Many Minds

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

Whales and dolphins are, without a doubt, some of the most charismatic, enigmatic creatures around. Part of what draws us to them is that­—different as our worlds are from theirs, different as our bodies are—we sense a certain kinship. We know they’ve got big brains, much like we do. We know that some cetacean species live long lives, sing songs, and form close bonds. If you’re like me, you may have also wondered about other parallels. For example, do whales and dolphins have something we might want to call culture? If so, what do those cultures look like? What sorts of traditions might these animals be innovating and circulating down in the depths? On this week’s episode I chatted with Dr. Luke Rendell, a Reader in the School of Biology and a member of the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He’s been studying cetaceans for more than two decades. He’s the author, with Hal Whitehead, of the 2014 book The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. (You can probably guess by the book’s title where Luke comes down on the question of cetacean culture.) Luke’s work is, to my mind, an impressive blend of naturalistic observation, cutting edge methods, and big-picture theorizing. In this conversation, Luke and I do a bit of “Cetaceans 101.” We talk about what culture is and why whale song is a good example of it. We discuss lob-tail feeding in humpback whales and tail-walking in bottlenose dolphins. We talk about Luke’s very recent work on how sperm whales in the 19th century may have learned from each other how to evade whalers. And we discuss why an understanding of culture may be crucial for ongoing cetacean conservation efforts. We didn’t plumb all the depths of this rich topic—nor did we exhaust all the maritime puns—but we did have a far-reaching chat about some of the most fascinating beings on our planet and their distinctive cultures. As always, thanks a bunch for listening folks. On to my conversation with Dr. Luke Rendell. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.    Notes and links 2:30 – My favorite edition of Moby Dick (for what it’s worth). 6:45 – A primer on cetaceans. 9:30 – A paper on the ins and outs of the whale nose. 10:45 – A general audience article about echolocation in cetaceans, drawing on this recent academic article. 12:30 ­– A discussion of Roger Payne’s storied whale song album. 19:00 – A paper on cetacean brain and body size. 19:45 – Dr. Rendell’s 2001 article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, co-authored with Hal Whitehead. The paper made a splash. 24:50 – A paper by Dr. Rendell and colleagues describing some of his work on whale song. 26:40 – The 2000 paper by Michael Noad and colleagues, presenting some of compelling early evidence for whale song as a culturally transmitted phenomenon. 28:30 – A subsequent paper by Ellen Garland, Michael Noad, and colleagues showing further evidence for the socially transmitted nature of song. 31:45 – Dr. Rendell has also done important theoretical work on social learning strategies. See, for instance, here and here. 33:24 – An article offering evidence of imitation in killer whales. 36:10 – The paper by Dr. Rendell and colleagues on lob-tail feeding in humpback whales. 36:35 – A video illustrating “bubble net feeding.” 47:45 – The paper by Dr. Rendell and colleagues on tail-walking in dolphins. 55:30 – The paper by Dr. Rendell and colleagues on 19th century sperm whales' evasion tactics, as well as a popular piece on the same. 57:00 – A website documenting various aspects of whaling history. 1:05:00 – A recent discussion of gene-culture co-evolution across animal species. 1:10:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Rendell and (many) colleagues about how an appreciation of animal culture offers important lessons for conservation.   Dr. Rendell’s end of show recommendations: Dolphin Politics in Shark Bay, by Richard Connor Deep Thinkers, edited by Janet Mann The Wayfinders, by Wade Davis You can keep up with Dr. Rendell on Twitter (@_lrendell).   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 creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. 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. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Have you ever seen what seemed to be a spirit? Or heard a voice from an unseen source? Or maybe just sensed a presence and found yourself with goosebumps all over? These kinds of experiences can be incredibly powerful— life-altering, in fact—but they don’t happen often, and they don’t happen to everyone. So what drives this individual variation? Why do some of us have these extraordinary experiences while others never do? Could it be something about our personalities? Or our cultures? Could it have to do with the way we understand our minds? My guests on today’s show are Tanya Luhrmann, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, and Kara Weisman, a postdoc at UC-Riverside (formerly in the Psychology department at Stanford). Along with nine collaborators from across institutions, Tanya and Kara recently published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) titled ‘Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths.’ This episode is nominally in our “behind the paper” series, but really it tells the story of not just this one paper but a much larger project: The Mind and Spirit project. The project was an unusual effort in scope: it included anthropologists and psychologists; it involved fieldwork in Ghana, Thailand, China, Vanuatu, and the US and practitioners of different faith traditions; it used both in-depth interviews and large-scale survey testing with thousands of participants. The particular paper we’re discussing today probed the basic idea that so-called “spiritual presence events”—those tingly, jarring, extraordinary experiences that some of us have—could be due to two main factors, factors that vary across individuals and cultures. The first proposed factor is how people understand the mind-world boundary. People who conceive of the mind as fundamentally leaky or “porous” might be more likely to have these kinds of experiences. The second proposed factor is how likely people are to get absorbed in their sensory experiences, to lose themselves in music, art, nature, movies, and so on. In our conversation, Tanya, Kara, and I talk about the deeper history behind this work; we break down what the constructs of porosity and absorption mean exactly and how they chose to measure them; we discuss the challenges and rewards of cross-disciplinary collaboration; and we talk about why I really need to read more William James. I wanted to feature this paper the moment I learned about it—it’s such an impressive piece of research on several levels. It’s also just certifiably cool. It’s dealing with cultural differences. It’s dealing with individual differences. And it’s dealing with variability in, to use the authors’ words “something as basic as what feels real to the senses.” So let’s get to it. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Dr. Tanya Luhrmann and Dr. Kara Weisman. Enjoy! The paper we discuss is here. A transcript of this show is available here.   Notes and links 4:00 – Dr. Luhrmann’s first book was based on work with British practitioners of magic and witchcraft. 5:30 – Another of Dr. Luhrmann’s books looked at American Evangelicals and their relationship to God. 6:30 – A paper by Marcia Johnson and Carol Raye on “reality monitoring.” 12:45 – In earlier work, Dr. Weisman examined people’s conceptions of mind and mental life. 16:37 – One of the other collaborators on the Mind and Spirit project is Felicity Aulino. 19:30 – More info about Tellegen’s absorption scale can be found here and here. 28:05 – Another member of the project is Rachel E. Smith. 33:24 – Another member of the project is Cristine Legare, former guest on Many Minds (!). 36:00 – Another member of the project is John Dulin. 42:00 – Another member of the project is Emily Ng. 42:30 – Another member of the project is Joshua D. Brahinsky. 43:00 – Another member of the project is Vivian Dzokoto. 58:00 – Dr. Luhrmann discusses the “citadel” model of the mind in her more recent book, How God Becomes Real. 59:20 – Dr. Weisman is currently part of a new large-scale project, the Developing Belief Network.   Dr. Luhrmann’s end-of-show recommendation: Religious Experience Reconsidered, by Ann Taves Dr. Weisman’s end-of-show recommendation: The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James   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 creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. 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. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our NEW website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Welcome back folks! Don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, but rumor is that in certain parts of the Northern Hemisphere, the signs of spring are starting to emerge—little buds and shocks of color. We’ll be monitoring the situation closely over the coming weeks. My guest today is Melanie Challenger. Melanie is a writer and researcher whose work explores the relationship between humans and the natural world. The subject of our conversation is her latest book, How to be Animal: A New History of What it Means to Be Human. In it, she confronts our species’ epic struggle with our animal nature. We have this tendency to see ourselves as above and beyond the natural order, as possessing something special, something extraordinary that sets us apart. And yet it’s no secret that we are also biological organisms, made from the same stuff as the rest of the animal kingdom and bound by the same laws and limits. You can sense the struggle; you can probably feel the tension. Through the lens of this struggle, Melanie’s book takes in a huge sweep of terrain. It considers our tendency to dehumanize other humans and “dementalize” animals; it discusses our alienation from our own bodies; it takes up our desire to colonize space and upload our minds so they survive our death. That’s not all. It also zooms in on paleolithic cave art, neuro-essentialism, the notions of personhood and dignity, not to mention mass extinction and machine intelligence and a whole lot else. It’s a provocative book and a brave book, and chatting with Melanie about it was a real treat. An announcement, or re-announcement, I suppose: Applications for the 2021 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute are now open. Check out our amazing faculty (including some former guests of the show) and find further details at disi.org. I’ll just mention here that Melanie and I first met at the 2020 institute—she was one of our Storytellers. So, you know, more evidence that cool people who think about cool things are to be found at DISI. Alright folks—hope you enjoy this one. And, if you do, definitely pick up Melanie’s book. It’ll be out Tuesday, March 23 in the US.   A transcript of this show is available here.   Notes and links 9:24 – “Substance dualism” is one of several forms of dualism. See here. 12:30 – A primer on elephant cognition. 18:00 – One of the works on dehumanization that Challenger discusses in her book is Less than Human by David Livingstone Smith. The topic is also discussed at length in a book we featured in December, Survival of the Friendliest, by Brian Hare & Vanessa Woods. 21:30 – A recent review of the wide literature on “terror management theory.” 25:50 – An article reviewing work on “mental time travel,” which Challenger views as one of our key capacities as humans. 30:46 – A study by Amy Fitzgerald and colleagues on crime rates in the proximity of slaughterhouses. 33:50 – The Cave of Altamira in Spain. 38:30 – Here we discuss the work of researcher Kim Hill. 45:50 – John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690, can be read here. 53:57 – See Challenger’s previous book about extinction. 55:45 – Read about the 2009 Copenhagen accord here.   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 creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. 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. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our NEW website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

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 (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), 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 creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. 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. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Greetings friends and happy February! Today’s episode is a conversation with Dr. Michael Muthukrishna, an Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics. Michael’s research takes on a suite of topics that all start from a single big question: Why are we so different from other animals? Part of the answer has to do with our neural hardware. There’s no question we’ve got big brains—and Michael has some cool things to say about why they may have gotten so big. But Michael is just as focused on our cultural software—the tools and ideas we develop, tweak, share, and accumulate over time. You might say he’s more impressed by our collective brains than by our individual brains. To study all this, Michael builds formal theories and computational models; he runs experiments; and he constructs and analyzes huge databases. We cover a lot of ground in this episode. We talk about the finding that the size and interconnectedness of a social group affects the cultural skills that group can develop and maintain. We consider what actually powers innovation (hint: it’s not lone geniuses). We discuss how diversity is a bit double-edged and why psychology needs to become a historical science. And that, my friends, is hardly all—we also touch on cetaceans, religious history, and spinning plates. I’ve been hoping to have Michael on the show for months now. His work is deeply theoretical, advancing the basic science of what it means to be human. But it’s also engaged with important practical issues—issues like corruption and cultural diversity. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Dr. Michael Muthukrishna. Enjoy! A transcript of this show is available here.   Notes and links 4:30 - An introduction to “dual inheritance theory.” 11:00 - A 2013 paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues about the relationship between sociality and cultural complexity. 12:15 - A paper on the loss of cultural tools and traditions in the Tasmanian case. 21:20 – A 2016 paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich on innovation and the collective brain. 28:30 - The original paper on the notion of cultural “tightness” and “looseness.” 30:20 - A recent short piece by Dr. Muthukrishna on the paradox of diversity. 34:50 - A 2019 popular piece of mine on the phenomenon of “global WEIRDing.” 40:27 - The so-called Flynn Effect refers to the puzzling rise of IQ scores over time. It is named after James Flynn, who died only weeks ago. 42:30 - A paper about the significance of Luria’s work on abstract reasoning in Uzbekistan. 50:26 - A paper on the “cultural brain hypothesis,” the subject of Dr. Muthukrishna’s dissertation. 51:00 - A paper on brains as fundamentally “expensive.” 58:00 - Boyd & Richardson, mentioned here, have authored a number of highly influential books. The first of these was Culture and the Evolutionary Process. 59:35 - A 2015 paper on head size and emergency birth interventions. 1:01:20 - The stylized model we mention here is discussed and illustrated in this lecture from the 2020 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute. 1:03:15 – The paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues on cetacean brains and culture. 1:11:38 - The paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues on ‘Psychology as a Historical Science.’ 1:14:00 - The 2020 paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues introducing a tool for the measurement of cultural distance. 1:20:20 – Dr. Muthukrishna is part of the team behind the Database of Religious History. 1:24:25 - The paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and Joe Henrich on ‘The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation.’   Dr. Muthukrishna’s end-of-show reading recommendations: Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success & The WEIRDest People in the World Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works Matthew Syed, Rebel Ideas  You can keep up with Dr. Muthukrishna’s work at his personal website and on Twitter (@mmuthukrishna).   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), 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 creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. 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. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Today we’ve got another “behind the paper” episode for you. In it, we’re talking about some of the most alien-seeming yet charismatic creatures around. I chatted with Dr. Alex Schnell, a Comparative Psychologist and Research Fellow at Cambridge University. We discuss a paper she recently published with a few colleagues titled, ‘How intelligent is a cephalopod?’ I’ve been charmed by cephalopods for awhile now—octopuses specifically. Maybe you have too. You’ve probably seen those videos of octopuses carrying coconut shells for protection, or pretending to be a hermit grab or a flounder. Maybe you saw the recent documentary My Octopus Teacher where the main octopus character gathers a bunch of shells into a kind of makeshift armor to protect herself against an imminent shark attack. This is all jaw-droppingly, head-scratchingly cool stuff. But you may have also wondered, as I have, what’s really going on—cognitively— behind these behaviors. What’s happening in the minds of these creatures when they pull off these fancy feats? Could the mechanisms involved actually be simpler than you might at first guess? This really is the core issue in Alex’s paper and we circle around it for much of the conversation. But, in circling, we touch on a lot. We cover some Cephalopod 101 type stuff—when cephalopods split from vertebrates, what cephalopods brains are like, why octopuses tends to hog the limelight when squid and cuttlefish are pretty impressive, too. We talk about Alex’s studies of self-control in cuttlefish, styled on the classic marshmallow experiments. We talk about the cephalopod gift for disguise and whether this gift might suggest a form of bodily awareness or maybe even theory of mind. And we zoom out to talk about the evolution of cognitive sophistication generally and how cephalopods can help us understand the kinds of forces that drive it. I’ve been excited about cephalopods for awhile now, but having this conversation made me that much more so. It’s convinced me that we still have a ton to learn about—and probably from—these brainy, shape-shifting creatures. So let’s get to it. Here’s my conversation with Dr. Alex Schnell. Enjoy!   The paper we discuss is here. A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 14:35 – Watch a video of octopuses carrying coconuts here. See the original research study on this behavior here. 16:45 – A paper showing that Eurasian jays can think beyond their current state to consider future needs. 17:40 – The paper reporting the original pretzel experiments in human children. 29:10 – A video of an octopus purportedly changing colors while dreaming. 32:10 – Another recent paper published by Dr. Schnell, led by her colleague Piero Amodio, about the evolutionary drivers of cephalopod intelligence and animal intelligence generally. 38:20 – A recent discussion of animal sentience and the “precautionary principle.”   Dr. Schnell’s end-of-show reading recommendations: A recent paper by P. Billard and colleagues Recent work by Piero Amodio Research at the Cognitive Neuroethology of Cephalopods (NECC) lab You can follow Dr. Schnell at her website or on Twitter.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), 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 creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. 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. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

When you think of domestication, I bet you think of farm animals—you know cows and pigs and alpacas—or maybe house pets. You might think of corn or wheat or rice. You probably don’t think of us—humans, Homo sapiens. But, by the end of today’s conversation, I’m guessing you will. For this episode I talked with Dr. Brian Hare of Duke University. He’s a core member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience there, as well a Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology. Along with Vanessa Woods, he’s the author of book published this summer titled Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding our Origins and Rediscovering our Common Humanity. We talked about Brian’s research with dogs, foxes, and bonobos and how it led him to a big idea at the center of this new book. The idea is that, much as we domesticated farm animals to make them tamer and easier to work with, we also seem to have domesticated ourselves at some point in our evolutionary past. This process is known as self-domestication—a selection for friendliness. But beyond making us gentler and smilier, the domestication process also had a bunch of unexpected impacts on our behaviors, bodies, and brains. Really unexpected, like the fact that we have globe-shaped heads. According to Brian and Vanessa’s account, self-domestication was in fact the force that allowed ancient humans to develop larger social networks and, in turn, more sophisticated technologies. So it may hold the answer to why we’re still around while other hominin species—like the Neanderthals—aren’t. As Brian says at one point in our conversation, the book is really offering an account of human nature. And, importantly, it’s a dual nature. Lurking behind our friendliness—co-existing and co-evolved with our newfound chumminess—is a darker side, a capacity for real cruelty. I consider the human self-domestication hypothesis to be one of the most fascinating ideas of that last decade. Right now it’s really at the center of a lot of conversations about human origins and about human and animal minds. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links Note: Much of what we discuss is covered in Survival of the Friendliest, but additional readings and sources are also listed here. 6:42 – Read the paper inspired by Dr. Hare’s early observations about how his dog Oreo could understand human pointing gestures. 8:40 – In one study, Dr. Hare traveled to Siberia to study a population of domesticated foxes—and specifically to ask whether they would show a predilection for cooperative communication. The long-running fox-farm experiment is the subject of a book titled How to Tame a Fox (And Build a Dog). 10:50 – Around the same time as his research in Siberia, Dr. Hare also published work examining how bonobos exhibit more tolerance than chimpanzees. 15:15 – A recent article voicing skepticism about the fox-farm research and the so-called “domestication syndrome.” 17:30 – See Dr. Hare’s 2017 book, Bonobos: Unique in Mind, Brain, and Behavior, co-authored with Shinya Yamamato. 30:00 – A long-standing puzzle in paleoanthropology is why modern human behavior—as judged by advanced tool use, symbolism, etc.—lagged behind modern human anatomy by more than a hundred thousand years. The eventual emergence of modern behavior is sometimes described as the Upper Paleolithic Revolution. 40:00 – An article Dr. Hare published along with Robert L. Cieri, Steven Churchill, and other colleagues on the origins of “behavioral modernity.” 48:30 – Steven Pinker—among other scholars—has argued that violence has declined in human societies from prehistory until today. This idea has been both influential and controversial. 58:45 – Evidence from social psychology suggests that cross-group friendships might be especially powerful in changing attitudes. Here’s one paper on the power of inter-group contact.   Brian Hare’s end-of-show recommendations: Richard Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox David Livingston Smith, On Inhumanity David Stasavage, The Decline and Rise of Democracy See also: books by Joseph Henrich and Michael Tomasello   The best way to keep up with Dr. Hare’s work is on Twitter (@bharedogguy) website: http://brianhare.net/   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. 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. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Welcome back folks! Today’s episode is a conversation about the nature of knowledge. I talked with Dr. Briana Toole, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. Briana specializes in epistemology—the branch of philosophy that grapples with all things knowledge-related. In her work she is helping develop a new framework called “standpoint epistemology.” The basic idea is that what we know depends in part on our social position—on our gender, our race, and other factors. We flesh out this idea by walking through a bunch of examples that show how where we stand shapes the facts we attend to, believe, accept, and resist. We also talk about our moment present, polarized and fractured as it is. As we discuss, standpoint epistemology might offer tools to help us make sense of what’s happening, understand where others are coming from, and maybe even bridge some of the chasms that divide us. Enjoy!   A transcript of this show is available here.   Notes and links 2:10 – Learn more about Dr. Toole’s outreach organization, Corrupt the Youth. And for more about Dr. Toole’s work with the program see this recent profile in Guernica magazine. 6:15 – Socrates was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth. 9:00 – Corrupt the Youth often begins with lessons on the allegory of the cave and the ring of Gyges. 19:50 – For more on the significance of “fake barn country,” see this entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Gettier’s groundbreaking paper is here. 23:00 – We mention a number of early pioneers in standpoint epistemology, including Rebecca Kukla, Sandra Harding, and Donna Haraway. 26:40 – Jane Addams’s letter about women and public housekeeping. 32:20 – Dr. Toole’s recent paper—‘From Standpoint Epistemology to Epistemic Oppression’—discusses the distinction between marginalized and dominant knowers, among other topics. 32:55 – Kristie Dotson’s classic paper on epistemic oppression. You can also listen to a podcast with her here.    37:00 – Indigenous communities in Australia have long known that certain birds spread fire in order to flush out prey. This example is discussed in Dr. Toole’s article ‘Demarginalizing Standpoint Epistemology.’ 38:20 – We discuss three key theses in the standpoint epistemology framework: the situated knowledge thesis; the achievement thesis; and the epistemic privilege thesis. 41:10 – Read more about W.E.B. Dubois’s notion of “double consciousness” here. 43:29 – The particular sense of “conceptual resources” we discuss here was introduced by Gaile Pohlhaus, and is further developed by Dr. Toole in her paper, ‘From Standpoint Epistemology to Epistemic Oppression.’ 44:50 – The concept of “misogynoir” is discussed here. 59:40 – The notion of “consciousness raising” has its roots feminism, as discussed here. 1:11:35 – A recent interview in The Atlantic in which former US President Barack Obama referred to our current moment as one of “epistemological crisis.”   Briana Toole’s end-of-show recommendations: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, by bell hooks Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde Learning from the Outsider Within, Patricia Hill Collins Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan an Nancy Tuana The best way to keep up with Dr. Toole’s work is at her website: http://www.brianatoole.com/   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. 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. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Today we’ve got another installment in our “behind the paper” format. In case you missed the first iteration, these are 30-minute or so interviews that dig into recent notable papers. This episode takes on a timeless question: Do concepts differ from one language to the next, or are they basically the same? Maybe you think we already know the answer. You’ve probably heard of cases where one language labels a concept that other languages don’t—the German word schaudenfreude, or the Danish notion of hygge, or, my favorite, the Japan concept of tsundoku. These examples are fun and get a lot of attention, and they certainly make it clear that there’s at least some variation. But a more provocative possibility is that even everyday words that seem easy to translate—words for concepts like chair, beautiful, or walk—might actually differ considerably from one language to the next. Today I talk to Dr. Bill Thompson, a postdoc at Princeton University in the Department of Computer Science and Dr. Gary Lupyan, a Professor at the University of Wisconsin in the Department of Psychology. Along with their co-author Sean Roberts, they published a paper this summer that looks at just this issue, at whether basic words have the same meanings across languages. The paper’s title is: “Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment.” We talk about the computational approach they use to quantify the similarity of word meanings. We consider their finding that certain kinds of concepts are more similar across languages than others. We discuss the role of culture in shaping concepts. And we talk a bit about why their paper caused something of a stir online. I found this to be a really thought-provoking conversation. It circles around one of the deepest questions we can ask about the human mind: Where do our concepts come from? Spoiler: we don’t settle the question once and for all here. But we do throw some light on it—perhaps. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Dr. Bill Thompson and Dr. Gary Lupyan. Enjoy!   The paper we discuss is here. A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 9:20 – A very brief introduction to distributional semantics. A core tenet of such approaches is that “you shall know a word by the company it keeps”—as J. R. Firth famously put it. 16:00 – The Intercontinental Dictionary Series divides the words of the world’s languages into 22 semantic domains. See also this blog post by Sean Roberts, in which he reports the results of a survey the authors did on how translatable people thought words from these domains would be across languages. 22:10 – The D-Place dataset is here. 27:00 – The popular write-up which, when shared on Twitter, caused a bit of a stir.   End-of-show reading recommendations: Comparing lexicons cross-linguistically, by Asifa Majid The Conceptual Mind: New Directions in the Study of Concepts, edited by Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence Words and the Mind, edited by Barbara Malt and Phillip Wolff Does vocabulary help structure the mind? by Gary Lupyan and Martin Zettersten   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), 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 creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. 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. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

You probably think you know the Neanderthals. We’ve all been hearing about them since we were kids, after all. They were all over the comics; they were in museum dioramas and on cartoons. They were always cast as mammoth-eating, cave-dwelling dimwits—nasty brutes, in other words. You probably also learned that they died off because they couldn’t keep pace with us, Homo sapiens, their svelter, savvier superiors. That’s story we had long been told anyhow. But, over the past few decades, there’s been a slow-moving sea change—a revolution in how archaeologists understand our closest cousins. For this episode I talked to Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes about this revolution. She is a Neanderthal specialist and the author of the new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. Rebecca and I discuss the new picture of Neanderthals emerging from the latest archaeological research. We talk about where they lived, what they ate, the tools and clothing they made. We talk about the evidence that they had a considerable degree of cognitive sophistication and—very possibly—an aesthetic sense. Once we put all this together—and let the new picture come into focus—the gap long thought to separate them from us from them starts to close. And this makes the question of why they vanished about 40 thousand years ago all the more puzzling. I really hope you enjoy this one—I certainly did. And if you do, I definitely encourage you to check out Kindred!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links  Most of the topics we discuss are treated in detail in Rebecca Wragg Sykes’s book, Kindred. 5:40 – Earlier book-length treatments of the Neanderthals include The Smart Neanderthal and Neanderthals Revisited. 9:15 – The archaeological site of Atapuerca in Spain, which includes the Sima de los Huesos (Pit of Bones). 11:20 – The Neander Valley in Germany was the site of the very first Neanderthal find in 1856. 11:50 – Another early site was Krapina, Croatia, which is now home to a Neanderthal museum. 24:30 – A recent academic article on the complexity of Neanderthal tool use. 28:27 – A French site—La Folie—gives a sense of what some Neanderthal dwellings were like. 41:05 – A popular article about the “wow site” at Bruniquel. The original academic article. 49:16 – An article on the evidence that Neanderthals were preparing and using birch tar. 56:45 – Some evidence suggests Neanderthals were interested in bird feathers and talons. 1:01:30 – There is now evidence for repeated phases of interbreeding between human and Neanderthals. 1:05:00 – Other ancient hominin species included the Denisovans. 1:07:00 – There are some reasons to believe that pathogens carried by humans may have played a role in the demise of the Neanderthals. 1:13:30 – Another richly imaginative treatment of ancient human life is Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic, by Mark Edmonds. To keep up with the latest Neanderthal research, Dr. Wragg Sykes recommends following archaeologists such as John Hawks (@johnhawks). She is also on Twitter (@LeMoustier) and her website is: https://www.rebeccawraggsykes.com/. Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. 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. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Welcome back folks! Today is a return to one of our favorite formats: the audio essay. If you like your audio essays short, concise, and full of tidbits, then this mini will not disappoint. We take a look at a 140-year-old idea but very much a radical one—the root-brain hypothesis. It was proposed by Charles Darwin in a book published in the twilight of his career. The idea, in short, is that plants have a structure that is, in some ways, brain-like—and it is located underground, at their roots. We talk about how Darwin and his son Francis arrived at this idea, why it was ignored for so long, and how it’s recently stirred to life. Enjoy!   A text version of this “mini” is available here.   Notes and links 2:15 – The last page of Darwin’s The Power of Movement in Plants (1880). 3:25 – The 2009 paper by Dr. Baluška and colleagues about the history and modern revival of the “root-brain hypothesis.” 6:00 – The tinfoil hats experiment—and its influence—is discussed in this 2009 paper. 8:00 – The dust-up between Darwin and Sachs is described in this 1996 paper. 8:47 – The 2011 paper listing many of the environmental variables plants are now known to be sensitive to. 9:28 – Dr. Gagliano and colleagues’ paper on associative learning in plant and on plants’ use of sounds to find water. The possibility of echolocation is discussed here. 9:45 – For broader context surrounding the question of plants may have something like a brain, see Oné R. Pagán's essay titled 'The brain: A concept in flux.' 9:57 – The 2006 paper that inaugurated the field of “plant neurobiology.” 10:34 – Discussions of the “transition zone” of the root can be found in the 2009 paper by Baluška and colleagues, as well as in this more technical paper from 2010. 11:00 – The response letter to the original “plant neurobiology” paper, signed by 36 plant biologists. 12:00 – Michael Pollan’s 2013 article ‘The Intelligent Plant’ in The New Yorker. 12:05 – Anthony Trewavas’s letter, highlighting the power of metaphors in science. 12:26 – The 2020 paper about pea tendrils in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Correction: The audio version of this episode misstates the publication year of Darwin's final book, about worms. The correct year is 1881, not 1883.    Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play—or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Imagine a friend’s face. How much detail do you see? Do you see the color of their hair? What about the curve of their smile? For many people, this mental image will be relatively vivid. A somewhat watered down picture, sure, but still a picture—still something similar to what they would see if that friend were sitting across from them. For other folks, though, there’s no image there at all. There's just no way to will it into being. Such people have what is now known as “aphantasia”—the inability to generate visual imagery. Today I talk with Dr. Rebecca Keogh, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of New South Wales in Australia. Dr. Keogh is one of the leading researchers in the new, fast-evolving study of aphantasia. We talk about the work she and her colleagues are doing to explore the full spectrum of individual differences in visual imagery ability, how these differences arise in the brain, and how they impact different aspects of everyday life, from how we dream, to how we envision the future, to how we respond to trauma. We also talk about folks on the other end of the spectrum—those with so-called “hyperphantasia,” who experience visual images in extraordinary detail. And we get a sneak preview of some of the questions that Rebecca and her colleagues are taking on next. This episode takes us, for the first time on Many Minds, into the fascinating terrain of individual differences—into questions about how other human minds may differ from our own, often in ways that invisible and unexpected. This is terrain we definitely plan to revisit in future episodes. Had a blast with this one folks—hope you enjoy it, too!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links  3:16 – The 2015 paper in Cortex that introduced the term “aphantasia,” but the spectrum of visual imagery ability has been studied since the 1800s. 5:08 – In the 1980s Martha Farah and colleagues studied a case of acquired “aphantasia,” though they didn’t use the term at the time. 8:30 – The Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) was first introduced in 1973 by David Mark. 12:15 – The 2018 paper in Cortex by Dr. Keogh and Dr. Joel Pearson. 15:15 – A 2008 paper by Dr. Pearson introducing the binocular rival method of measuring mental imagery. 23:15 – An overview of the idea of separate “what” and “where” pathways in the brain. 27:23 – The 2020 paper—'A cognitive profile of multi-sensory imagery, memory and dreaming in aphantasia’—by Alexei Dawes, Dr. Keogh, and colleagues. 41:30 – The 2020 paper by Dr. Keogh and colleagues about the role of cortical excitability in visual imagery. 44:30 – Phosphenes are a kind of visual experience that is not induced by light entering the retina. 48:15 – A primer on Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS). 51:45 – A pre-print by Marcus Wicken, Dr. Keogh, and Dr. Pearson using skin conductance to examine the level of fear experienced by aphantasic and control participants. 1:01:45 – A paper by Dr. Adam Zeman and colleagues titled ‘Phantasia–The psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes,’ which discusses vocational choices in people with extreme imagery.   Rebecca Keogh’s end-of-show recommendations: Aphantasia: Experiences, Perceptions, and Insights by Alan Kendle The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination by Anna Abraham   The best way to keep up with Dr. Keogh’s work is to follow her on Twitter (@Becca_Keogh_PhD). To keep tabs on aphantasia research more broadly, you can follow other prominent aphantasia researchers such as Dr. Joel Pearson (@ProfJoelPearson) and Dr. Adam Zeman (@ZemanLab). You can also check out the Future Minds Lab and sign up for their mailing list: https://www.futuremindslab.com/.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. 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. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Welcome to our 10th episode! Today’s show is another in our ‘mini minds’ series. We’ve been experimenting with different formats for our minis, as you may have noticed, but today we’ve got another in the classic blogpost style. The topic is the acronym WEIRD—maybe you’ve heard it used. It stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It’s become a shorthand for the idea that people in WEIRD societies are a bit unusual relative to the rest our species. The term was first introduced 10 years ago. On this episode I talk about its origins and the far-reaching influence it’s had since. As with all episodes, be sure to check out the show notes for a smorgasbord of links and tidbits. There was a lot I had to leave on the cutting room floor with this one. But I swept some of it up and put it in the notes for anyone who’s interested. Enjoy!   A text version of this "mini" is readable here.    Notes and links 2:00 – The birthplace of the acronym: ‘The weirdest people in the world?’ 2:44 – A 2008 paper by Jeffrey Arnett that provided key support for the first part of Henrich et al.’s two-part argument. 3:35 – The visual illusion in question is the Müller-Lyer Illusion. 3:52 – These cultural differences in spatial conceptualization were first widely reported by Stephen Levinson and colleagues. See his book for the full story (or see a popular article of mine for a much shorter version). 4:33 – See the commentary by Meadon and Spurrett titled ‘It’s not just the subjects – there are too many WEIRD researchers.’ 4:45 – See the commentary by Rozin titled ‘The weirdest people in the world are a harbinger of the future of the world.’ For an expansion of Rozin’s argument, with more examples, see my article on “global WEIRDing”. 5:45 – See David F. Lancy, The Anthropology of Childhood. (Note that only the second edition came out after the WEIRD article was published.) One part of child development that proves unexpectedly variable across cultures is learning to walk and other motor milestones. 6:30 – The intersection of smell and WEIRD-ness is discussed in a recent special issue—see the editorial introduction here. Long-standing ideas about the impoverished nature of human olfaction are discussed here. 6:48 – A study comparing olfactory sensitivity in Tsimane people and Germans. 6:55 – For discussion of the idea that odors are ineffable, see this article. The same article was also among the first to characterize the elaborated and consistently applied odor lexicon of a hunter-gatherer group. Other papers have since built on this work. 7:23 – See the paper titled ‘WEIRD bodies: Mismatch, medicine, and missing diversity.’ Foot flatness and flexibility in “conventionally shod” populations are discussed in this paper. 8:10 – The researchers behind the original WEIRD paper—and their students—have kept busy themselves, exploring and expanding many related themes. See papers on theodiversity, the possible influence of the Catholic Church on WEIRD psychology, and the use of a new tool for mapping degrees of cultural distance. 8:22 – For a variety of articles raising issues of sample diversity, see: the 2014 opinion piece on the exclusion of left-handers from studies in cognitive neuroscience; another piece on diversity issues in cognitive neuroscience, focusing on issues of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic homogeneity; an article on “anglocentrism” in linguistics; and a commentary on “missing diversity” in genetics. 9:11 – For the idea that our understanding of primates may be skewed by a focus on captive primates, see ‘The Mismeasure of Ape Social Cognition.’ For the STRANGE framework, see here. 10:00 – For recent critiques, see here and here. The quote about the “homogeneous West” comes from the Broesch et al. (2020) paper; the quote about treating humans as “endangered butterflies” comes from Barrett (2020). Conducting research on sensitive populations is a major theme of Broesch et al. (2020). 11:15 – The analysis of persistent sampling problems in developmental psychology is here. The analysis of the journal Psychological Science is here. Patricia Bauer’s editorial is here.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. 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. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Greetings all—and a warm welcome back for another episode! Today’s show is a conversation with Daniel Oberhaus. Daniel is a staff writer for Wired magazine and the author of the book Extraterrestrial Languages, published by MIT Press in 2019. The book charts the history of humanity’s efforts at “interstellar communication”—our attempts to send messages to the stars in the hopes that alien life forms might receive them. Daniel and I talk about what these messages have contained, what forms they’ve taken, and the thinking and theories behind them. As you might guess, the history of interstellar communication is packed full of colorful episodes, charismatic characters, and quirky passion projects. But it’s also full of deep questions—questions about the very nature of communication, about the essence of human language, about why minds think in the ways they do, about the origins of mathematics, about what can and should be said on behalf of our species—or our planet. Apologies for the long list, but there really is a lot in play here—we touch on a bunch of it but for the fuller story, I definitely recommend you check out Daniel’s book. Thank you so much for joining us, as always. Enjoy and take care!   A transcript of this interview is available here.   Notes and links  Most of the topics we discuss are treated in detail in Daniel Oberhaus’s book, Extraterrestrial Languages. 2:38 – In 1960 the mathematician Hans Freudenthal published a book called Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse. Here is Daniel’s original article profiling Freudenthal and his ideas. 5:08 – There were a number of fanciful early schemes for communicating with aliens. For example, Carl Friedrich Gauss, better known for his contributions to mathematics, reportedly proposed building a large right triangle as a kind of message. 10:30 – The Arecibo message was devised and sent by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan in 1974. 11:25 – Two important acronyms in this world: the search for extraterrestrial life (SETI) and messaging extraterrestrial life (METI). 14:40 – In case you need a refresher on what an exoplanet is—as I did—here is a place to start. 20:38 – For more on the idea of Mathematical Platonism, see this article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A few alternatives to Mathematical Platonism have been proposed, including the theories of Embodied Mathematics put forward by George Lakoff & Rafael Núñez in Where Mathematics Comes From. 27:00 – A brief survey of the different numeral base systems used in across human languages. 28:30 – For a bit about John Lilly, read his obituary or see this article on his role in SETI. Lilly promoted the idea that communicating with aliens might be akin to communicating with dolphins. 30:50 – Another analogy: decoding alien messages might be like decoding ancient scripts like Linear B. 34:20 – For more on the dolphin whistle research we discuss, see here. 36:16 – Noam Chomsky’s idea that recursion is a key—perhaps the key feature—of human language is controversial. For discussion of this claim—and an equally controversial rejection of it—see this article. 37:50 – For examples of the communication abilities of Koko the gorilla, see here. Koko died in 2018. 44:45 – See here for more about the Pioneer Plaques, and here for more about the Golden Voyager Record. 48:30 – Here is a list of the musical recordings that were included on the Golden Voyager Record. 51:20 – For more about the Cosmic Call messages, see here. 53:10 – The controversial Pioneer Plaque image. 56:49 – The website for METI International. 1:03:30 – The 2015 announcement of a $100 million donation to fund SETI research is discussed here.   Daniel Oberhaus’s end-of-show recommendations: Intelligent Life in the Universe, by I.S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, edited by Carl Sagan The best way to keep up with Daniel is on Twitter @DMOberhaus. His personal website is: http://www.danieloberhaus.com/   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. 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. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Birds do the darnedest things. They fly, of course. They sing. They hunt in pitch darkness. They hide their food and remember where they put it. They use tools and migrate over astonishingly vast distances—sometimes even sleeping while in flight. How do they do all this? What's going on in their brains that makes these and other remarkable behaviors possible? How did their evolutionary path mold them into the incredible creatures they are today? My guests today are Dr. Andrew Iwaniuk and Dr. Georg Striedter. Andrew is a comparative neuroscientist and Associate Professor at the University of Lethbridge in Canada. Georg is a Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine. Together they are the authors of the new book, Bird Brains and Behavior: A Synthesis (available open access here). Here, Georg, Andrew, and I consider the deep history of birds—how they skirted the mass extinction event that felled the dinosaurs, and then radiated out into the 11,000 plus species we know today. We talk about how bird brains differ from those of mammals and reptiles—in terms of their size, but also in terms of their major structures, and in terms of their wrinkliness. We tour some of the most peculiar and perplexing bird behaviors, and consider their neural and anatomical underpinnings. Finally, we consider what we can learn from bird brains, not just about birds but about brains in general—how they evolve, how they get wired up, how they do and do not vary. Along the way we touch on barn owls, hummingbirds, megapodes, mallards, pigeons, parrots, starlings, and underestimated waterfowl; we touch on how birds' brains change with the seasons; the enduring mystery of magnetoreception; the possibility of olfactory maps; the optocollic reflex; the social intelligence hypothesis and the extractive foraging hypothesis; precocial versus altricial bird species; split-body gynandromorphy; and the future of non-invasive work in bird neuroscience. Season 7 of Many Minds is now gathering steam. We've got some great episodes in the works for you. Just a little reminder that we'd be grateful—thrilled, even—if you could help us get the word out about our show. You might do this by leaving a rating or a review, or by telling a colleague about us. We really appreciate the support, friends! Without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Georg Striedter and Dr. Andrew Iwaniuk. Enjoy!   Notes 8:00 – For more on the deep history of the brains of birds and other vertebrates, see: Dr. Striedter’s book (co-authored with R. Glenn Northcutt), Brains Through Time; this paper authored by Dr. Striedter and colleagues; and this paper authored by Dr. Iwaniuk and colleagues. 9:30 – The paper on neuron density in birds, by Dr. Pavel Němec and colleagues. 20:00 – For more about Dr. Striedter and colleagues revising some of the terminology for bird brain structures, see here and here. 24:00 – A paper by Dr. Striedter and colleagues on cortical folding.  34:00 – A recent paper describing seasonal neurogenesis in European starlings. 38:00 – A paper on the phenomenon of unihemispheric sleep across species. 42:00 – A video demonstrating the optocollic reflex in a bird. 45:00 – A paper on the puzzles of magnetoreception in birds and other animals. 51:00 – A classic paper on sound localization in barn owls.  54:00 – A paper by Dr. Iwaniuk and colleagues showing that harriers have an auditory system much like the (better-studied) owl. 58:00 – For more on place cells, the hippocampus, and cognitive maps, see our previous episode with Dr. Hugo Spiers. For more on the evolution of the hippocampus in birds and reptiles, see Dr. Striedter’s paper here. 1:02:00 – For images of gynandromorphy in birds, see here and here. 1:10:00 – For a recent paper on “parental provisioning,” the precocial-altricial spectrum, and brain size in birds, see here. 1:13:00 – For examples of research on the social intelligence hypothesis in birds and other animals, see here and here. 1:18:00 – For work by Dr. Iwaniuk and colleagues on some of the most interesting features of parrot brains, see here. 1:27:00 – The Avonet database.   Recommendations Flight Paths, by Rebecca Heisman An Immense World, by Ed Yong [former guest!] Mind of the Raven, by Bernd Heinrich Bird Brain, by Nathan Emery Soul Made Flesh, by Carl Zimmer   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. 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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

One afternoon you decide to snub your responsibilities and go for a hike. You spend a few hours in the woods or the mountains. You study the bark of trees, you bathe in birdsong, you let your eyes roam along a distant ridgeline. And you come back feeling better, restored somehow—like you have more energy, more patience, more bandwidth. We've all, I'm guessing, had experiences like this. But what's behind these effects? Why would nature restore us? What's the evidence that it really does? And what is even being restored, actually? My guest today is Dr. Marc Berman. Marc is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago where he directs the Environmental Neuroscience Lab. Marc is also the author of a new book, Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being. Here, Marc and I talk about Attention Restoration Theory—the idea that nature experiences restore our limited capacity for directed attention. We discuss the broader field of "environmental neuroscience," which Marc helped kickstart and continues to lead. We range across studies from Marc's lab that show nature's beneficial effects—on attention, on mood, and on health. We talk about what the active ingredients in nature seem to be. And we discuss the field's prospects for understanding how nature impacts not just the mind, but the brain itself. Along the way, Marc and I touch on: soft versus harsh fascination; the elusive concept of "mental energy"; trees, wood, fire, and rain; the architect and theorist Christopher Alexander; the value of fake plants; fractalness in space and time; curvature and spirituality; and how nature tends to steer our thoughts in certain directions. Needless to say, we're stoked to be kicking off a new season of Many Minds. If you're new to the show, welcome! If you're already a fan, perhaps you'd consider leaving us a rating or a review on your platform of choice. It really does help us reach new listeners. Alright friends, on to my conversation w/ Dr. Marc Berman. Enjoy!   Notes and links 7:00 – For more on Attention Restoration Theory and the distinctions it makes between directed attention and involuntary attention, see this paper by Dr. Stephen Kaplan. For more on the construct of “directed attention” in general, see this paper by Dr. Kaplan and Dr. Berman. 12:00 – For an overview of the aims and scope of “environmental neuroscience,” see this paper by Dr. Berman and colleagues.  17:00 – The 1989 book by Dr. Stephen Kaplan and Dr. Rachel Kaplan, The Experience of Nature  21:30 – For the “walk in the park” study that kickstarted Dr. Berman’s research on environmental neuroscience, see here. 25:30 – For some of Dr. Berman and colleagues’ work on nature sounds, see here and here. 27:00 – For a study on the possible benefits of nature for children with ADHD, see here.  30:00 – For more on the Garden of the Phoenix (aka the Osaka Garden) in Chicago, see here. For a news article about the benefits of “tiny forests,” see here.  34:00 –  See here for the follow-up to the “walk in the park” study with people experiencing depression.  38:00 – For the study on the relationship between tree cover and cardiometabolic health in Toronto, see here.  44:00 – For the classic study by Dr. Roger Ulrich on how the view from one's hospital room may impact recovery, see here. 47:00 – For more on the link between crime and nature in apartment complexes in Chicago, see here.  49:00 – A preprint by Dr. Berman and colleagues on the “compressibility” and memorability of natural images is here. 55:00 – For some of Dr. Berman’s earliest work on the "low-level" visual features of natural scenes, see here.  57:00 – For the work, led by Kathryn Schertz, on how natural (or non-natural) images with curved edges direct our thoughts, see here.  1:01:00 – The firelight talk paper is here.  1:02:30 – For the study by Dr. Schertz, Dr. Berman, and colleagues comparing thoughts in the conservatory and at the mall, see here. 1:05:00 – For the study on a historical increase in the use of the generic term “tree” in English, see here. 1:06:00 – Christopher Alexander, the architect and theorist, is perhaps best known for his (co-authored) book, A Pattern Language. For the study by Alex Coburn, Dr. Berman, and colleagues, see here. 1:09:30 – To get a visual flavor of La Sagrada Familia, see here. 1:18:00 – The study on whether people can reliably predict how much they will enjoy a walk in nature.  1:20:00 – For some of Dr. Berman and colleagues’ initial work on temporal “fractalness” in the brain, see here.   Recommendations Greg Bratman et al., ‘Nature and human well-being: The olfactory pathway’ Kim Doell et al., ‘Leveraging neuroscience for climate change research’ Lucia Mason et al., ‘Short-term exposure to nature and benefits for students’ cognitive performance: A review’   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. 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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Hi friends! We're taking a much-needed summer pause—we'll have new episodes for you later in September. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! ------- [originally aired June 1, 2023] There's a common story about the human past that goes something like this. For a few hundred thousand years during the Stone Age we were kind of limping along as a species, in a bit of a cognitive rut, let’s say. But then, quite suddenly, around 30 or 40 thousand years ago in Europe, we really started to come into our own. All of a sudden we became masters of art and ornament, of symbolism and abstract thinking. This story of a kind of "cognitive revolution" in the Upper Paleolithic has been a mainstay of popular discourse for decades. I’m guessing you’re familiar with it. It's been discussed in influential books by Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari; you can read about it on Wikipedia. What you may not know is that this story, compelling as it may be, is almost certainly wrong. My first guest today is Dr. Eleanor Scerri, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, where she heads the Pan-African Evolution research group. My second guest is Dr. Manuel Will, an archaeologist and Lecturer at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Together, Eleanor and Manuel are authors of a new paper titled 'The revolution that still isn't: The origins of behavioral complexity in Homo sapiens.' In the paper, they pull together a wealth of evidence showing that there really was no cognitive revolution—no one watershed moment in time and space. Rather, the origins of modern human cognition and culture are to be found not in one part of Europe but across Africa. And they’re also to be found much earlier than that classic picture suggests.  Here, we talk about the “cognitive revolution" model and why it has endured. We discuss a seminal paper from the year 2000 that first influentially challenged the revolution model. We talk about the latest evidence of complex cognition from the Middle Stone Age in Africa—including the perforation of marine shells to make necklaces; and the use of ochre for engraving, painting, and even sunblock. We discuss how, though the same complex cognitive abilities were likely in place for the last few hundred thousand years, those abilities were often expressed patchily in different parts of the world at different times. And we consider the factors that led to this patchy expression, especially changes in population size.   I confess I was always a bit taken with this whole "cognitive revolution" idea. It had a certain mystery and allure. This new picture that’s taking its place is certainly a bit messier, but no less fascinating. And, more importantly, it’s truer to the complexities of the human saga.  Alright friends, on to my conversation with Eleanor Scerri & Manuel Will. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 3:30 – The paper by Dr. Scerri and Dr. Will we discuss in this episode is here. Their paper updates and pays tribute to a classic paper by McBrearty and Brooks, published in 2000. 6:00 – The classic “cognitive revolution” model sometimes discussed under the banner of “behavioral modernity” or the “Great Leap Forward.” It has been recently featured, for instance, in Harari’s Sapiens. 11:00 – Dr. Scerri has written extensively on debates about where humans evolved within Africa—see, e.g., this paper.  18:00 – A study of perforated marine shells in North Africa during the Middle Stone Age. A paper by Dr. Will and colleagues about the use of various marine resources during this period.  23:00 – A paper describing the uses of ochre across Africa during the Middle Stone Age. Another paper describing evidence for ochre processing 100,000 years ago at Blombos Cave in South Africa. At the same site, engraved pieces of ochre have been found. 27:00 – A study examining the evidence that ochre was used as an adhesive. 30:00 – For a recent review of the concept of “cumulative culture,” see here. We discussed the concept of “cumulative culture” in our earlier episode with Dr. Cristine Legare.  37:00 – For an overview of the career of the human brain and the timing of various changes, see our earlier episode with Dr. Jeremy DeSilva. 38:00 – An influential study on the role of demography in the emergence of complex human behavior. 41:00 – On the idea that distinctive human intelligence is due in large part to culture and our abilities to acquire cultural knowledge, see Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success. See also our earlier episode with Dr. Michael Muthukrishna.  45:00 – For discussion of the Neanderthals and why they may have died out, see our earlier episode with Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes.    Recommendations Dr. Scerri recommends research on the oldest Homo sapiens fossils, found in Morocco and described here, and new research on the evidence for the widespread burning of landscapes in Malawi, described here.  Dr. Will recommends the forthcoming update of Peter Mitchell’s book, The Archaeology of Southern Africa. See Twitter for more updates from Dr. Scerri and Dr. Will.   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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Hi friends! We're taking a much-needed August pause—we'll have new episodes for you in September. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! _____ [originally aired February 8, 2024] 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!   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 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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Hi friends! We're taking a much-needed August pause—we'll have new episodes for you in September. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! _____ [originally aired May 30, 2024] 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 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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. s For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).