Afleveringen
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They tend to move under the cover of darkness. As night descends, they come for your gardens and compost piles, for your trash cans and attic spaces. They are raccoons, skunks, and coyotes. And if you live in urban North America, they are a growing presence. Whether you consider them menacing, cute, fascinating, or all of the above, you have to grant that they are quite a clever crew. After all, they've figured out how to adapt to human-dominated spaces. But how have they done this? What traits and talents have allowed them to evolve into this brave new niche? And are they still evolving into it?
My guest today is Dr. Sarah Benson-Amram. Sarah is Assistant Professor of Forest and Conservation Sciences and Zoology at the University of British Columbia; she also directs the Animal Behavior & Cognition Lab at UBC. Sarah's research group focuses on the behavioral and cognitive ecology of urban wildlife. They ask what urban wildlife can teach us about animal cognition more generally and try to understand ways to smooth human-wildlife interactions.
Here, Sarah and I talk about her work on that trio I mentioned before: raccoons, skunks, and coyotes. These three species are all members of the mammalian order of carnivora, a clade of animals that Sarah has focused on throughout her career and one that has been underrepresented in studies of animal cognition. We discuss the traits that have allowed these species—and certain members of these species—to thrive in dynamic, daunting urban spaces. We also talk about the big picture of the evolution of intelligence—and how urban adapter species might shed light on what is known as the cognitive buffer hypothesis. Along the way, we touch on: the neophilia of raccoons and the neophobia of coyotes, puzzle boxes, the Aesop's fable task, hyenas and elephants, brain size, individual differences, human-wildlife conflict, comparative gastronomy, and the cognitive arms race that might be unfolding in our cities.
If you have any feedback for us, we would love to hear from you. Guest suggestions? Topics or formats you'd like to see? Blistering critiques? Effusive compliments? We're open to all of it. You can email us at manymindspodcast at gmail dot com. That's manymindspodcast at gmail. Though, honestly, if it's really an effusive compliment, feel free to just post that publicly somewhere.
Alright friends, on to my conversation with Sarah Benson-Amram. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode will be available soon.
Notes and links
8:50 – A study of manual dexterity in raccoons.
11:30 – A video featuring raccoon chittering, among other vocalizations.
12:00 – A recent academic paper on the categorization of wildlife responses to urbanization—avoider, adapter, exploiter—with some critical discussion.
14:00 – A study of how animals are becoming more nocturnal in response to humans.
18:00 – An encyclopedia article on the Social Intelligence Hypothesis, by one of its originators, Richard Byrne. A recent appraisal of how the hypothesis has fared across different taxa.
18:30 – A recent review article by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues surveying carnivore cognition.
25:00 – On the question of urban vs rural animals, see the popular article, ‘Are cities making animals smarter?’
28:00 – A study by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues using puzzle boxes to study behavioral flexibility in captive raccoons. See also her follow-up study, conducted with a large team of neuroscience collaborators, examining the brains of raccoons who successfully solved the puzzle boxes.
34:30 – An earlier study by Dr. Benson-Amram on innovative problem solving in hyenas.
36:30 – Our earlier episode on animal personality with Dr. Kate Laskowski.
39:00 – A study by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues exploring raccoons’ ability to solve the Aesop’s Fable task. She has also used this task with elephants.
44:00 – A study by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues examining reversal learning in raccoons, skunks, and coyotes.
49:00 – An article articulating the “cognitive buffer hypothesis.”
51:00 – A paper discussing—and “reviving”—the so-called ecological intelligence hypothesis.
53:00 – A study by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues comparing brain size and problem-solving ability in mammalian carnivores.
56:00 – A paper by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues on cognition in so-called nuisance species, in which they discuss the idea of a "cognitive arms race."
57:30 – A paper on bin-opening in cockatoos and how it might be leading to an “innovation arms race.”
Recommendations
How Monkeys See the World, Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans De Waal
An Immense World, by Ed Yong (featured in a previous episode!)
Urban Carnivores, by Stanley D. Gehrt, Seth P. D. Riley, and Brian L. Cypher
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Hi friends, we're busy with some spring cleaning this week. We'll have a new episode for you in two weeks. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives!
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[originally aired Nov 30, 2022]
When we talk about AI, we usually fixate on the future. What’s coming next? Where is the technology going? How will artificial intelligences reshape our lives and worlds? But it's also worth looking to the past. When did the prospect of manufactured minds first enter the human imagination? When did we start building robots, and what did those early robots do? What are the deeper origins, in other words, not only of artificial intelligences themselves, but of our ideas about those intelligences?
For this episode, we have two guests who've spent a lot of time delving into the deeper history of AI. One is Adrienne Mayor; Adrienne is a Research Scholar in the Department of Classics at Stanford University and the author of the 2018 book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology. Our second guest is Elly Truitt; Elly is Associate Professor in the History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the 2015 book, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art.
In this conversation, we draw on Adrienne's expertise in the classical era and Elly's expertise in the medieval period to dig into the surprisingly long and rich history of AI. We discuss some of the very first imaginings of artificial beings in Greek mythology, including Talos, the giant robot guarding the island of Crete. We talk about some of the very first historical examples of automata, or self-moving devices; these included statues that spoke, mechanical birds that flew, thrones that rose, and clocks that showed the movements of the heavens. We also discuss the long-standing and tangled relationships between AI and power, exoticism, slavery, prediction, and justice. And, finally, we consider some of the most prominent ideas we have about AI today and whether they had precedents in earlier times.
This is an episode we've been hoping to do for some time now, to try to step back and put AI in a much broader context. It turns out the debates we're having now, the anxieties and narratives that swirl around AI today, are not so new. In some cases, they're millennia old.
Alright friends, now to my conversation with Elly Truitt and Adrienne Mayor. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
4:00 – See Adrienne’s TedEd lesson about Talos, the “first robot.” See also Adrienne’s 2019 talk for the Long Now Foundation.
7:15 – The Throne of Solomon does not survive, but it was often rendered in art, for example in this painting by Edward Poynter.
12:00 – For more on Adrienne’s broader research program, see her website; for more on Elly’s research program, see her website.
18:00 – For more on the etymology of ‘robot,’ see here.
23:00 – A recent piece about Aristotle’s writings on slavery.
26:00 – An article about the fact that Greek and Roman statues were much more colorful than we think of them today.
30:00 – A recent research article about the Antikythera mechanism.
34:00 – See Adrienne’s popular article about the robots that guarded the relics of the Buddha.
38:45 – See Elly’s article about how automata figured prominently in tombs.
47:00 – See Elly’s recent video lecture about mechanical clocks and the “invention of time.” For more on the rise of mechanistic thinking—and clocks as important metaphors in that rise—see Jessica Riskin’s book, The Restless Clock.
50:00 – An article about a “torture robot” of ancient Sparta.
58:00 – A painting of the “Iron Knight” in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.
Adrienne Mayor recommends:
The Greeks and the New, by Armand D’Angour
Classical Traditions in Science Fiction, edited by Brett Rogers and Benjamin Stevens
In Our Own Image, by George Zarkadakis
Ancient Inventions, by Peter James and Nick Thorpe
Elly Truitt recommends:
AI Narratives, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon
The Love Makers, by Aifric Campbell
The Mitchells vs the Machines
You can read more about Adrienne’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter. You can read more about Elly’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).
You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.
**You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!**
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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We've all seen those illusions. The dots seem to dance, when in fact they're completely still. The lines look like they bend, but in reality they're perfectly straight. Here's the thing: It doesn't matter that you know the ground truth of these illusions—the dancing and bending won't stop. And that we see the world one way, even though we know it's actually another way, is a fascinating quirk of our minds—and maybe a telling one. It suggests that there's a chasm between perceiving and thinking, that these may be two independent provinces of the mind. But, if so, we're faced with another question: Where does perception end and thinking begin?
My guest today is Dr. Chaz Firestone. Chaz is an Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, and Director of the Perception and Mind lab there. He and his research group study perceiving, thinking, and the interface between the two.
Here, Chaz and I talk about his background in philosophy and how it continues to animate his research. We sketch the differences between perception and cognition and why the two are best considered separate faculties. We consider the idea of so-called "top-down" effects on perception. We discuss the fact that, even if perception and cognition are separate, there's much more to perception than meets the eye. We seem to see things like causes and social interactions; we perceive things like silences and absences. Along the way, Chaz and I touch on the modular view mind, skeletal shapes, the El Greco fallacy, stubborn epistemology, birders and radiologists, retinotopy and visual adaptation, adversarial images, human-machine comparisons, and the case of the blue banana.
This is a fun one, friends. But before we get to it, one humble request. If you've been enjoying Many Minds, now would be a great time to leave us a rating or review. You can do this on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. It would really help us grow and get the word out! It actually looks like our last review on Apple Podcasts is about 10 months old—so, if you have a minute, that could really use some freshening up.
Alright folks, on to my conversation with Chaz Firestone. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
3:00 – Dr. Firestone’s early paper reporting the Times Square experiment and the “skeletal shape” phenomenon.
8:00 – A visual explanation of the “missing bullet holes” graphic.
13:00 – Dr. Firestone has collaborated intensively with the philosopher Ian Phillips.
15:00 – A recent book by Ned Block, The Border Between Seeing and Thinking.
24:00 – Visual illusions are legion, as are inventories of them. See, for instance, this catalogue on Wikipedia or this Reddit thread.
25:00 – An obituary for Jerry Fodor, who died in 2017. The classic book by Zenon Pylyshyn, Computation and Cognition.
28:00 – A paper by Dr. Firestone about the history of the El Greco fallacy. An empirical paper by Dr. Firestone and Brian Scholl showing the El Greco fallacy at work in perception research.
35:00 – A target article (with commentaries) in Behavioral and Brain Sciences by Dr. Firestone and Dr. Scholl about claims of “top-down” effects on perception. Dr. Firestone has published other work on this theme, e.g., here, here, & here.
41:00 – A paper with discussion (and illustration) of the classic Dalmation Mooney image.
45:00 – A study of rapid visual pattern recognition in expert chess players.
50:30 – A paper by J.J. Valenti and Dr. Firestone about the case of the blue banana.
54:00 – A review paper by Alon Hafri and Dr. Firestone reviewing evidence that people actually perceive high-level relations like causality, support, and social interaction.
56:00 – A study by Martin Rolfs and colleagues about the perception of causality.
1:02:00 – A study by Liuba Papeo and colleagues about the perception of social interactions. A related paper showing an inversion effect.
1:04:00 – A paper by Alon Hafri and colleagues on the perception of roles in an interaction.
1:06:00 – A widely cited paper by J. Kiley Hamlin and colleagues on the recognition of social interactions in preverbal infants.
1:06:30 – A review paper on reading in the brain.
1:10:00 – A paper by Rui Goh, Dr. Phillips, and Dr. Firestone on the perception of silence.
1:18:00 – A recent review paper by Jorge Morales and Dr. Firestone about the dialogue between philosophy of perception and psychology, which discusses the perception of absence (among other case studies).
1:22:00 – A recent perspective piece by Dr. Firestone about human-machine comparisons.
1:25:00 - An empirical paper by Zhenglong Zhou and Dr. Firestone on the deciphering of adversarial images by humans.
1:28:00 – For a review of the mirror self-recognition test, see our earlier audio essay.
1:35:00 – Other interesting work going on in Dr. Firestone’s research group has investigated representational momentum, beauty, and epistemic actions, among other topics.
Recommendations
The Modularity of Mind, by Jerry Fodor
The Contents of Visual Experience, by Susanna Siegel
Psych, by Paul Bloom
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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If you want to have a rich social life, you're going to need to know who's who. You'll need to distinguish friend from foe, sister from stranger. And you're going to need to hold those distinctions in your head— for at least a little while. This is true not just for humans but—we have to assume—for other social species as well. But which species? And for how long can other creatures hold on to these kinds of social memories?
My guests today are Dr. Laura Lewis and Dr. Chris Krupenye. Laura is a biological anthropologist and postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley; Chris is a comparative psychologist and an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins. Along with a larger team, Laura and Chris recently authored a paper on memory for familiar faces in chimpanzees and bonobos. In it, they show that our closest cousins remember their groupmates for decades.
Here, we chat about the paper and the backstory behind it. We consider the anecdotes about long-term memory in great apes—and how Laura and Chris decided to go beyond those anecdotes. We talk about the evidence for complex social memory across the animal kingdom. We discuss the use of eye-tracking with primates and its advantages over earlier methods. We also talk about why long-term social memory might have evolved. Along the way, we touch on dolphins, ravens, and lemurs; voices, gaits, and names; the different gradations of recognition; and how memory serves as a critical foundation for social life more generally.
Alright friends, without further ado, here's my conversation with Laura Lewis and Chris Krupenye. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
4:30 – Dr. Lewis and Dr. Krupenye worked together in the lab of Dr. Brian Hare, a former guest on the podcast.
8:30 – The video of Mama and the primatologist Jan van Hooff.
12:00 – For research on the remarkably long social memories of dolphins, see here.
14:00 – For research on long-term voice recognition in bonobos, see here.
19:30 – Another collaborator on the paper we’re discussing was Dr. Fumihiro Kano, affiliated with the Kumamoto Sanctuary.
29:30 – For more on the use of eye-tracking with primates, see a recent review paper by Dr. Lewis and Dr. Krupenye.
34:00 – For the previous study by Dr. Lewis, Dr. Krupenye, and colleagues about how bonobos and chimpanzees attend to current groupmates, see here.
41:00 – A popular article reviewing bonobo social behavior.
54:30 – A research paper on individual recognition by scent in chimpanzees.
55:30 – A research paper on individual recognition by butt in chimpanzees.
Recommendations
‘Long-term memory for affiliates in ravens’
‘Decades-long social memory in bottlenose dolphins’
‘Enduring voice recognition in bonobos’
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Brains are not cheap. It takes a lot of calories to run a brain, and the bigger your brain, the more calories it takes. So how is it that, over the last couple million years, the human brain tripled in size. How could we possibly have afforded that? Where did the extra calories come from? There's no shortage of suggestions out there. Some say it was meat; others say it was tubers; many say it was by mastering fire and learning to cook. But now there's a newer proposal on the table and—spoiler—it's a bit funky.
My guests today are Katherine Bryant, Postdoctoral Fellow at Aix-Marseille University, and Erin Hecht, Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. Katherine, Erin, and another colleague are the authors of a new paper titled 'Fermentation technology as a driver of human brain expansion.' In it, they argue that fermented foods could have provided the caloric boost that allowed our brains to expand.
Here, we talk about how the human body differs from the bodies of other great apes, not just in terms of our brains but also in terms of our bowels. We discuss the different mechanisms by which fermented foods provide nutritional benefits over unfermented foods. We consider how fermentation—which basically happens whether you want it to or not—would have been cognitively easier to harness than fire. Along the way, we touch on kiviaq, chicha, makgeolli, hákarl, natto, Limburger cheese, salt-rising bread, and other arguably delectable products of fermentation.
This is a fun one friends. But before we get to it: a friendly reminder about this summer's Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute. This a yearly event in St Andrews, Scotland; it features a rich program of lectures and events devoted to the study of cognition, mind, and intelligence in all its forms. If you have a taste for cross-disciplinary ferment and bubbly conversation, DISI may be for you. The application window is now open but is closing soon. You can find more info at DISI.org. That's D-I-S-I.org.
Alright, friends, on to my conversation with Erin Hecht and Katherine Bryant. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
3:00 – A popular science article about the “infectiously delicious confection” that is salt-rising bread. A recipe for the bread.
6:00 – An article about makgeolli, a Korean rice wine. An article about chicha, the traditional corn-based fermented beverage that has been banned in some places.
11:30 – An article about the role of the arcuate fasciculus in language processing. A recent paper by Dr. Bryant and colleagues comparing the arcuate in humans and chimpanzees.
12:30 – A recent article by Dr. Hecht and colleagues on the evolutionary neuroscience of domestication.
13:00 – For discussions of the encephalization quotient (aka EQ) and of human brain evolution, see our previous episodes here and here.
15:00 – The classic paper on the “expensive tissue hypothesis.”
22:00 – An article about the role of meat in human evolution; an article about the role of tubers. The cooking hypothesis is most strongly associated with Richard Wrangham and his book, Catching Fire.
26:00 – A recent article on evidence for the widespread control of fire in human groups by around 400,000 years ago.
31:30 – A paper on how fermenting cassava reduces its toxicity.
38:30 – There have been various claims in the ethnographic literature that the control of fire has been lost among small groups, such as in Tasmania. See footnote 2 in this article.
44:30 – A popular article about kiviaq.
45:00 – The article from the New Yorker, by Rebecca Mead, about the foodways of the Faroe Islands.
53:00 – For more discussion of the so-called drunken monkey hypothesis, see our previous episode about intoxication.
1:00:30 – A popular article about hákarl, which is fermented Greenland shark.
Recommendations
The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan
The Art of Fermentation, by Sandor Katz
Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Katz
“How humans evolved large brains,” by Karin Isler & Carel van Schaik
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Where do memories live in the brain? If you've ever taken a neuroscience class, you probably learned that they're stored in our synapses, in the connections between our neurons. The basic idea is that, whenever we have an experience, the neurons involved fire together in time, and the synaptic connections between them get stronger. In this way, our memories for those experiences become minutely etched into our brains. This is what might be called the synaptic view of memory—it's the story you'll find in textbooks, and it's often treated as settled fact. But some reject this account entirely. The real storehouses of memory, they argue, lie elsewhere.
My guest today is Dr. Sam Gershman. Sam is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and the director of the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab there. In a recent paper, he marshals a wide-ranging critique of the synaptic view. He makes a compelling case that synapses can't be the whole story—that we also have to look inside the neurons themselves.
Here, Sam and I first discuss the synaptic view and the evidence that seems to support it. We then talk about some of the problems with this classic picture. We consider, for example, cases where memories survive the radical destruction of synapses; and, more provocatively, cases where memories are formed in single-celled organisms that lack synapses altogether. We talk about the dissenting view, long lurking in the margins, that intracellular molecules like RNA could be the real storage sites of memory. Finally, we talk about Sam's new account—a synthesis that posits a role for both synapses and molecules. Along the way we touch on planaria and paramecia; spike-timing dependent plasticity; the patient H.M.; metamorphosis, hibernation, and memory transfer; the pioneering work of Beatrice Gelber; unfairly maligned ideas; and much, much more.
Before we get to it, one important announcement: Applications are now open for the 2024 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (or DISI)! The event will be held in beautiful, seaside St Andrews, Scotland, from June 30 to July 20. If you like this show—if you like the conversations we have and the questions we ask—it's a safe bet that you'd like DISI. You can find more info at disi.org—that's disi.org. Review of applications will begin on Mar 1, so don't delay.
Alright friends, on to my conversation about the biological basis of memory with Dr. Sam Gershman. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
4:00 - A general audience article on planarian memory transfer experiments and the scientist who conducted them, James V. McConnell.
8:00 - For more on Dr. Gershman’s research and general approach, see his recent book and the publications on his lab website.
9:30 - A brief video explaining long-term potentiation. An overview of “Hebbian Learning.” The phrase “neurons that fire together wire together” was, contrary to widespread misattribution, coined by Dr. Carla Shatz here.
12:30 - The webpage of Dr. Jeremy Gunawardena, Associate Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard University. A recent paper from Dr. Gunawardena’s lab on the avoidance behaviors exhibited by the single-celled organism Stentor (which vindicates some disputed, century-old findings).
14:00 - A recent paper by C. R. Gallistel describing some of his views on the biological basis of memory.
19:00 - The term “engram” refers to the physical trace of a memory. See recent reviews about the so-called search for the engram here, here, and here.
20:00 - An article on the importance of H.M. in neuroscience.
28:00 - A review about the phenomenon of spike-timing dependent plasticity.
33:00 - An article, co-authored by former guest Dr. Michael Levin, on the evidence for memory persistence despite radical remodeling of brain structures. See our episode with Dr. Levin here.
35:00 - A study reporting the persistence of memories in decapitated planarians. A popular article about these findings.
36:30 - An article reviewing one chapter in the memory transfer history. Another article reviewing evidence for “vertical” memory transfer (between generations).
39:00 - For more recent demonstrations of memory transfer, see here and here.
40:00 - A paper by Dr. Gershman, Dr. Gunawardena, and colleagues reconsidering the evidence for learning in single cells and describing the contributions of Dr. Beatrice Gelber. A general audience article about Gelber following the publication of the paper by Dr. Gershman and colleagues.
45:00 – A recent article arguing for the need to understand computation in single-celled organisms to understand how computation evolved more generally.
46:30 – Another study of classical conditioning in paramecia, led by Dr. Todd Hennessey.
49:00 – For more on plant signaling, see our recent episode with Dr. Paco Calvo and Dr. Natalie Lawrence.
56:00 – A recent article on “serial reversal learning” and its neuroscientific basis.
1:07:00 – A 2010 paper demonstrating a role for methylation in memory.
Recommendations
The Behavior of the Lower Organisms, by Herbert Spencer Jennings
Memory and the Computational Brain, by C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King
Wetware, by Dennis Bray
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Welcome back folks! The new season of Many Minds is quickly ramping up. On today’s episode we’re thrilled to be rejoined by Dr. Michael Muthukrishna. Michael is Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics. He’s an unusually wide-ranging and rigorous thinker; though still early in his career, Michael has already made key contributions to our understanding of culture, intelligence, evolution, innovation, cooperation and corruption, cross-cultural variation, and a bunch of other areas as well.
We wanted to have Michael back on—not just because he was an audience favorite—but because he’s got a new book out. It’s titled A theory of everyone: The new science of who we are, how we got here, and where we’re going. In this conversation, Michael and I talk about the book and lay out that grand theory mentioned in the title. We discuss energy and how—since the very origins of life—it’s proven to be a fundamental, unshakeable constraint. We talk about the nature of human intelligence and consider the dynamics of human cooperation and innovation. We also delve into a few of the implications that Michael’s “theory of everyone” has for the future of our species. Along the way, we touch on carrying capacity, nuclear fusion, inclusive fitness, religion, the number line, multiculturalism, AI, the Flynn effect, and chaos in the brickyard.
If you enjoy this one, you may want to go back to listen to our earlier chat as well. But more importantly, you may want to get your hands on Michael’s book. It’s ambitious and inspiring and we were barely able to graze it here.
Alright friends, without further ado, on to my second conversation with Dr. Michael Muthukrishna. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
8:30 – Dr. Muthukrishna completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia, where he was advised by Joseph Henrich. He also worked with Ara Norenzayan, Steven Heine, and others.
9:30 – Previous books on dual-inheritance theory and cultural evolution mentioned here include The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich, Not by Genes Alone by Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, and Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony by Kevin Lala.
16:30 – Dr. Muthukrishna’s paper on the theory problem in psychology, drawn from his dissertation.
17:10 – The classic paper ‘Chaos in the Brickyard,’ about the need for theory-building in science.
22:00 – For a brief overview of Dr. Muthukrishna’s understanding of human intelligence and human uniqueness, see this recent paper. For an overview of cumulative culture in comparative perspective, see here.
23:00 – For the 2005 issue of Science magazine showcasing 25 big unanswered questions, see here.
23:30 – For the review paper on cooperation by Dr. Muthukrishna and Dr. Henrich, see here.
26:00 – For Dr. Muthukrishna’s empirical work that attempts to induce corruption in the lab, see here.
28:00 – The scholar Robert Klitgaard, mentioned here, is well-known for his research on corruption.
29:00 – See the preprint by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues titled ‘The size of the stag determines the level of cooperation.’
33:30 – A video laying out the RNA world hypothesis.
45:00 – For more on the evolution of human brain size, see our earlier conversation with Dr. Muthukrishna, as well as our conversation with Jeremy DeSilva.
47:00 – For the metric known as Energy Return on Investment (EROI), see here.
54:00 – For more on the cross-cultural variation in numeracy, see here.
55:20 – To correct the record, according to this review of rare numeral systems, there is only a single known base 8 system in the world’s languages.
57:15 – In our earlier conversation (around 42:00), we discussed the work by Luria on ‘If P, then Q’ reasoning.
57:30 – For more on the so-called WEIRD problem, see our earlier audio essay.
1:00:30 – For some experimental evidence consistent with the idea that language improves the transmission of cultural information, see here.
1:07:00 – For data on the acceleration of urbanization, see here.
1:16:00 – For a brief primer on land value taxes, see here.
1:18:30 – For the idea that Machiavelli’s The Prince was satire, see here.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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And we’re back! It’s been a while, friends. Hope you enjoyed your fall and your holidays. Thanks so much for re-joining us—we’re super excited to be kicking off a brand-new season of the Many Minds podcast. We thought we’d get things started this year with an audio essay, one partly inspired by some musings and mullings from my parental leave. Hope you enjoy it folks—and we’ll see you again in a couple weeks with our first interview of 2024.
Now on to ‘Dawn of the smile.’ Enjoy!
A text version of this episode will be available soon.
Notes and links
3:00 – Darwin describes his children’s first smiles in his 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
4:10 – On so-called Duchenne smiles, see this classic investigation.
5:00 – For a summary of “basic emotions” theory, see any number of Paul Ekman’s writing (e.g., here, here). For a recent articulation of the “social tools” theory, see writings by Alan J. Fridlund (e.g., here). For another influential recent critique of “basic emotions” theory, see here.
6:00 – For the classic bowling study, see here.
7:00 – For a recent review of facial expressions in blind people, see here.
7:45 – For a review of smiling and gender (and the importance of “rules and roles”), see here. For one of the studies linking smiliness to historical migration patterns, see here.
8:30 – For the historical shift in smiling—and its possible relation to the Kodak company—see here. For the yearbook photo analysis, see here.
9:30 – See Darwin’s discussion of infant laughter in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
10:30 – For Darwin’s observations of laughter and smiles in primates, again, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. See Jan van Hooff’s classic study here.
11:30 – For the study comparing laughter across the Great Apes, see here. For the study of an “ape-like” stage in human laughter, see here.
12:30 – For a review of play vocalizations and laughter across species, see here.
13:20 – For the Marina Davila-Ross’s suggestion that laughter and smiles share a common evolutionary source, see here.
13:30 – For research on human infants’ open-mouthed smiles, see here.
14:00 – For the idea of the “acoustic origin” of the smile, see here.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Hi friends! We've been on hiatus for the fall, but we'll be back with new episodes in January 2024. In the meanwhile, enjoy another favorite from our archives!
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[originally aired November 2, 2022]
Some of us are a little shy; others are sociable. There are those that love to explore the new, and those happy to stick to the familiar. We’re all a bit different, in other words—and when I say “we” I don’t just mean humans. Over the last couple of decades there's been an explosion of research on personality differences in animals too—in birds, in dogs, in fish, all across the animal kingdom. This research is addressing questions like: What are the ways that individuals of the same species differ from each other? What drives these differences? And is this variation just randomness, some kind of inevitable biological noise, or could it have an evolved function?
My guest today is Dr. Kate Laskowski. Kate is an Assistant Professor of Evolution and Ecology at the University of California, Davis. Her lab focuses on fish. They use fish, and especially one species of fish—the Amazon molly—as a model system for understanding animal personality (or as she sometimes calls it “consistent individual behavioral variation”).
In this episode, Kate and I discuss a paper she recently published with colleagues that reviews this booming subfield. We talk about how personality manifests in animals and how it may differ from human personality. We zoom in on what is perhaps the most puzzling question in this whole research area: Why do creatures have personality differences to begin with? Is there a point to all this individual variation, evolutionarily speaking? We discuss two leading frameworks that have tried to answer the question, and then consider some recent studies of Kate’s that have added an unexpected twist. On the way, we touch on Darwinian demons, combative anemones, and a research method Kate calls "fish Big Brother."
Alright friends, I had fun with this one, and I think you’ll enjoy it, too. On to my conversation with Kate Laskowski!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
3:00 – A paper by Dr. Laskowski and a colleague on strong personalities in sticklebacks.
5:30 – The website for the lab that Dr. Laskowski directs at UC-Davis.
7:00 – The paper we focus on—‘Consistent Individual Behavioral Variation: What do we know and where are we going?’—is available here.
11:00 – A brief encyclopedia entry on sticklebacks.
13:00 – A video of two sea anemones fighting. A research article about fighting (and personality) in sea anemones.
15:00 – A classic article reviewing the “Big 5” model in human personality research.
17:00 – The original article proposing five personality factors in animals.
22:30 – A recent special issue on the “Pace-of-Life syndromes” framework.
27:00 – A recent paper on evidence for the “fluctuating selection” idea in great tits.
29:00 – A 2017 paper by Dr. Laskowski and colleagues on “behavioral individuality” in clonal fish raised in near-identical environments.
32:10 – A just-released paper by Dr. Laskowski and colleagues extending their earlier findings on clonal fish.
39:30 – The Twitter account of the Many Birds project. The website for the project.
Dr. Laskowski recommends:
Innate, by Kevin Mitchell
Why Fish Don’t Exist, by Lulu Miller
The Book of Why, by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!
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[originally aired July 20, 2022]
The world is bigger than you think. I don’t mean geographically, though maybe that too. I mean in terms of its textures and sounds and smells; I mean in terms of its hues and vibrations. There are depths and layers to the world that we don’t usually experience, that we might actually never be able to experience. Our senses just aren’t wired to take it all in. We’re simply not tuned to all the dimensions of reality’s rich splendor. But there is a way we can appreciate these hidden dimensions: with a flex of the imagination, we can step into the worlds of other creatures; we can try out different eyes and noses; we can voyage into different perceptual universes. Or at least we can try.
My guest today is Ed Yong, author of the new book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Arounds Us. Ed is a science writer for The Atlantic and the author of an exceptional earlier book on the microbiome called I Contain Multitudes. This new book tours the wide diversity of animal senses. It asks what it’s like to be a bat, sure, but also what it’s like to be a star-nosed mole, a manatee, or a mantis shrimp. Informed by some truly extraordinary science, the book considers how it might feel to electrolocate around the ocean, to hear through the threads of a web, or to be tugged by the earth's magnetic field.
There’s a lot of praise I could lavish on this book, but I’ll just say this: it really makes you feel more alive. Reading it makes everything, in fact, seem more alive. It makes the world seem richer, more vivid, somehow more technicolor and finely textured. It makes you realize that every organism, all the creatures we share this planet with, possesses a kind of vibrant genius all their own.
After this episode we will be on a short holiday, and then we’ll be gearing up for Season 4. If you have guests or topics you want us to cover, please send us a note. And, of course: if you’ve enjoyed the show so far, we would be most grateful if you would leave us a rating or a review. I know I say this all the time, and it’s probably a bit annoying: but it really, truly helps, and I would personally, very much appreciate it!
Alright friends, now to my conversation with Ed Yong. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
3:30 – One of our earlier audio essays—'Me, my umwelt, and I’—profiled von Uexküll and his concept of an Umwelt.
6:00 – The classic Nagel article ‘What is it like to be a bat?’; Mike Tomasello’s recent variant, ‘What is it like to be a chimpanzee?’, which we discussed just last episode.
10:00 – One of many articles by Ed about COVID-19. He was awarded a Pulitzer prize for his coverage of the pandemic.
14:30 – A popular article on proprioception.
19:00 – A research article on the evolution of opsin proteins.
20:00 – A primer on echolocation.
25:00 – A brief article on heat-sensitive pits in snakes.
26:30 – An academic article about the “star” of the star-nosed mole. A video showing the star-nosed mole in action.
31:00 – A popular article about the eyes of starfish.
32:00 – A collection of research articles about the Ampullae of Lorenzini.
35:00 – A very recent article about spider webs as “outsourced” hearing.
38:00 – A research article about aspects of bird song that humans can’t hear.
40:00 – A study by Lucy Bates and colleagues about how elephants operate with a spatial model of where their kin are.
You can read more about Ed’s work at his website, catch up on his stories in The Atlantic, or follow him on Twitter.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!
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[originally aired May 25, 2022]
When we think about ancient humans, we often imagine them doing certain kinds of things. Usually very serious things like hunting game and making tools, foraging for food and building fires, maybe performing the occasional intricate ritual. But there was definitely more to the deep past than all this adulting. There were children around, too—lots of them—no doubt running around and wreaking havoc, much as they do today. But what were the kids up to, exactly? What games were they playing? What toys did they have? What were their lives like?
My guest today is Dr. Michelle Langley, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Michelle grapples with questions about children, play, and childhood in the deep past. In recent work, she draws on ethnographic reports to assemble a picture of what children have in common all across the globe. She then uses that understanding to cast new light on the archaeological record, to make fresh inferences about what kids must have been doing, making, and leaving behind.
In this conversation, Michelle and I talk about the kinds of basic activities that have long been a mainstay of childhood everywhere—activities like playing with dolls, keeping pets, collecting shells, and building forts. We discuss how archaeologists often assume that hard-to-interpret objects have ritual purpose, when, in fact, those objects could just as easily be toys. We talk about how children seek out and engineer “secret spaces”. We also touch on how a male-centric bias has distorted archaeological discussions; how the baby sling may have been the primordial container; and how otters stash their favorite tools in their armpits.
This is a super fun one, folks. But first a tiny bit of housekeeping: in case you missed the news, we have new newsletter. Seriously, who wouldn’t want a monthly dose of Many Minds right in their inbox? You can find a sign-up link in the show notes.
Alright friends, on to my conversation with Dr. Michelle Langley. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
2:30 – A 15,000 year old horse figurine from Les Espélugues cave in France.
6:00 – A classic paper by Conkey & Spector that helped initiate a wave of feminist archaeology.
7:30 – Dr. Langley’s first paper to examine children’s leavings in the archaeological record.
8:30 – See here for discussion and examples of perforated batons or bâton percés.
9:30 – Dr. Langley’s paper, co-authored with Mirani Litster, ‘Is it ritual? Or is it children?’
14:00 – An influential discussion of ethnographic analogies in archaeology.
18:30 – A paper on the interpretation of Dorset miniature harpoon heads.
23:30 – An article on the Neanderthal ornamental use of raptor feathers.
29:00 - Dr. Langley’s paper on identifying children’s secret spaces in the archaeological record.
30:30 – A book by David Sobel on children’s special spaces.
34:00 – A website about the site of Étiolles.
40:00 – A figure showing the layout of the Bruniquel Cave, including the secondary structures.
41:00 – More information about the mammoth bone huts of Ukraine.
44:00 – A paper by Dr. Langley and Thomas Suddendorf on bags and other “mobile containers” in human evolution.
47:00 – A video showing a sea otter using their underarm “pocket” to store objects.
50:00 – The “carrier bag theory of evolution” was proposed by Elizabeth Fisher in Women’s Creation. This later inspired Ursula Le Guin to propose the “carrier bag theory of fiction.”
51:30 – An experimental study by Dr. Langley and colleagues on children’s emerging intuitions about the use of containers and bags.
55:30 – A paper by Dr. Langley and colleagues on early symbolic behavior in Indonesia.
Dr. Langley recommends:
Growing up in the Ice Age, by April Nowell
You can read more about Dr. Langley’s work at her website and follow her on Twitter.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. This week's episode is in our audio essay format. Enjoy!
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[originally aired May 26, 2021]
Welcome back folks! We’ve got an audio essay for you this week. It touches on art, music, the skin, the spine, individual differences, vestigial responses, tiny muscles. There’s even some Darwin thrown in there. It’s a fun one. Hope you enjoy it!
A text version of this essay is available on Medium.
Notes and links
1:30 – The novel that very recently gave me goosebumps.
2:00 – A brief discussion of Nabokov and his ideas about the tell-tale tingle.
2:45 – Some terms for goosebumps in other languages.
3:00 – A primer on skin anatomy.
4:00 – A paper on the thermoregulatory function of piloerection in primates and other animals.
4:25 – Read Darwin’s Expression here.
5:00 – A paper about “nails on chalkboard chills.” A paper that discusses claims that piloerection attends awe (but which fails to find evidence for this association in a lab setting). A paper on goosebumps in religious experiences. A paper that references mathematicians getting goosebumps when seeing proofs.
5:30 – The 1980 paper by Goldstein on “thrills.”
6:45 – The Darwin passage is quoted in McCrae 2007.
7:00 – A 1995 paper by Panskepp, as well as his 2002 study with a co-author.
7:40 – A recent paper on chills in response to films; another on poetry.
9:15 – The paper by McCrae reporting the association between “openness to experience” and chills.
10:00 – A paper by Fiske and colleagues on kama muta, the “sudden devotion emotion.”
11:10 – Panskepp’s “separation call” hypothesis is perhaps best described in his 2002 study.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!
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[originally aired June 23, 2021]
You’ve no doubt heard that—as humans—our sense of smell is, well, kind of pathetic. The idea goes all the way back to Aristotle, that we have advanced senses—especially sight and hearing—and then lowly, underdeveloped ones—taste and smell. It’s an idea that has been repeated and elaborated over and over, throughout Western intellectual history. Along with it comes a related notion: that smells are nearly impossible to talk about, that odors simply can’t be captured in words. These ideas may be old, but are they actually true?
A number of researchers would say they're ripe for reconsideration. And my guest is one such researcher, Asifa Majid. She’s Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of York in the UK. For a decade now, Asifa’s been pioneering a new wave of research on human olfaction, especially how it interfaces with language, thought, and culture.
In this conversation we talk about the general notion that some kinds of experience are harder to put into words than others. We discuss Asifa’s fieldwork with hunter-gatherer groups in the Malay peninsula, as well as her studies with wine experts in the west. We talk about whether learning special smell terms seems to sharpen one’s ability to discriminate odors. And we venture beyond Asifa’s own work, to touch on a bunch of recent highlights from the broader science of olfaction.
This was such a fun conversation, folks! I’ve admired Asifa’s work on this topic since her very first paper. She’s a truly interdisciplinary thinker and, as you’ll hear, she’s got a nose for fun examples and deep questions.
Without further ado, on to my conversation with Dr. Asifa Majid! Enjoy.
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
3:40 – A paper on the 19th century rise of the myth that humans are poor smellers.
6:00 – A paper estimating that humans can discriminate possibly a trillion different odors.
7:30 – A theoretical paper by Dr. Majid and a collaborator on “differential ineffability” and the senses.
9:20 – Dr. Majid’s collaborator in her work on Jahai, a Malaysian language, was Niclas Burenhult.
11:00 – A classic book on the idea of “basic terms” in the domain of color, which provide an analogy for basic terms in the domain of smell.
12:30 – A first paper by Dr. Majid and Niclas Burenhult describing the language of olfaction in Jahai.
14:45 – Dr. Majid’s first experiment comparing odor naming (and color naming) in Jahai and English.
20:00 – Dr. Majid has also examined smell lexicons in several other languages, including Seri, Thai, Maniq, and Cha’palaa.
25:40 – A follow-up study by Dr. Majid and a collaborator on two groups within Malaysia who contrast in subsistence mode.
29:30 – A paper detailing cultural practices surrounding smell among the Jahai.
31:00 – Dr. Majid discusses the factors shaping cultural variation in olfaction (as well as a number of other interesting issues) in her most recent review paper.
39:00 – The “deodorization” hypothesis was discussed in a classic book on the cultural history of aroma.
39:40 – In a recent study, Dr. Majid and collaborators failed to find evidence that the frequency of smell language has fallen off since industrialization.
45:50 – Dr. Majid led a study comparing 20 languages across the world in terms of how expressible their speakers found different sensory experiences.
53:00 – Some possible reasons for the general trend toward the ineffability of smell are considered in Dr. Majid’s recent review paper.
57:00 – Along with her collaborators, Dr. Majid has examined the smell-naming abilities of wine experts. See one paper here.
1:02:45 – A recent paper by Dr. Majid and colleagues showing that wine experts’ smell-naming abilities are not dependent on “thinking in” language.
1:05:35 –Some evidence from “verbal interference” tasks suggests that, when carrying out color discrimination tasks, people rely on language in the moment.
1:09:00 – The Odeuropa project.
1:10:20 – The website of Noam Sobel’s lab.
Dr. Majid’s end of show recommendations:
What the Nose Knows, by Avery Gilbert
The Philosophy of Olfactory Perception, by Andreas Keller
Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, by Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synott
Neuroenology, by Gordon Shepard
Cork Dork, by Bianca Bosker
You can keep up with Dr. Majid on Twitter (@asifa_majid).
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!
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[originally aired February 17, 2021]
Guess what folks: we are celebrating a birthday this week. That’s right, Many Minds has reached the ripe age of one year old. Not sure how old that is in podcast years, exactly, but it’s definitely a landmark that we’re proud of. Please no gifts, but, as always, you’re encouraged to share the show with a friend, write a review, or give us a shout out on social.
To help mark this milestone we’ve got a great episode for you. My guest is the writer, Brian Christian. Brian is a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley and the author of three widely acclaimed books: The Most Human Human, published in 2011; Algorithms To Live By, co-authored with Tom Griffiths and published in 2016; and most recently, The Alignment Problem. It was published this past fall and it’s the focus of our conversation in this episode.
The alignment problem, put simply, is the problem of building artificial intelligences—machine learning systems, for instance—that do what we want them to do, that both reflect and further our values. This is harder to do than you might think, and it’s more important than ever.
As Brian and I discuss, machine learning is becoming increasingly pervasive in everyday life—though it’s sometimes invisible. It’s working in the background every time we snap a photo or hop on Facebook. Companies are using it to sift resumes; courts are using it to make parole decisions. We are already trusting these systems with a bunch of important tasks, in other words. And as we rely on them in more and more domains, the alignment problem will only become that much more pressing.
In the course of laying out this problem, Brian’s book also offers a captivating history of machine learning and AI. Since their very beginnings, these fields have been formed through interaction with philosophy, psychology, mathematics, and neuroscience. Brian traces these interactions in fascinating detail—and brings them right up to the present moment. As he describes, machine learning today is not only informed by the latest advances in the cognitive sciences, it’s also propelling those advances.
This is a wide-ranging and illuminating conversation folks. And, if I may say so, it’s also an important one. Brian makes a compelling case, I think, that the alignment problem is one of the defining issues of our age. And he writes about it—and talks about it here—with such clarity and insight. I hope you enjoy this one. And, if you do, be sure to check out Brian’s book.
Happy birthday to us—and on to my conversation with Brian Christian. Enjoy!
A transcript of this show is available here.
Notes and links
7:26 - Norbert Wiener’s article from 1960, ‘Some moral and technical consequences of automation’.
8:35 - ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ is an episode from the animated film, Fantasia (1940). Before that, it was a poem by Goethe.
13:00 - A well-known incident in which Google’s nascent auto-tagging function went terribly awry.
13:30 - The ‘Labeled Faces in the Wild’ database can be viewed here.
18:35 - A groundbreaking article in ProPublica on the biases inherent in the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) tool.
25:00 – The website of the Future of Humanity Institute, mentioned in several places, is here.
25:55 - For an account of the collaboration between Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch, see here.
29:35- An article about the racial biases built into photographic film technology in the 20th century.
31:45 - The much-investigated Tempe crash involving a driverless car and a pedestrian:
37:17 - The psychologist Edward Thorndike developed the “law of effect.” Here is one of his papers on the law.
44:40 - A highly influential 2015 paper in Nature in which a deep-Q network was able to surpass human performance on a number of classic Atari games, and yet not score a single point on ‘Montezuma’s Revenge.’
47:38 - A chapter on the classic “preferential looking” paradigm in developmental psychology:
53:40 - A blog post discussing the relationship between dopamine in the brain and temporal difference learning. Here is the paper in Science in which this relationship was first articulated.
1:00:00 - A paper on the concept of “coherent extrapolated volition.”
1:01:40 - An article on the notion of “iterated distillation and amplification.”
1:10:15 - The fourth edition of a seminal textbook by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, AI a Modern approach, is available here: http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/
1:13:00 - An article on Warren McCulloch’s poetry.
1:17:45 - The concept of “reductions” is central in computer science and mathematics.
Brian Christian’s end-of-show reading recommendations:
The Alignment Newsletter, written by Rohin Shah
Invisible Women, by Caroline Criado Perez:
The Gardener and the Carpenter, Alison Gopnik:
You can keep up with Brian at his personal website or on Twitter.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!
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A pharmacologist and a philosopher walk into a bar... This is not the start of a joke—it’s the start of our 2021 finale and our first ever theme episode. The idea with these theme episodes is that we have not one but two guests, from different fields, coming together to discuss a topic of mutual interest.
Our theme for this first one—in the spirit of the holiday season—is intoxication and our guests are Dr. Oné Pagán and Dr. Edward Slingerland. Oné is a Professor of Biology at West Chester University and our pharmacologist in residence for this episode. He just published Drunk flies and stoned dolphins: A trip through the world of animal intoxication. Ted is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia and our resident philosopher. He is the author of the recent book Drunk: How we sipped, danced, and stumbled our way into civilization.
We range over a lot of ground in this conversation. We talk about alcohol as a kind of pharmacological “hand grenade”—whereas other substances are more like “scalpels”. We touch on catnip, cannabis, psychedelic fungi, and poison toads. We discuss Asian flushing genes and what they might suggest about the functions of alcohol. We talk about self-medication in the animal kingdom and in Neanderthals. We size up the "drunken monkey”, "stoned ape”, and "beer before bread" hypotheses. And though we mostly keep things light and festive here, we also do delve into the dark side of intoxication—which may have gotten that much darker with the advent of distilled liquor.
Whether you're a tippler or a teetotaler, I’m guessing you’ll find this to be a heady conversation. Did you really think I was going to make it to the end of this intro without a single intoxication-related pun? You know me better.
Alright friends—be well, be merry, and be safe this holiday season. We’ll be back in mid-January after a not so long winter’s nap. Now on to my conversation with Dr. Oné Pagán and Ted Slingerland. Cheers!
A transcript of this episode is now available.
Notes and links
4:00 – The “write drunk, edit sober” idea is sometimes (mis)attributed to Ernest Hemingway.
8:00 – Dr. Pagán wrote an earlier book about his favored model organism, the planaria (or flatworms). You may recall we discussed planaria in our recent episode with Dr. Michael Levin.
10:10 – Dr. Slingerland wrote an earlier book about the Chinese ideal of wu-wei. See this brief discussion of his ideas in The Marginalian.
13:00 – The idea of alcohol as pharmacological “hand grenade” is a metaphor due to Steven Braun.
19:30 – An article in Science about “why cats are crazy for catnip.”
21:20 – A recent article in The Conversation about Asian flushing genes.
26:00 – Thomas Hunt Morgan, who won the Nobel Prize in 1933, pioneered the use of drosophila as an animal model.
28:20 – An article on the inebriometer (with an accompanying illustration).
33:00 – The biologist Robert Dudley introduced the “drunken monkey” hypothesis. A recent synopsis by Dudley.
38:00 – Not to be confused with the “stoned ape” hypothesis, which was introduced by Terrence McKenna. A recent popular article on the hypothesis.
41:00 – The idea of psychedelics as introducing “mutagens” into culture comes from How to Change Your Mind, by Michael Pollan.
44:00 – A recent popular article on the “beer before bread” hypothesis. The idea was originally proposed in 1953.
48:50 – Pharmaceutical practices of non-human animals are called “zoopharmacognosy.” A 2014 summary of findings about animal self-medication.
53:00 – The original report in Science on the “flower burial” in Shanidar cave.
56:20 – The Laussel Venus appears to be drinking (alcohol?) from a horn.
59:20 – An article describing the tragic case of Tusko the elephant.
1:03:50 – One example of practices that moderate alcohol’s dangerous effect is the Greek symposium.
1:08:00 – A brief history of distillation, which is a relatively recent invention.
1:11:00 – Planaria are widely used as an animal model for understanding nicotine, among other intoxicating substances.
Dr. Slingerland recommends the following books:
Buzz, by Steven Braun
Drink, by Iain Gately
A Short History of Drunkenness, by Mark Forsyth
Dr. Pagán recommends the following book:
Intoxication, by Ronald Siegel
You can find Dr. Slingerland on Twitter (@slingerland20) and follow him at his website; you can find Dr. Pagán on Twitter (@Baldscientist), follow him at his website, and listen to his podcast.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Hi friends, we will be on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Sadly, the guest featured in this week's archive pick—Karen Bakker—passed way last month. Her colleagues at UBC posted a rememberance here.
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Consider the peacock. Its plumage is legendary—those shimmering, iridescent colors, and those eerie, enchanting eyespots. But what often goes less appreciated (at least by us humans) is that this chromatic extravaganza is also a sonic extravaganza. The peacock's display operates in infrasound, an acoustic dimension that we simply can't hear without assistance. Which raises a question: If we're oblivious to the full vibrancy of the peacock's display, what other sounds might we be missing out on?
My guest today is Dr. Karen Bakker. Karen is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia and author of the new book, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants. In the book, Karen dives into rich realms of sound that, for one reason or another, humans have tended to ignore.
In this conversation, Karen and I discuss the twin fields of "bioacoustics" and "ecoacoustics." We talk about "deep listening" and "digital listening", "infrasound" and "ultrasound." We discuss why sound is such a ubiquitous signaling medium across the tree of life. We consider the fact that scientific discoveries about sound have often been resisted. We touch on debates about whether animal communication systems constitute languages, and discuss new efforts to decode those systems using AI. We also talk about turtles, bats, plants, coral, bees, and—yes—peacocks.
If you enjoy our conversation, I strongly recommend Karen's book. It’s really bursting with insight, science, and stories—all presented with unusual clarity.
Another year of Many Minds is drawing to a close and we're about to go on a brief holiday hiatus. But first a little end-of-year ask: What topics or thinkers would you like to see us feature in 2023? If you have any ideas, we’d love to hear them. You can email us at: [email protected].
Alright friends, I hope you enjoy the holidays. And I hope you enjoy this conversation with Dr. Karen Bakker.
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
3:30 – A range of bat sounds are available on the website of Dr. Mirjam Knörnschild (who was previously featured on the show!).
4:30 – The winner of the 2014 ‘Most Beautiful Sound in the World’ contest was a recording of a froggy swamp in Malaysia.
10:30 – A popular article profiling the relatively young field of “bioacoustics.” A recent academic article by Dr. Bakker and a colleague about “conservation acoustics” in particular.
11:30 – A popular article about the use of acoustic technologies to discover and monitor whale populations.
17:00 – A research article about the involvement of infrasound in peacock mating displays.
23:30 – A research study showing that coral larvae move toward reef sounds.
28:00 – A review paper by Camila Ferrara and colleagues about sound communication in Amazonian river turtles.
31:00 – A research article by Heidi Appel and a colleague about plants responding to the sounds of leaf-chewing.
35:00 – A recent historical study of Karl von Frisch and his work with honey bees. A recent study suggesting the possibility of play in bumble bees (not honey bees).
42:00 – A popular article profiling the field of “biosemiotics.”
48:00 – An essay by Dr. Bakker about honeybee communication and how technologies may be helping us understand it.
53:00 – Dr. Bakker recommends books by Indigenous scholars Robin Wall-Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass), Dylan Robinson (Hungry Listening), and John Borrows.
Dr. Bakker recommends:
A number of examples of the “sounds of life” are collected at Dr. Bakker’s website, here. The same site also includes recommendations for getting involved in citizen science. In addition to the books by Indigenous scholars listed above, Dr. Bakker recommends work by Monica Gagliano.
You can read more about Karen’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).
You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.
**You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!**
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Hi friends, we will be on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. You may not be surprised to hear that the paper featured in this archive pick attracted a lot of attention. In the time since we first aired this episode, it prompted at least one direct critique, which then occasioned a reply by the authors.
Enjoy!
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You have a big brain. I have a big brain. We, as a species, have pretty big brains. But this wasn't always the case. Way back when, our brains were much smaller; then they went through a bit of growth spurt, one that lasted for a couple million years. This steady ballooning of brain size is one of the key themes of the human story. But then there's a late-breaking twist in that story—a kind of unexpected epilogue. You see, after our brains grew, they shrank. But when this shrinkage happened and—of course, why—have remained mysterious. My guest today is Jeremy DeSilva, a paleoanthropologist at Dartmouth College. He’s an expert on the evolution of the foot and ankle. But, it turns out the body is all connected, so he also thinks about brains and heads. In a recent paper, Jerry and his colleagues took up the mystery of human brain shrinkage. They first set out to establish more precisely when in our past this occurred. Using a large database of crania, spanning few million years, Jerry’s team was able to establish that this shrinkage event happened much more recently than previously thought—a mere 3000 years ago. Naturally, the next question was why? What happened around that time that could have possibly caused our brains to deflate? To answer this, Jerry and his collaborators turned to an unexpected source of insight: Ants. That’s right, ants. They argue that these ultrasocial critters may offer clues to why we might have suddenly dispensed with a chunk of brain about the size of a lemon. This is a really juicy paper and a super fun conversation, so we should just get to it. But I did want to mention: Jerry has a recent book from 2021 called First Steps that I whole-heartedly recommend. It’s about origins of upright walking in humans—which it turns out, is bound up with all kinds of other important aspects of being human. So definitely check that out!
Thanks folks—on to my chat with Dr. Jerry DeSilva. Enjoy!
The paper we discuss is available here. A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
3:00 – A podcast episode from the Leakey Foundation about the so-called “obstetrical dilemma.”
5:40 – A refresher for those who have trouble keeping their ‘cenes’ straight: the Pleistocene refers to the period from 2.58 million years ago to 11,700 years ago; immediately after that came the Holocene, which we are still in today.
7:00 – An article discussing the issue of unethical collections of human remains.
10:30 – The key figure form Dr. DeSilva’s paper—showing the changing “slopes” of brain size over time—is available here.
19:30 – The original article by Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler on the “expensive tissue hypothesis.” A more recent popular article on the hypothesis.
20:45 – An article by a major proponent of the social intelligence hypothesis, Dr. Robin Dunbar. A more critical review of the social intelligence hypothesis.
23:00 – A recent paper by Jeff Stibel and an older preprint by John Hawks evaluating the “body size” explanation of recent brain shrinkage.
24:00 – See our earlier episode on human self-domestication with Brian Hare.
29:00 – One of Dr. DeSilva’s collaborators on this research is Dr. James Traniello, who specializes in ants.
34:45 – An overview of the earliest history of writing.
37:20 – Dr. DeSilva’s book, First Steps, came out in 2021.
39:00 – A recent paper discussing the evolution of rotational birth in humans.
Dr. DeSilva recommends:
Kindred, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes (featured in an earlier episode!)
Origin, by Jennifer Raff
You can find Dr. DeSilva on Twitter.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).
You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.
**You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!**
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Hi friends, we will be on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!
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There's an old view of the mind that goes something like this: The world is flooding in, and we're sitting back, just trying to process it all. Our minds are basically passive and reactive, always a step behind. Contrast that view with a new one that’s quickly gaining ground. According to this alternative, we don't just react to the world, we anticipate it. We’re not leaning back but trying to stay a step ahead—our minds are fundamentally active and predictive. And our predictions aren't just idle guesses, either—they're shaping how we experience the world. This new view is known as the “predictive processing framework”, and it has implications, not just for how we perceive, but also for how we act and how we feel, for our happiness and our well-being.
My guest today is Dr. Mark Miller. Mark is a philosopher of cognition and senior research fellow at the Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies at Monash University. He's part of a new wave of intensely interdisciplinary scholars who are working at the intersections of philosophy, neuroscience, and psychiatry.
Here, Mark and I sketch the predictive processing framework and unpack some of its key pillars. We discuss how this approach can inform our understanding of depression, addiction, and PTSD. We sketch out notions of loops and slopes, stickiness and rigidity, wobble and volatility, edges and grip. And, on the way, we will have a bit to say about video games, play, horror, psychedelics, and meditation.
This was all pretty new terrain for me, but Mark proved an affable and capable guide. If you enjoy this episode and want to explore some of these topics further, definitely check out the Contemplative Science Podcast, which Mark co-hosts.
Alright friends, on to my chat with Mark Miller. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
4:15 – The website of the Hokkaido University Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience (CHAIN). The website of the Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies (M3CS).
6:00 – Dr. Miller co-hosts the Contemplative Science podcast, a project of M3CS.
7:30 – For one introduction to the predictive processing framework, see this article by Dr. Miller and colleagues.
11:00 – See Dr. Miller’s essay in Aeon on social media, co-authored with Ben White, as well as this more detailed treatment for an academic audience.
12:00 – See a paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues on depression.
14:00 – An introduction to the subfield of “computational psychiatry.”
17:00 – Andy Clark’s “watershed” paper on the predictive processing framework.
18:00 – A recent book on “active inference” (which is largely synonymous with the predictive processing approach).
22:00 – A chapter on the idea of the “body as the first prior.”
24:30 – A demo of the “hollow face” illusion.
29:00 – On the potential value of psychedelics in jarring people out of trenches and ruts, see also our earlier episode with Alison Gopnik.
31:00 – See our recent episode with Dimitris Xygalatas.
34:30 – A popular article on children wanting to hear the same stories over and over.
38:00 – A paper by Coltan Scrivner and colleagues on horror fans and psychological resilience during COVD-19.
42:30 – A recent article by Dr. Miller and colleagues about the “predictive dynamics of happiness and well-being,” which covers much of the same terrain as this episode.
46:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues on the evocative notion of “grip.”
50:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues about video games and predictive processing.
57:00 – A paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues in which they discuss meditation in the context of the prediction processing approach.
Dr. Miller recommends books by the philosopher Andy Clark, including:
Surfing Uncertainty
You can read more about Dr. Miller’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).
You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.
**You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!**
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Welcome back all! So, this episode is a first for us. Two firsts, actually. For one, it features our first-ever repeat guest: Andrew Barron, a neuroscientist at Macquarie University. If you're a long-time listener, you might remember that Andy was actually the guest on our very first episode, 'Of bees and brains,' in February 2020. And, second, this episode is our first-ever "live show." We recorded this interview in July at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute in St Andrews, Scotland.
Andy and his colleagues—the philosophers Marta Halina and Colin Klein—just released an ambitious paper titled 'Transitions in Cognitive Evolution.' In it, they take a wide-angle view of mind; they zoom out to try to tell an overarching story of how brains and cognition evolved across the tree of life. The story, as they tell it, is not about a smoothly gradual evolution of cognitive sophistication. Rather, it's a story built around five major transitions—fundamental changes, that is, to how organisms process information.
In this conversation, Andy and I discuss their framework and how it takes inspiration from other transitional accounts of life and mind. We lay out each of the five stages—or portals, as we refer to them—and talk about the organisms that we find on either side of these portals. We discuss what propels organisms to make these radical changes, especially considering that evolution is not prospective. It doesn't look ahead—it can't see what abilities might be possible down the road. We talk about how this framework got its start, particularly in some of Andy's thinking about insect brains and how they differ from vertebrate brains. And, as a bit of a bonus, we left in some of the live Q & A with the audience. In it we touch on octopuses, eusocial insects, oysters, and a bunch else.
Speaking of major transitions, I will be going on parental leave for much of the fall. So this is, in fact, the final episode of Season 4 and then the podcast will go on a brief hiatus. Before we get started on Season 5, we'll be putting up some of our favorite episodes from the archive.
Alright friends, on to my conversation with Dr. Andrew Barron, recorded live at DISI 2023. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
3:30 – For further information about the “major transitions” project, see the project’s web page here.
7:00 – Many transitional accounts of evolution draw inspiration from the classic book The Major Transitions in Evolution.
8:00 – One influential previous transitional account of the evolution of cognition was put forward by Dennett in Kinds of Minds. Another was put forward by Ginsburg and Jablonka in The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul.
12:45 – A brief introduction to cnidaria.
18:00 – The idea of cellular memory has been garnering more and more attention—see, e.g., this popular article.
21:00 – The idea of “reflective” systems is also used in computer science.
26:00 – The scala naturae, or Great Chain of Being, was the notion that organisms could be arranged on a scale of sophistication, with humans on the top of the scale.
30:00 – The “teleological fallacy” as Dr. Barron and colleagues describe it in their paper is the fallacy of “appeal[ing] to later benefits to explain earlier changes.”
34:00 – A brief introduction to the phylum gastropoda.
37:00 – For an overview of Dr. Barron’s work on the neuroscience of honey bees, see our previous episode.
48:30 – It’s commonly observed in popular coverage of octopuses that their brains are “decentralized” (e.g., here, here, and here).
55:00 – In discussions of human brain evolution, it has been argued that certain kinds of cognitive offloading (e.g., writing) have allowed our brains to actually shrink in recent history. See our earlier episode with Jeremy DeSilva.
58:00 – On the notion of “Turing completeness,” see here. The idea of an “Infinite Improbability Drive” comes (apparently) from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
1:00:06 – For a discussion of eusociality and individuality in the context of “major transitions” ideas, see here.
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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Scientists who study the mind and brain have always been drawn to periods of intense change—to those life stages marked by rapid transformation. Infancy is one of those periods, of course. Adolescence is another. But there's a less-discussed time of life when our brains and minds have to reconfigure: the window surrounding when we become parents.
My guests today are Dr. Winnie Orchard and Dr. Jodi Pawluski. Winnie is a cognitive neuroscientist and postdoctoral scholar at the Yale Child Study Center. Jodi is a neuroscientist, author, and podcaster affiliated with the University of Rennes in France. Both are experts in the neural and cognitive changes that surround pregnancy, motherhood, and parenthood more generally.
Here, we talk about the idea of "matrescence" as a distinctive developmental stage. We discuss the research around memory loss in early motherhood, as well as findings that certain brain areas get fine-tuned during this period. We talk about postpartum anxiety, depression, and psychosis, and what may be causing them. We consider the finding that having children—and, in fact, having more children—seems to confer a protective effect on the aging brain. Throughout we talk about which of these changes also occur in fathers and other non-birthing parents. And we consider the difficulty of scientifically studying a period of life—parenthood—that is not only rife with social and psychological changes, but also fraught with expectations and narratives.
Alright friends, I hope you enjoy this one. As you'll hear, this research area is very much still in its infancy. There are definitely some provocative findings. But maybe more exciting are all the questions that remain.
Without further ado, here's my chat with Dr. Winnie Orchard and Dr. Jodi Pawluski. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
2:45 – For more on the relationship between adolescence and “matrescence,” see this recent review paper by Winnie and colleagues in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
6:00 – For discussions surrounding the idea of “mommy brain,” see Jodi’s podcast, ‘Mommy Brain Revisited.’ See also this recent editorial by Jodi and colleagues in JAMA Neurology.
17:00 – A recent meta-analysis on cognitive impairment during pregnancy.
25:00 – A study by Winnie and colleagues showing subjective—but not objective—memory deficits in mothers one year after giving birth.
26:45 – An influential study showing structural changes in the brain following pregnancy. The same study also found that some of these changes correlated with measures of maternal attachment.
28:00 – A recent review article by Jodi and colleagues on the idea of neural fine-tuning in early motherhood.
41:45 – A recent review paper by Jodi and colleagues about the neural underpinnings of postpartum depression and anxiety.
44:00 – A review paper about postpartum psychosis.
51:00 – A study on the prevalence of postpartum depression across cultures.
58:00 – A 2014 review of research on mother-child synchrony.
1:00:00 – A recent study by Winnie and colleagues looking at how having children affects later life brain function. Another study by Winnie and colleagues on the same topic.
1:13:00 – Several studies have documented general changes in “Big 5” personality factors as people age. A study examining this in both American and Japanese participants is here.
1:18:00 – Since we recorded this interview, the publication date for the English version of Jodi’s book has been scheduled. It comes out in September 2023—more info here.
Recommendations
Dr. Orchard recommends:
Baby Brain, Sarah McKay
Mother Brain, Chelsea Conaboy
Dr. Pawluski recommends:
Matrescence, by Lucy Jones
After the Storm, by Emma Jane Unsworth
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.
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