexicons in several other languages, including Seri, Thai, Maniq, and Cha’palaa.

25:40 – A follow-up study by Dr. Majid and a collaborator on two groups within Malaysia who contrast in subsistence mode.

29:30 – A paper detailing cultural practices surrounding smell among the Jahai.

31:00 – Dr. Majid discusses the factors shaping cultural variation in olfaction (as well as a number of other interesting issues) in her most recent review paper.

39:00 – The “deodorization” hypothesis was discussed in a classic book on the cultural history of aroma.

39:40 – In a recent study, Dr. Majid and collaborators failed to find evidence that the frequency of smell language has fallen off since industrialization.

45:50 – Dr. Majid led a study comparing 20 languages across the world in terms of how expressible their speakers found different sensory experiences.

53:00 – Some possible reasons for the general trend toward the ineffability of smell are considered in Dr. Majid’s recent review paper.

57:00 – Along with her collaborators, Dr. Majid has examined the smell-naming abilities of wine experts. See one paper here.

1:02:45 – A recent paper by Dr. Majid and colleagues showing that wine experts’ smell-naming abilities are not dependent on “thinking in” language.

1:05:35 –Some evidence from “verbal interference” tasks suggests that, when carrying out color discrimination tasks, people rely on language in the moment.

1:09:00 – The Odeuropa project.

1:10:20 – The website of Noam Sobel’s lab.

Dr. Majid’s end of show recommendations:

What the Nose Knows, by Avery Gilbert

The Philosophy of Olfactory Perception, by Andreas Keller

Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, by Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synott

Neuroenology, by Gordon Shepard

Cork Dork, by Bianca Bosker

You can keep up with Dr. Majid on Twitter (@asifa_majid).

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

From the archive: Aligning AI with our values

18 oktober 2023 | 83 min

Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!

----

[originally aired February 17, 2021]

Guess what folks: we are celebrating a birthday this week. That’s right, Many Minds has reached the ripe age of one year old. Not sure how old that is in podcast years, exactly, but it’s definitely a landmark that we’re proud of. Please no gifts, but, as always, you’re encouraged to share the show with a friend, write a review, or give us a shout out on social.

To help mark this milestone we’ve got a great episode for you. My guest is the writer, Brian Christian. Brian is a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley and the author of three widely acclaimed books: The Most Human Human, published in 2011; Algorithms To Live By, co-authored with Tom Griffiths and published in 2016; and most recently, The Alignment Problem. It was published this past fall and it’s the focus of our conversation in this episode.

The alignment problem, put simply, is the problem of building artificial intelligences—machine learning systems, for instance—that do what we want them to do, that both reflect and further our values. This is harder to do than you might think, and it’s more important than ever.

As Brian and I discuss, machine learning is becoming increasingly pervasive in everyday life—though it’s sometimes invisible. It’s working in the background every time we snap a photo or hop on Facebook. Companies are using it to sift resumes; courts are using it to make parole decisions. We are already trusting these systems with a bunch of important tasks, in other words. And as we rely on them in more and more domains, the alignment problem will only become that much more pressing.

In the course of laying out this problem, Brian’s book also offers a captivating history of machine learning and AI. Since their very beginnings, these fields have been formed through interaction with philosophy, psychology, mathematics, and neuroscience. Brian traces these interactions in fascinating detail—and brings them right up to the present moment. As he describes, machine learning today is not only informed by the latest advances in the cognitive sciences, it’s also propelling those advances.

This is a wide-ranging and illuminating conversation folks. And, if I may say so, it’s also an important one. Brian makes a compelling case, I think, that the alignment problem is one of the defining issues of our age. And he writes about it—and talks about it here—with such clarity and insight. I hope you enjoy this one. And, if you do, be sure to check out Brian’s book.

Happy birthday to us—and on to my conversation with Brian Christian. Enjoy!

A transcript of this show is available here.

Notes and links

7:26 - Norbert Wiener’s article from 1960, ‘Some moral and technical consequences of automation’.

8:35 - ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ is an episode from the animated film, Fantasia (1940). Before that, it was a poem by Goethe.

13:00 - A well-known incident in which Google’s nascent auto-tagging function went terribly awry.

13:30 - The ‘Labeled Faces in the Wild’ database can be viewed here.

18:35 - A groundbreaking article in ProPublica on the biases inherent in the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) tool.

25:00 – The website of the Future of Humanity Institute, mentioned in several places, is here.

25:55 - For an account of the collaboration between Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch, see here.

29:35- An article about the racial biases built into photographic film technology in the 20th century.

31:45 - The much-investigated Tempe crash involving a driverless car and a pedestrian:

37:17 - The psychologist Edward Thorndike developed the “law of effect.” Here is one of his papers on the law.

44:40 - A highly influential 2015 paper in Nature in which a deep-Q network was able to surpass human performance on a number of classic Atari games, and yet not score a single point on ‘Montezuma’s Revenge.’

47:38 - A chapter on the classic “preferential looking” paradigm in developmental psychology:

53:40 - A blog post discussing the relationship between dopamine in the brain and temporal difference learning. Here is the paper in Science in which this relationship was first articulated.

1:00:00 - A paper on the concept of “coherent extrapolated volition.”

1:01:40 - An article on the notion of “iterated distillation and amplification.”

1:10:15 - The fourth edition of a seminal textbook by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, AI a Modern approach, is available here: http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

1:13:00 - An article on Warren McCulloch’s poetry.

1:17:45 - The concept of “reductions” is central in computer science and mathematics.

Brian Christian’s end-of-show reading recommendations:

The Alignment Newsletter, written by Rohin Shah

Invisible Women, by Caroline Criado Perez:

The Gardener and the Carpenter, Alison Gopnik:

You can keep up with Brian at his personal website or on Twitter.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

From the archive: Intoxication

4 oktober 2023 | 79 min

Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!

---

A pharmacologist and a philosopher walk into a bar... This is not the start of a joke—it’s the start of our 2021 finale and our first ever theme episode. The idea with these theme episodes is that we have not one but two guests, from different fields, coming together to discuss a topic of mutual interest.

Our theme for this first one—in the spirit of the holiday season—is intoxication and our guests are Dr. Oné Pagán and Dr. Edward Slingerland. Oné is a Professor of Biology at West Chester University and our pharmacologist in residence for this episode. He just published Drunk flies and stoned dolphins: A trip through the world of animal intoxication. Ted is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia and our resident philosopher. He is the author of the recent book Drunk: How we sipped, danced, and stumbled our way into civilization.

We range over a lot of ground in this conversation. We talk about alcohol as a kind of pharmacological “hand grenade”—whereas other substances are more like “scalpels”. We touch on catnip, cannabis, psychedelic fungi, and poison toads. We discuss Asian flushing genes and what they might suggest about the functions of alcohol. We talk about self-medication in the animal kingdom and in Neanderthals. We size up the "drunken monkey”, "stoned ape”, and "beer before bread" hypotheses. And though we mostly keep things light and festive here, we also do delve into the dark side of intoxication—which may have gotten that much darker with the advent of distilled liquor.

Whether you're a tippler or a teetotaler, I’m guessing you’ll find this to be a heady conversation. Did you really think I was going to make it to the end of this intro without a single intoxication-related pun? You know me better.

Alright friends—be well, be merry, and be safe this holiday season. We’ll be back in mid-January after a not so long winter’s nap. Now on to my conversation with Dr. Oné Pagán and Ted Slingerland. Cheers!

A transcript of this episode is now available.

Notes and links

4:00 – The “write drunk, edit sober” idea is sometimes (mis)attributed to Ernest Hemingway.

8:00 – Dr. Pagán wrote an earlier book about his favored model organism, the planaria (or flatworms). You may recall we discussed planaria in our recent episode with Dr. Michael Levin.

10:10 – Dr. Slingerland wrote an earlier book about the Chinese ideal of wu-wei. See this brief discussion of his ideas in The Marginalian.

13:00 – The idea of alcohol as pharmacological “hand grenade” is a metaphor due to Steven Braun.

19:30 – An article in Science about “why cats are crazy for catnip.”

21:20 – A recent article in The Conversation about Asian flushing genes.

26:00 – Thomas Hunt Morgan, who won the Nobel Prize in 1933, pioneered the use of drosophila as an animal model.

28:20 – An article on the inebriometer (with an accompanying illustration).

33:00 – The biologist Robert Dudley introduced the “drunken monkey” hypothesis. A recent synopsis by Dudley.

38:00 – Not to be confused with the “stoned ape” hypothesis, which was introduced by Terrence McKenna. A recent popular article on the hypothesis.

41:00 – The idea of psychedelics as introducing “mutagens” into culture comes from How to Change Your Mind, by Michael Pollan.

44:00 – A recent popular article on the “beer before bread” hypothesis. The idea was originally proposed in 1953.

48:50 – Pharmaceutical practices of non-human animals are called “zoopharmacognosy.” A 2014 summary of findings about animal self-medication.

53:00 – The original report in Science on the “flower burial” in Shanidar cave.

56:20 – The Laussel Venus appears to be drinking (alcohol?) from a horn.

59:20 – An article describing the tragic case of Tusko the elephant.

1:03:50 – One example of practices that moderate alcohol’s dangerous effect is the Greek symposium.

1:08:00 – A brief history of distillation, which is a relatively recent invention.

1:11:00 – Planaria are widely used as an animal model for understanding nicotine, among other intoxicating substances.

Dr. Slingerland recommends the following books:

Buzz, by Steven Braun

Drink, by Iain Gately

A Short History of Drunkenness, by Mark Forsyth

Dr. Pagán recommends the following book:

Intoxication, by Ronald Siegel

You can find Dr. Slingerland on Twitter (@slingerland20) and follow him at his website; you can find Dr. Pagán on Twitter (@Baldscientist), follow him at his website, and listen to his podcast.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

From the archive: A hidden world of sound

20 september 2023 | 59 min

Hi friends, we will be on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Sadly, the guest featured in this week's archive pick—Karen Bakker—passed way last month. Her colleagues at UBC posted a rememberance here.

———

Consider the peacock. Its plumage is legendary—those shimmering, iridescent colors, and those eerie, enchanting eyespots. But what often goes less appreciated (at least by us humans) is that this chromatic extravaganza is also a sonic extravaganza. The peacock's display operates in infrasound, an acoustic dimension that we simply can't hear without assistance. Which raises a question: If we're oblivious to the full vibrancy of the peacock's display, what other sounds might we be missing out on?

My guest today is Dr. Karen Bakker. Karen is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia and author of the new book, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants. In the book, Karen dives into rich realms of sound that, for one reason or another, humans have tended to ignore.

In this conversation, Karen and I discuss the twin fields of "bioacoustics" and "ecoacoustics." We talk about "deep listening" and "digital listening", "infrasound" and "ultrasound." We discuss why sound is such a ubiquitous signaling medium across the tree of life. We consider the fact that scientific discoveries about sound have often been resisted. We touch on debates about whether animal communication systems constitute languages, and discuss new efforts to decode those systems using AI. We also talk about turtles, bats, plants, coral, bees, and—yes—peacocks.

If you enjoy our conversation, I strongly recommend Karen's book. It’s really bursting with insight, science, and stories—all presented with unusual clarity.

Another year of Many Minds is drawing to a close and we're about to go on a brief holiday hiatus. But first a little end-of-year ask: What topics or thinkers would you like to see us feature in 2023? If you have any ideas, we’d love to hear them. You can email us at: [email protected].

Alright friends, I hope you enjoy the holidays. And I hope you enjoy this conversation with Dr. Karen Bakker.

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:30 – A range of bat sounds are available on the website of Dr. Mirjam Knörnschild (who was previously featured on the show!).

4:30 – The winner of the 2014 ‘Most Beautiful Sound in the World’ contest was a recording of a froggy swamp in Malaysia.

10:30 – A popular article profiling the relatively young field of “bioacoustics.” A recent academic article by Dr. Bakker and a colleague about “conservation acoustics” in particular.

11:30 – A popular article about the use of acoustic technologies to discover and monitor whale populations.

17:00 – A research article about the involvement of infrasound in peacock mating displays.

23:30 – A research study showing that coral larvae move toward reef sounds.

28:00 – A review paper by Camila Ferrara and colleagues about sound communication in Amazonian river turtles.

31:00 – A research article by Heidi Appel and a colleague about plants responding to the sounds of leaf-chewing.

35:00 – A recent historical study of Karl von Frisch and his work with honey bees. A recent study suggesting the possibility of play in bumble bees (not honey bees).

42:00 – A popular article profiling the field of “biosemiotics.”

48:00 – An essay by Dr. Bakker about honeybee communication and how technologies may be helping us understand it.

53:00 – Dr. Bakker recommends books by Indigenous scholars Robin Wall-Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass), Dylan Robinson (Hungry Listening), and John Borrows.

Dr. Bakker recommends:

A number of examples of the “sounds of life” are collected at Dr. Bakker’s website, here. The same site also includes recommendations for getting involved in citizen science. In addition to the books by Indigenous scholars listed above, Dr. Bakker recommends work by Monica Gagliano.

You can read more about Karen’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).

You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

**You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!**

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

From the archive: Why did our brains shrink 3000 years ago?

6 september 2023 | 47 min

Hi friends, we will be on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. You may not be surprised to hear that the paper featured in this archive pick attracted a lot of attention. In the time since we first aired this episode, it prompted at least one direct critique, which then occasioned a reply by the authors.

Enjoy!

———

You have a big brain. I have a big brain. We, as a species, have pretty big brains. But this wasn't always the case. Way back when, our brains were much smaller; then they went through a bit of growth spurt, one that lasted for a couple million years. This steady ballooning of brain size is one of the key themes of the human story. But then there's a late-breaking twist in that story—a kind of unexpected epilogue. You see, after our brains grew, they shrank. But when this shrinkage happened and—of course, why—have remained mysterious. My guest today is Jeremy DeSilva, a paleoanthropologist at Dartmouth College. He’s an expert on the evolution of the foot and ankle. But, it turns out the body is all connected, so he also thinks about brains and heads. In a recent paper, Jerry and his colleagues took up the mystery of human brain shrinkage. They first set out to establish more precisely when in our past this occurred. Using a large database of crania, spanning few million years, Jerry’s team was able to establish that this shrinkage event happened much more recently than previously thought—a mere 3000 years ago. Naturally, the next question was why? What happened around that time that could have possibly caused our brains to deflate? To answer this, Jerry and his collaborators turned to an unexpected source of insight: Ants. That’s right, ants. They argue that these ultrasocial critters may offer clues to why we might have suddenly dispensed with a chunk of brain about the size of a lemon. This is a really juicy paper and a super fun conversation, so we should just get to it. But I did want to mention: Jerry has a recent book from 2021 called First Steps that I whole-heartedly recommend. It’s about origins of upright walking in humans—which it turns out, is bound up with all kinds of other important aspects of being human. So definitely check that out!

Thanks folks—on to my chat with Dr. Jerry DeSilva. Enjoy!

The paper we discuss is available here. A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – A podcast episode from the Leakey Foundation about the so-called “obstetrical dilemma.”

5:40 – A refresher for those who have trouble keeping their ‘cenes’ straight: the Pleistocene refers to the period from 2.58 million years ago to 11,700 years ago; immediately after that came the Holocene, which we are still in today.

7:00 – An article discussing the issue of unethical collections of human remains.

10:30 – The key figure form Dr. DeSilva’s paper—showing the changing “slopes” of brain size over time—is available here.

19:30 – The original article by Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler on the “expensive tissue hypothesis.” A more recent popular article on the hypothesis.

20:45 – An article by a major proponent of the social intelligence hypothesis, Dr. Robin Dunbar. A more critical review of the social intelligence hypothesis.

23:00 – A recent paper by Jeff Stibel and an older preprint by John Hawks evaluating the “body size” explanation of recent brain shrinkage.

24:00 – See our earlier episode on human self-domestication with Brian Hare.

29:00 – One of Dr. DeSilva’s collaborators on this research is Dr. James Traniello, who specializes in ants.

34:45 – An overview of the earliest history of writing.

37:20 – Dr. DeSilva’s book, First Steps, came out in 2021.

39:00 – A recent paper discussing the evolution of rotational birth in humans.

Dr. DeSilva recommends:

Kindred, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes (featured in an earlier episode!)

Origin, by Jennifer Raff

You can find Dr. DeSilva on Twitter.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).

You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

**You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!**

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

From the archive: Happiness and the predictive mind

23 augusti 2023 | 62 min

Hi friends, we will be on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!

———

There's an old view of the mind that goes something like this: The world is flooding in, and we're sitting back, just trying to process it all. Our minds are basically passive and reactive, always a step behind. Contrast that view with a new one that’s quickly gaining ground. According to this alternative, we don't just react to the world, we anticipate it. We’re not leaning back but trying to stay a step ahead—our minds are fundamentally active and predictive. And our predictions aren't just idle guesses, either—they're shaping how we experience the world. This new view is known as the “predictive processing framework”, and it has implications, not just for how we perceive, but also for how we act and how we feel, for our happiness and our well-being.

My guest today is Dr. Mark Miller. Mark is a philosopher of cognition and senior research fellow at the Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies at Monash University. He's part of a new wave of intensely interdisciplinary scholars who are working at the intersections of philosophy, neuroscience, and psychiatry.

Here, Mark and I sketch the predictive processing framework and unpack some of its key pillars. We discuss how this approach can inform our understanding of depression, addiction, and PTSD. We sketch out notions of loops and slopes, stickiness and rigidity, wobble and volatility, edges and grip. And, on the way, we will have a bit to say about video games, play, horror, psychedelics, and meditation.

This was all pretty new terrain for me, but Mark proved an affable and capable guide. If you enjoy this episode and want to explore some of these topics further, definitely check out the Contemplative Science Podcast, which Mark co-hosts.

Alright friends, on to my chat with Mark Miller. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

4:15 – The website of the Hokkaido University Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience (CHAIN). The website of the Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies (M3CS).

6:00 – Dr. Miller co-hosts the Contemplative Science podcast, a project of M3CS.

7:30 – For one introduction to the predictive processing framework, see this article by Dr. Miller and colleagues.

11:00 – See Dr. Miller’s essay in Aeon on social media, co-authored with Ben White, as well as this more detailed treatment for an academic audience.

12:00 – See a paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues on depression.

14:00 – An introduction to the subfield of “computational psychiatry.”

17:00 – Andy Clark’s “watershed” paper on the predictive processing framework.

18:00 – A recent book on “active inference” (which is largely synonymous with the predictive processing approach).

22:00 – A chapter on the idea of the “body as the first prior.”

24:30 – A demo of the “hollow face” illusion.

29:00 – On the potential value of psychedelics in jarring people out of trenches and ruts, see also our earlier episode with Alison Gopnik.

31:00 – See our recent episode with Dimitris Xygalatas.

34:30 – A popular article on children wanting to hear the same stories over and over.

38:00 – A paper by Coltan Scrivner and colleagues on horror fans and psychological resilience during COVD-19.

42:30 – A recent article by Dr. Miller and colleagues about the “predictive dynamics of happiness and well-being,” which covers much of the same terrain as this episode.

46:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues on the evocative notion of “grip.”

50:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues about video games and predictive processing.

57:00 – A paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues in which they discuss meditation in the context of the prediction processing approach.

Dr. Miller recommends books by the philosopher Andy Clark, including:

Surfing Uncertainty

You can read more about Dr. Miller’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).

You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

**You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!**

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

The five portals of cognitive evolution

10 augusti 2023 | 65 min

Welcome back all! So, this episode is a first for us. Two firsts, actually. For one, it features our first-ever repeat guest: Andrew Barron, a neuroscientist at Macquarie University. If you're a long-time listener, you might remember that Andy was actually the guest on our very first episode, 'Of bees and brains,' in February 2020. And, second, this episode is our first-ever "live show." We recorded this interview in July at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute in St Andrews, Scotland.

Andy and his colleagues—the philosophers Marta Halina and Colin Klein—just released an ambitious paper titled 'Transitions in Cognitive Evolution.' In it, they take a wide-angle view of mind; they zoom out to try to tell an overarching story of how brains and cognition evolved across the tree of life. The story, as they tell it, is not about a smoothly gradual evolution of cognitive sophistication. Rather, it's a story built around five major transitions—fundamental changes, that is, to how organisms process information.

In this conversation, Andy and I discuss their framework and how it takes inspiration from other transitional accounts of life and mind. We lay out each of the five stages—or portals, as we refer to them—and talk about the organisms that we find on either side of these portals. We discuss what propels organisms to make these radical changes, especially considering that evolution is not prospective. It doesn't look ahead—it can't see what abilities might be possible down the road. We talk about how this framework got its start, particularly in some of Andy's thinking about insect brains and how they differ from vertebrate brains. And, as a bit of a bonus, we left in some of the live Q & A with the audience. In it we touch on octopuses, eusocial insects, oysters, and a bunch else.

Speaking of major transitions, I will be going on parental leave for much of the fall. So this is, in fact, the final episode of Season 4 and then the podcast will go on a brief hiatus. Before we get started on Season 5, we'll be putting up some of our favorite episodes from the archive.

Alright friends, on to my conversation with Dr. Andrew Barron, recorded live at DISI 2023. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:30 – For further information about the “major transitions” project, see the project’s web page here.

7:00 – Many transitional accounts of evolution draw inspiration from the classic book The Major Transitions in Evolution.

8:00 – One influential previous transitional account of the evolution of cognition was put forward by Dennett in Kinds of Minds. Another was put forward by Ginsburg and Jablonka in The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul.

12:45 – A brief introduction to cnidaria.

18:00 – The idea of cellular memory has been garnering more and more attention—see, e.g., this popular article.

21:00 – The idea of “reflective” systems is also used in computer science.

26:00 – The scala naturae, or Great Chain of Being, was the notion that organisms could be arranged on a scale of sophistication, with humans on the top of the scale.

30:00 – The “teleological fallacy” as Dr. Barron and colleagues describe it in their paper is the fallacy of “appeal[ing] to later benefits to explain earlier changes.”

34:00 – A brief introduction to the phylum gastropoda.

37:00 – For an overview of Dr. Barron’s work on the neuroscience of honey bees, see our previous episode.

48:30 – It’s commonly observed in popular coverage of octopuses that their brains are “decentralized” (e.g., here, here, and here).

55:00 – In discussions of human brain evolution, it has been argued that certain kinds of cognitive offloading (e.g., writing) have allowed our brains to actually shrink in recent history. See our earlier episode with Jeremy DeSilva.

58:00 – On the notion of “Turing completeness,” see here. The idea of an “Infinite Improbability Drive” comes (apparently) from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

1:00:06 – For a discussion of eusociality and individuality in the context of “major transitions” ideas, see here.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Matrescence and the brain

26 juli 2023 | 79 min

Scientists who study the mind and brain have always been drawn to periods of intense change—to those life stages marked by rapid transformation. Infancy is one of those periods, of course. Adolescence is another. But there's a less-discussed time of life when our brains and minds have to reconfigure: the window surrounding when we become parents.

My guests today are Dr. Winnie Orchard and Dr. Jodi Pawluski. Winnie is a cognitive neuroscientist and postdoctoral scholar at the Yale Child Study Center. Jodi is a neuroscientist, author, and podcaster affiliated with the University of Rennes in France. Both are experts in the neural and cognitive changes that surround pregnancy, motherhood, and parenthood more generally.

Here, we talk about the idea of "matrescence" as a distinctive developmental stage. We discuss the research around memory loss in early motherhood, as well as findings that certain brain areas get fine-tuned during this period. We talk about postpartum anxiety, depression, and psychosis, and what may be causing them. We consider the finding that having children—and, in fact, having more children—seems to confer a protective effect on the aging brain. Throughout we talk about which of these changes also occur in fathers and other non-birthing parents. And we consider the difficulty of scientifically studying a period of life—parenthood—that is not only rife with social and psychological changes, but also fraught with expectations and narratives.

Alright friends, I hope you enjoy this one. As you'll hear, this research area is very much still in its infancy. There are definitely some provocative findings. But maybe more exciting are all the questions that remain.

Without further ado, here's my chat with Dr. Winnie Orchard and Dr. Jodi Pawluski. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

2:45 – For more on the relationship between adolescence and “matrescence,” see this recent review paper by Winnie and colleagues in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

6:00 – For discussions surrounding the idea of “mommy brain,” see Jodi’s podcast, ‘Mommy Brain Revisited.’ See also this recent editorial by Jodi and colleagues in JAMA Neurology.

17:00 – A recent meta-analysis on cognitive impairment during pregnancy.

25:00 – A study by Winnie and colleagues showing subjective—but not objective—memory deficits in mothers one year after giving birth.

26:45 – An influential study showing structural changes in the brain following pregnancy. The same study also found that some of these changes correlated with measures of maternal attachment.

28:00 – A recent review article by Jodi and colleagues on the idea of neural fine-tuning in early motherhood.

41:45 – A recent review paper by Jodi and colleagues about the neural underpinnings of postpartum depression and anxiety.

44:00 – A review paper about postpartum psychosis.

51:00 – A study on the prevalence of postpartum depression across cultures.

58:00 – A 2014 review of research on mother-child synchrony.

1:00:00 – A recent study by Winnie and colleagues looking at how having children affects later life brain function. Another study by Winnie and colleagues on the same topic.

1:13:00 – Several studies have documented general changes in “Big 5” personality factors as people age. A study examining this in both American and Japanese participants is here.

1:18:00 – Since we recorded this interview, the publication date for the English version of Jodi’s book has been scheduled. It comes out in September 2023—more info here.

Recommendations

Dr. Orchard recommends:

Baby Brain, Sarah McKay

Mother Brain, Chelsea Conaboy

Dr. Pawluski recommends:

Matrescence, by Lucy Jones

After the Storm, by Emma Jane Unsworth

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

From the archive: Bat signals

12 juli 2023 | 79 min

We're still on summer break, but we wanted to share a favorite interview from our archives. Enjoy!

----

We’ve got something special for you today folks: bats. That’s right: bats.

Ever since Thomas Nagel wrote his famous essay on what it’s like to be a bat, these flying, furry, nocturnal, shrieky mammals have taken up roost in our scientific imaginations. They’ve become a kind of poster child—or poster creature?—for the idea that our world is full of truly alien minds, inhabiting otherworldly lifeworlds. On today’s show, we dive deep into these other minds—and into some of their less appreciated capacities. Bats don’t just echolocate, they also sing. And, as we’ll see, they sing with gusto.

My guest today is Dr. Mirjam Knörnschild. She directs the Behavioral Ecology and Bioacoustics Lab at the Natural History Museum of Berlin. She and her team study bat communication, cognition, and social life; they focus in particular on bat social vocalizations—what we might call bat signals.

Here, we do a bit of Bats 101. We talk about how bats form a spectacularly diverse group, or taxon. We talk about the mechanics of echolocation. We talk about the mind-bogglingly boisterous acoustic world of bats and how they’re able to navigate it. We discuss Mirjam and her team's recent paper in Science magazine, showing that baby bat pups babble much like human infants. And, last but not least, we talk about what it's like to be a bat.

As I say in this conversation, I've always been a bit unnerved by bats, but part of me also knew they were seriously cool. But really, I didn't know the half of it. There's so much more to these creatures than meets the casual eye.

One last thing before we jump in: as a little bonus, for this episode Mirjam was kind enough to share some examples of the bat calls we discuss in the episode. So there’s a bit of an audio appendix at the end where you can hear slowed-down versions.

On to my chat with Dr. Mirjam Knörnschild. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

7:20 – Meet the Honduran white bat, which Knörnschild likens to a “fluffy little white ping pong ball.”

13:50 – Austin, Texas is home to Bracken Cave, which harbors more than 15 million bats.

16:30 – Much of Dr. Knörnschild’s work focuses on the Greater Sac-winged bat, which is a member of the Emballonurid family.

18:00 – See the audio appendix for an example of a Greater Sac-winged bat’s echolocation calls. See also examples on Dr. Knörnschild’s website.

21:10 – A paper by Dr. Knörnschild and colleagues about how echolocation calls serve social functions in addition to navigational functions.

24:00 – A paper by Dr. Knörnschild and colleagues on the origin and diversity of bat songs.

30:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Knörnschild and colleagues on the correlation between social complexity and vocal complexity across bat species.

37:30 – A brand new special issue on vocal learning in humans and animals, including a review of vocal learning in mammals by Dr. Vincent Janik and Dr. Knörnschild.

40:35 – Dr. Knörnschild’s first scientific paper, in 2006, reported the observation that Greater Sac-winged bats seemed to babble like infants.

47:20 – A recent paper by Dr. Knörnschild and colleagues on territorial songs in male Greater Sac-winged bats.

53:45 – A very recently published paper in Science by Ahana Fernandez, Dr. Knörnschild, and collaborators; see also this popular article and a video about the findings.

1:05:30 – A recent paper by Dr. Knörnschild and colleagues on bat “motherese.”

1:12:00 – For a concise narrative summary of Dr. Knörnschild’s research, including some of the future directions she is planning to pursue, see the article ‘Bats in translation.’

1:14:00 – The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously argued that we can’t really know what it’s like to be a bat.

Dr. Knörnschild recommends two books by Merlin Tuttle:

Bats: An Illustrated Guide to All Species

The Secret Lives of Bats

You can find Dr. Knörnschild on Twitter (@MKnornschild) and follow her research at her website.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

From the archive: The eye's mind

28 juni 2023 | 14 min

We're taking a little summer break right now, but we wanted to share a favorite essay from our archives. Enjoy!

---

Welcome back folks! Today, we’ve got an audio essay for you. I won’t say too too much—don’t want to spoil it—but it’s about pupils. Not as in students, but as in the dark cores of our eyes. This one of those that’s been in the works for a little while. About a year ago I started collecting all the cool new pupil-related stuff coming out. Then at some point this summer some extra cool stuff came out and I said, “That’s it—time to do it, time to pull this material together into some kind of episode.” So that’s what we have for you today. And I hope you find it eye-opening.

Quick reminder before we get to it: As always, we could really use your help in getting the word out about the show. That might mean subscribing, if you don’t already. It might mean rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts. It might mean sending the show to a friend or two. I mean honestly it could mean knitting a Many Minds cardigan for the cold months ahead and sporting it around town. Ceaselessly.

Alright all, on to this week’s essay ‘The eye’s mind.’ Enjoy!

A text version of this episode (enriched with images!) is readable on Medium.

Notes

2:00 – The eye of the giant squid was described in detail for the first time in 2012, in this paper.

3:10 – On diversity in animal pupils, see this recent paper.

4:40 – Pupil changes to imagined and linguistically encoded light can be read about here and here.

5:30 – Eckherd Hess’s early research on pupils is summarized in his 1965 Scientific American article, ‘Attitude and Pupil Size’.

6:45 – The 1966 paper by Kahneman and Beatty is here. Or see a 2018 review of more recent research on pupils and cognitive effort.

8:10 – Hess’s studies on the social functions of pupils are recounted in his 1975 Scientific American article, ‘The Role of Pupil Size in Communication’. Several of his classic studies have been replicated just this year (with good but not perfect success).

8:50 – Mariska Kret’s suggestion about how pupils fit the baby schema can be found here.

9:45 – Kret’s studies of pupil mimicry include this one, this one, and this one, among others.

10:15 – The 2021 paper by Wohltjen & Wheatley on “pupillary synchrony” is available here.

12:00 – The 1974 Nature article titled ‘Pupils of a talking parrot’ is available here.

Correction: The audio version of this essay misstated the size of the pupil changes in Daniel Kahneman's classic studies. These changes were roughly .2 to .5 mm, not 2 to 5 mm.

The octopus and the android

14 juni 2023 | 86 min