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.

Hello friends, and happy new year! We're gearing up for a new run of episodes starting later in January. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives. ------ [originally aired October 16, 2024] IQ is, to say the least, a fraught concept. Psychologists have studied IQ—or g for "general cognitive ability"—maybe more than any other psychological construct. And they've learned some interesting things about it. That it's remarkably stable over the lifespan. That it really is general: people who ace one test of intellectual ability tend to ace others. And that IQs have risen markedly over the last century. At the same time, IQ seems to be met with increasing squeamishness, if not outright disdain, in many circles. It's often seen as crude, misguided, reductive—maybe a whole lot worse. There's no question, after all, that IQ has been misused—that it still gets misused—for all kinds of racist, classist, colonialist purposes. As if this wasn't all thorny enough, the study of IQ is also intimately bound up with the study of genetics. It's right there in the roiling center of debates about how genes and environment make us who we are. So, yeah, what to make of all this? How should we be thinking about IQ? My guest today is Dr. Eric Turkheimer. Eric is Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He has studied intelligence and many other complex human traits for decades, and he's a major figure in the field of "behavior genetics." Eric also has a new book out this fall—which I highly recommend—titled Understanding the Nature-Nurture Debate. In a field that has sometimes been accused of rampant optimism, Eric is—as you'll hear—a bit more measured. In this conversation, Eric and I focus on intelligence and its putatively genetic basis. We talk about why Eric doubts that we are anywhere close to an account of the biology of IQ. We discuss what makes intelligence such a formidable construct in psychology and why essentialist understandings of it are so intuitive. We talk about Francis Galton and the long shadow he's cast on the study of human behavior. We discuss the classic era of Twin Studies—an era in which researchers started to derive quantitative estimates of the heritability of complex traits. We talk about how the main takeaway from that era was that genes are quite important indeed, and about how more recent genetic techniques suggest that takeaway may have been a bit simplistic. Along the way, Eric and I touch on spelling ability, child prodigies, the chemical composition of money, the shared quirks of twins reared apart, the Flynn Effect, the Reverse Flynn Effect, birth order, the genetics of height, the problem of missing heritability, whether we should still be using IQ scores, and the role of behavior genetics in the broader social sciences.  Alright folks, lots in here—let's just get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Eric Turkheimer. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 3:30 – The 1994 book The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein a Charles Murray, dealt largely with the putative social implications of IQ research. It was extremely controversial and widely discussed. For an overview of the book and controversy, see the Wikipedia article here. 6:00 – For discussion of the "all parents are environmentalists…" quip, see here. 12:00 – The notion of "multiple intelligences" was popularized by the psychologist Howard Gardner—see here for an overview. See here for an attempt to test the claims of the "multiple intelligences" framework using some of the methods of traditional IQ research. For work on EQ (or Emotional Intelligence) see here. 19:00 – Dr. Turkheimer has also laid out his spelling test analogy in a Substack post. 22:30 – Dr. Turkheimer's 1998 paper, "Heritability and Biological Explanation." 24:30 – For an in-passing treatment of the processing efficiency idea, see p. 195 of Daniel Nettle's book Personality. See also Richard Haier's book, The Neuroscience of Intelligence. 26:00 – The original study on the relationship between pupil size and intelligence. A more recent study that fails to replicate those findings. 31:00 – For an argument that child prodigies constitute an argument for "nature," see here. For a memorable narrative account of one child prodigy, see here. 32:00 – A meta-analysis of the Flynn effect. We have previously discussed the Flynn Effect in an episode with Michael Muthukrishna. 37:00 – James Flynn's book, What is Intelligence? On the reversal of the Flynn Effect, see here. 40:00 – The phrase "nature-nurture" originally comes from Shakespeare and was picked up by Francis Galton. In The Tempest, Prospero describes Caliban as "a born devil on whose nature/ Nurture can never stick." 41:00 – For a biography of Galton, see here. For an article-length account of Galton's role in the birth of eugenics, see here. 50:00 – For an account of R.A. Fisher's 1918 paper and its continuing influence, see here. 55:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer's paper on the "nonshared environment"—E in the ACE model. 57:00 – A study coming out of the Minnesota Study of Twins reared apart. A New York Times article recounting some of the interesting anecdata in the Minnesota Study. 1:00:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer's 2000 paper on the "three laws of behavior genetics." Note that this is not, in fact, Dr. Turkheimer's most cited paper (though it is very well cited). 1:03:00 – For another view of the state of behavior genetics in the postgenomic era, see here. 1:11:00 – For Dr. Turkheimer's work on poverty, heritability, and IQ, see here. 1:13:00 – A recent large-scale analysis of birth order effects on personality. 1:16:00 – For Dr. Turkheimer's take on the missing heritability problem, see here and here.    1:19:00 – A recent study on the missing heritability problem in the case of height. 1:30:00 – On the dark side of IQ, see Chapter 9 of Dr. Turkheimer's book. See also Radiolab's series on g. 1:31:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer's Substack, The Gloomy Prospect.   Recommendations The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden Intelligence, Stuart Ritchie Intelligence and How to Get It, Richard Nisbett "Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents'' (Ted talk), James Flynn   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Hello there, friends! We hope you're having a restful holiday, or a lively holiday, or whatever mix of those you prefer. As the year draws to a close, we at Many Minds are taking a much needed pause ourselves. But we wanted to share with you an episode from a podcast that we've been following for some time called On Humans. It's hosted by Ilari Mäkelä. It looks at humanity from all angles to understand where we come from and where we're going. The episode we're sharing features an interview with biologist and historian of science, Matthew Cobb; he's also the author of the book, The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience. In it, Ilari and Matthew take a zoomed-out view of the human brain and of our quest to understand it. This episode is actually part of a 5-part mini-series that On Humans did all about the human brain. So if you enjoy it, you may want to check out that broader series.   Alright friends, have a great close of 2025 and a great start to 2026. We'll see you in January with our first episode of the new year. In the meanwhile, enjoy this offering from our friends at On Humans.     The original show notes for this On Humans episode can be viewed here. You can follow the On Humans podcast through their newsletter or on Bluesky. 

Alright, friends—we've come to the end of the 2025 run of Many Minds! Our final episode of the year is an audio essay by yours truly. This is a classic format for the show, one that we only do every so often. Today's essay is about names. It's about the question of whether animals have something like names for each other. And it's also about a deeper question: What even is a name? How do humans use names? How does the historical and ethnographic record kind of complicate our everyday understanding of what names are. I had a lot of fun putting this together, and I do hope you enjoy it.  Now, the holiday season is a time when people might be shopping around for new podcasts to listen to. That makes it a great time to recommend us to your friends and family and colleagues. You can think of it as an especially thoughtful gift, one that's absolutely free, and that keeps on giving throughout the year.  Speaking of gifts, as an addendum to this episode you'll find a little stocking stuffer after the credits. It's a reading of a poem that figures prominently in today's essay.  Without further ado, here is my essay—'In search of names.' Enjoy!   A text version of this essay will be published shortly.   Notes 2:00 – The text of 'The Naming of Cats' by T.S. Eliot is here. See also the full collection, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. The lines about cats' taste preferences and cats having different kinds of minds comes from another poem in the collection, 'The Ad-Dressing of Cats.' 3:00 – The 2019 study finding that cats know their names, and the 2022 study showing that cats know the names of their friends. 4:00 – For an overview of research on dolphin "signature whistles," see here. 5:00 – For the 2024 study reporting name-like rumbles in elephants, see here.  6:00 – For the 2024 study reporting vocal labels for individuals in marmosets, see here. A critical response to the study is here; the authors' response to the criticism is here. 12:00 – For overviews of cross-cultural variation in names and naming practices, see here, here, here, and here. Richard Alford's 1988 study, published in book form, is here.  13:30 – The study reporting name signs in Kata Kolok is here. 15:00 – For research on expectations based on the sounds of people's names, see here and here. 16:00 – For recent work on the "face-name matching effect," see here. For the study on "nominative determinism" in the medical profession, see here. (Note that, while this latter study does report empirical data, its rigor is questionable. And, yet, at least one other study has reported similar findings.) 17:30 – For the example of over-used names in Scotland, see here.  19:30 – For discussion of names in New Guinea, see here. For examples of research on "teknonymy," see  here and here. For discussion of Penan "necronyms," see here.  20:30 – For an overview of name taboos, see here. For more on "alexinomia," see here. 22:30 – For an example of recent work on "name uniqueness," see here.   23:00 – William Safire's column on dog names is here. The study of gravestones in the world's oldest pet cemetery is here.     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).

Not long ago culture was considered rare in nature, maybe even uniquely human. But that's changed. We now know that the tree of life is buzzing with culture—and not just on a few lonely branches. Creatures great and small learn songs, migration routes, and feeding techniques from each other. Many species build up reservoirs of knowledge over generations. This has profound implications, not just for our understanding of the natural world, but also for our efforts to protect it.  My guest today is Dr. Philippa Brakes. Philippa is an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Exeter, with one foot in science and another in conservation. She's both a behavioral ecologist, focusing on whales and dolphins, and a leading voice—for more than a decade now—urging conservationists to take animal cultures seriously.  Here, Philippa and I talk about how researchers define culture and social learning in animals. We tour the mounting evidence for culture across species—in birds, in apes, in fish, possibly even in insects. We discuss the methods that scientists use to infer that behaviors are socially learned. We consider how animal culture complicates the conservation enterprise. We also discuss the idea that animal cultures have intrinsic value—not value for us humans, not value that can be easily quantified, but value for the animals themselves. Along the way Philippa and I talk about the notion of "cultural rescue"; indigenous understandings of animal culture; cases where social learning is maladaptive; human-animal mutualism; fashion trends; the idea of conserving "cultural capacity"; elephant matriarchs and other "keystone individuals"; golden lion tamarins, herring, and regent honey-eaters; and the question of why some orcas wear salmon as hats. Alright friends, this topic has been on our wish list for a while now. Hope you enjoy it!   Notes  2:30 – For academic articles by Dr. Brakes and colleagues on the importance of animal culture for conservation, see here, here, and here. The last of these is the introduction to a recent special issue on the topic. Many of the topics discussed in this episode are also covered in this issue.  3:30 – The case of the golden lion tamarins is discussed here. 5:00 – For more about the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species (or CMS) of Wild Animals, see here.  9:00 – For a classic paper on social learning in animals, see here. For a relatively recent, detailed overview of animal culture, see here. For a short primer on animal culture, see here. 10:00 – For discussion of the riskiness of long-line depredation, see here. 12:00 – For a study by Dr. Sonja Wild and colleagues on bottlenose dolphin declines following a heat wave—and how these declines may have been buffered by tool-using traditions—see here.  15:00 – For the review of cetacean foraging tactics by Dr. Taylor Hersh and colleagues, see here.  17:00 – For a primer on honeyguides (and their mutualism with honey hunters), see here. 20:00 – For a recent review of culture and social learning in birds, see here. For a review of conservation of avian song culture, see here. 25:00 – For a review of (the conservation of) chimpanzee culture, see here. 28:00 – For the initial report of chimpanzees putting grass in their ears, see here. For more on the phenomenon of orcas wearing salmon hats, see here. 33:00 – For a recent review of culture and social learning in fish, see here.  35:00 – For the recent study on "collective memory loss" in herring, see here. 39:00 ­– For more on the possibility of social learning in insects, see here. For a video of the puzzle box experiment in bees, see here. 44:00 – For a recent review of the "methodological toolkit" used by researchers in the study of social learning in animals, see here. 47:00 – For the study using network-based diffusion analysis to understand the spread of feeding strategies in humpback whales, see here. 49:00 – For the original 2000 study on the spread of humpback whale song, see here. For a more recent study of "revolutions" in whale song, see here.  53:00 – For an example of work looking at changes in whale song as a result of human noise, see here.  55:00 – For more on the idea of "keystone individuals" in the case of elephants, see here. For more on menopause and the so-called grandmother hypothesis, see our earlier episode with Alison Gopnik.  1:05:00 – A recent editorial calling for the protection of animal cultural heritage under UNESCO.   Recommendations The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell Animal Social Complexity, edited by Frans de Waal and Peter Tyack The Evolution of Cetacean Societies, by Darren P. Croft et al. The Edge of Sentience, by Jonathan Birch (featured on an earlier episode)   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).

Everyone loves a good evolutionary puzzle. Why do we have appendices? Why do we dream? Why do we blush? At first glance, memory would not seem to be in this category. It's clearly useful to remember stuff, after all—to know where to find food, to remember your mistakes so you don't repeat them, to recall who's friendly and who's fierce. In fact, though, certain aspects of memory—when you hold them up to the light—turn out to be quite puzzling indeed. My guests today are Dr. Ali Boyle and Dr. Johannes Mahr. Ali is a philosopher at the London School of Economics (LSE); Johannes is a philosopher at York University, in Toronto. Both have written extensively about the functions of memory, and, in particular, about the functions of episodic memory—that capacity for calling up specific events and experiences from our own lives.  Here, Ali, Johannes and I lay out the textbook taxonomy of memory, and discuss how episodic memory has drawn the lion's share of philosophical interest. We pick apart the relationship between episodic memory and another major type of long-term memory, semantic memory. We sketch a range of different accounts of the evolved functions of episodic memory, including Johannes's proposal that episodic memory serves communication and Ali's proposal that it fuels semantic memory. And, finally, we consider what this all means for our understanding of memory in children and in animals. Along the way, we touch on Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, infantile amnesia, evidential systems in language, imagination, "simulationist" theories of episodic memory, what it feels like to remember, collective memory, the hippocampus, cryptomnesia, and the cow's digestive system as a metaphor for memory.  If you're enjoying Many Minds, you might consider leaving us a rating or review on your platform of choice, or maybe giving us a shout-out on social media. Thanks so much in advance for supporting us, friends!   Notes 4:30 – For a broad orientation to memory research in the cognitive sciences, see here. For a broad orientation to the philosophy of memory, see here.  13:00 – See here for Dr. Boyle's paper on the "impure phenomenology" of episodic memory. 16:30 – For more on the idea of "WEIRD"-ness and the "WEIRD problem" in psychology, see our previous audio essay and our recent episode on childhood across cultures. 20:00 – For more on metaphors for memory in the cognitive sciences, see here (in which an apparently different "cow stomach" metaphor for memory is discussed). Note that cows do not, in fact, have four stomachs, but rather a single stomach with four distinct chambers. 24:00 – For an overview of the cognitive neuroscience of episodic memory, see here. 31:30 – For a discussion of the commonsense "mnemonic view" of episodic memory, see Dr. Boyle's recent article.  37:00 – For one influential articulation of a "simulationist" account of episodic memory, see here.  40:00 – For the proposal by Dr. Mahr and his colleague that episodic memory is for communication, see here and here. 45:00 – For more on evidential systems in language, see here and here.  48:00 – For the study by Dr. Mahr and colleagues on source memory in children, see here. 51:30 ­– For Dr. Boyle's proposal that episodic memory is for semantic memory, see here. For another of Dr. Boyle's discussions of the functions of episodic memory, see here. 1:02:00 – For more of Dr. Mahr's ideas about the cultural evolution of the "epistemic tag" that distinguishes episodic memory, see here. 1:03:00 – Partially digested stomach contents are sometimes known as "chyme." 1:07:00 – A news story about recent findings on infantile amnesia.  1:08:00 – A recent review article about Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory. 1:12:00 – An empirical study on the phenomenology of "cryptomnesia." 1:15:00 – For a recent discussion of episodic memory in animals, see this paper by Dr. Boyle and a colleague. Examples of Dr. Boyle's other work on memory in animals are here and here.   Recommendations The Memory Palace (blog) The Invention of Tomorrow, by Thomas Suddendorf, Jonathan Redshaw, & Adam Bulley (see also our episode featuring this book) Searching for Memory, by Daniel Schacter The Enigma of Reason, by Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber   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).