Afleveringen
-
Welcome back friends! Today we've got a first for you: our very first audio essay by... not me. I would call it a guest essay, but it's by our longtime Assistant Producer, Urte Laukaityte. If you're a regular listener of the show, you've been indirectly hearing her work across dozens and dozens of episodes, but this is the first time you will be actually hearing her voice.
Urte is a philosopher. She works primarily in the philosophy of psychiatry, but also in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of biology, the history of medicine, and neighboring fields. She's particularly interested in a colorful constellation of psychiatric phenomenaâphenomena like hypnosis, mass hysteria, psychogenic conditions, and (the topic of today's essay) the placebo effect.
There's almost certainly more to placebo than you realizeâit's a surprisingly many-layered phenomenon. Here, Urte pulls apart those layers. She talks about what placebo can and cannot do, the mechanisms by which it operates, the ethical dimensions of its use, its evil twin nocebo, how it is woven through the history of medicine, and a lot more. She argues that, though we've learned a lot about the placebo in recent decades, we have not yet harnessed its full potential.
As always, we eagerly welcome your comments about the show. Feel free to find us on social media, or send us a note at [email protected]. We would love to hear your suggestions for future episodes, your constructive criticisms, really your feedback of whatever kind.
Alright friends, now on to our audio essayâ'Rehabilitating placeboââwritten and read by Urte Laukaityte. Enjoy!
A text version of this episode will be available soon.
Notes and links
3:30 â A research paper describing the FIDELITY trial.
8:00 â For a neuroscientific overview of placebo research, see this review article. The landmark 1978 study is here.
9:00 â The study using naloxone in rats.
10:30 â A review of placebo effects in Parkinsonâs disease.
13:00 â The study showing placebo effects in allergy sufferers. For more on placebo and conditioning in the immune system, see here.
13:30 â An overview of the results on whether placebo âcan replace oxygen.â
16:00 â For the âmilkshakeâ study, see here.
20:00 â A perspective piece on open-label placebos. A review of the efficacy of open-label placebos.
22:00 â A review of nocebo-induced side effects within the placebo groups of trials.
24:00 â On the idea of âgood placebo responders,â see here.
27:30 â The book Medical Nihilism, by Jacob Stegenga.
28:00 â A review and meta-analysis of the use of placebo by clinicians.
29:30 Ââ A paper on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and placebo.
30:30 â A review of factors modulating placebo effects.
34:00 â For the âsignaling theory of symptoms,â 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.
-
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 speciesâand certain members of these speciesâto thrive in dynamic, daunting urban spaces. We also talk about the big picture of the evolution of intelligenceâand how urban adapter species might shed light on what is known as the cognitive buffer hypothesis. Along the way, we touch on: the neophilia of raccoons and the neophobia of coyotes, puzzle boxes, the Aesop's fable task, hyenas and elephants, brain size, individual differences, human-wildlife conflict, comparative gastronomy, and the cognitive arms race that might be unfolding in our cities.
If you have any feedback for us, we would love to hear from you. Guest suggestions? Topics or formats you'd like to see? Blistering critiques? Effusive compliments? We're open to all of it. You can email us at manymindspodcast at gmail dot com. That's manymindspodcast at gmail. Though, honestly, if it's really an effusive compliment, feel free to just post that publicly somewhere.
Alright friends, on to my conversation with Sarah Benson-Amram. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
8:50 â A study of manual dexterity in raccoons.
11:30 â A video featuring raccoon chittering, among other vocalizations.
12:00 Ââ A recent academic paper on the categorization of wildlife responses to urbanizationâavoider, adapter, exploiterâwith some critical discussion.
14:00 â A study of how animals are becoming more nocturnal in response to humans.
18:00 â 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 â A recent review article by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues surveying carnivore cognition.
25:00 Ââ On the question of urban vs rural animals, see the popular article, âAre cities making animals smarter?â
28:00 â 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 â An earlier study by Dr. Benson-Amram on innovative problem solving in hyenas.
36:30 â Our earlier episode on animal personality with Dr. Kate Laskowski.
39:00 â A study by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues exploring raccoonsâ ability to solve the Aesopâs Fable task. She has also used this task with elephants.
44:00 â A study by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues examining reversal learning in raccoons, skunks, and coyotes.
49:00 â An article articulating the âcognitive buffer hypothesis.â
51:00 â A paper discussingâand ârevivingââthe so-called ecological intelligence hypothesis.
53:00 â A study by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues comparing brain size and problem-solving ability in mammalian carnivores.
56:00 â 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 â A paper on bin-opening in cockatoos and how it might be leading to an âinnovation arms race.â
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.
-
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
-
Hi friends, we're busy with some spring cleaning this week. We'll have a new episode for you in two weeks. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives!
_____
[originally aired Nov 30, 2022]
When we talk about AI, we usually fixate on the future. Whatâs 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 â See Adrienneâs TedEd lesson about Talos, the âfirst robot.â See also Adrienneâs 2019 talk for the Long Now Foundation.
7:15 â The Throne of Solomon does not survive, but it was often rendered in art, for example in this painting by Edward Poynter.
12:00 â For more on Adrienneâs broader research program, see her website; for more on Ellyâs research program, see her website.
18:00 â For more on the etymology of ârobot,â see here.
23:00 â A recent piece about Aristotleâs writings on slavery.
26:00 â An article about the fact that Greek and Roman statues were much more colorful than we think of them today.
30:00 â A recent research article about the Antikythera mechanism.
34:00 â See Adrienneâs popular article about the robots that guarded the relics of the Buddha.
38:45 â See Ellyâs article about how automata figured prominently in tombs.
47:00 â See Ellyâs recent video lecture about mechanical clocks and the âinvention of time.â For more on the rise of mechanistic thinkingâand clocks as important metaphors in that riseâsee Jessica Riskinâs book, The Restless Clock.
50:00 â An article about a âtorture robotâ of ancient Sparta.
58:00 â A painting of the âIron Knightâ in Spenserâs The Faerie Queene.
Adrienne Mayor recommends:
The Greeks and the New, by Armand DâAngour
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 Adrienneâs work on her website and follow her on Twitter. You can read more about Ellyâs 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.
-
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 illusionsâthe 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 mindsâand 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 oldâso, 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 â Dr. Firestoneâs early paper reporting the Times Square experiment and the âskeletal shapeâ phenomenon.
8:00 â A visual explanation of the âmissing bullet holesâ graphic.
13:00 â Dr. Firestone has collaborated intensively with the philosopher Ian Phillips.
15:00 â A recent book by Ned Block, The Border Between Seeing and Thinking.
24:00 â Visual illusions are legion, as are inventories of them. See, for instance, this catalogue on Wikipedia or this Reddit thread.
25:00 â An obituary for Jerry Fodor, who died in 2017. The classic book by Zenon Pylyshyn, Computation and Cognition.
28:00 â 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 â A target article (with commentaries) in Behavioral and Brain Sciences by Dr. Firestone and Dr. Scholl about claims of âtop-downâ effects on perception. Dr. Firestone has published other work on this theme, e.g., here, here, & here.
41:00 â A paper with discussion (and illustration) of the classic Dalmation Mooney image.
45:00 â A study of rapid visual pattern recognition in expert chess players.
50:30 â A paper by J.J. Valenti and Dr. Firestone about the case of the blue banana.
54:00 â 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 â A study by Martin Rolfs and colleagues about the perception of causality.
1:02:00 â A study by Liuba Papeo and colleagues about the perception of social interactions. A related paper showing an inversion effect.
1:04:00 â A paper by Alon Hafri and colleagues on the perception of roles in an interaction.
1:06:00 â A widely cited paper by J. Kiley Hamlin and colleagues on the recognition of social interactions in preverbal infants.
1:06:30 â A review paper on reading in the brain.
1:10:00 â A paper by Rui Goh, Dr. Phillips, and Dr. Firestone on the perception of silence.
1:18:00 â 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 â 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 â For a review of the mirror self-recognition test, see our earlier audio essay.
1:35:00 â Other interesting work going on in Dr. Firestoneâs 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.
-
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 headâ for at least a little while. This is true not just for humans butâwe have to assumeâfor 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 apesâand 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 â Dr. Lewis and Dr. Krupenye worked together in the lab of Dr. Brian Hare, a former guest on the podcast.
8:30 â The video of Mama and the primatologist Jan van Hooff.
12:00 â For research on the remarkably long social memories of dolphins, see here.
14:00 â For research on long-term voice recognition in bonobos, see here.
19:30 â Another collaborator on the paper weâre discussing was Dr. Fumihiro Kano, affiliated with the Kumamoto Sanctuary.
29:30 â For more on the use of eye-tracking with primates, see a recent review paper by Dr. Lewis and Dr. Krupenye.
34:00 â For the previous study by Dr. Lewis, Dr. Krupenye, and colleagues about how bonobos and chimpanzees attend to current groupmates, see here.
41:00 â A popular article reviewing bonobo social behavior.
54:30 â A research paper on individual recognition by scent in chimpanzees.
55:30 â A research paper on individual recognition by butt in chimpanzees.
Recommendations
âLong-term memory for affiliates in ravensâ
âDecades-long social memory in bottlenose dolphinsâ
âEnduring voice recognition in bonobosâ
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.
-
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 andâspoilerâit'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 fermentationâwhich basically happens whether you want it to or notâwould have been cognitively easier to harness than fire. Along the way, we touch on kiviaq, chicha, makgeolli, hĂĄkarl, 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 â A popular science article about the âinfectiously delicious confectionâ that is salt-rising bread. A recipe for the bread.
6:00 â 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 â 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 â A recent article by Dr. Hecht and colleagues on the evolutionary neuroscience of domestication.
13:00 â For discussions of the encephalization quotient (aka EQ) and of human brain evolution, see our previous episodes here and here.
15:00 â The classic paper on the âexpensive tissue hypothesis.â
22:00 â 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 â A recent article on evidence for the widespread control of fire in human groups by around 400,000 years ago.
31:30 â A paper on how fermenting cassava reduces its toxicity.
38:30 â 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 â A popular article about kiviaq.
45:00 â The article from the New Yorker, by Rebecca Mead, about the foodways of the Faroe Islands.
53:00 â For more discussion of the so-called drunken monkey hypothesis, see our previous episode about intoxication.
1:00:30 â A popular article about hĂĄkarl, 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
âHow humans evolved large brains,â 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.
-
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 memoryâit'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 storyâthat 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 accountâa 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 showâif you like the conversations we have and the questions we askâit's a safe bet that you'd like DISI. You can find more info at disi.orgâthat'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. Gershmanâs 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 âHebbian Learning.â The phrase âneurons that fire together wire togetherâ 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. Gunawardenaâs 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 âengramâ 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 âverticalâ 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 â A recent article arguing for the need to understand computation in single-celled organisms to understand how computation evolved more generally.
46:30 â Another study of classical conditioning in paramecia, led by Dr. Todd Hennessey.
49:00 â For more on plant signaling, see our recent episode with Dr. Paco Calvo and Dr. Natalie Lawrence.
56:00 â A recent article on âserial reversal learningâ and its neuroscientific basis.
1:07:00 â 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.
-
Welcome back folks! The new season of Many Minds is quickly ramping up. On todayâs episode weâre thrilled to be rejoined by Dr. Michael Muthukrishna. Michael is Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics. Heâs 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 onânot just because he was an audience favoriteâbut because heâs got a new book out. Itâs titled A theory of everyone: The new science of who we are, how we got here, and where weâre 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 howâsince the very origins of lifeâitâs 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 Michaelâs âtheory of everyoneâ 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 Michaelâs book. Itâs 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 â 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 â 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 Darwinâs Unfinished Symphony by Kevin Lala.
16:30 â Dr. Muthukrishnaâs paper on the theory problem in psychology, drawn from his dissertation.
17:10 â The classic paper âChaos in the Brickyard,â about the need for theory-building in science.
22:00 â For a brief overview of Dr. Muthukrishnaâs understanding of human intelligence and human uniqueness, see this recent paper. For an overview of cumulative culture in comparative perspective, see here.
23:00 â For the 2005 issue of Science magazine showcasing 25 big unanswered questions, see here.
23:30 â For the review paper on cooperation by Dr. Muthukrishna and Dr. Henrich, see here.
26:00 â For Dr. Muthukrishnaâs empirical work that attempts to induce corruption in the lab, see here.
28:00 â The scholar Robert Klitgaard, mentioned here, is well-known for his research on corruption.
29:00 â See the preprint by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues titled âThe size of the stag determines the level of cooperation.â
33:30 â A video laying out the RNA world hypothesis.
45:00 â 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 â For the metric known as Energy Return on Investment (EROI), see here.
54:00 â For more on the cross-cultural variation in numeracy, see here.
55:20 â To correct the record, according to this review of rare numeral systems, there is only a single known base 8 system in the worldâs languages.
57:15 â In our earlier conversation (around 42:00), we discussed the work by Luria on âIf P, then Qâ reasoning.
57:30 â For more on the so-called WEIRD problem, see our earlier audio essay.
1:00:30 â For some experimental evidence consistent with the idea that language improves the transmission of cultural information, see here.
1:07:00 â For data on the acceleration of urbanization, see here.
1:16:00 â For a brief primer on land value taxes, see here.
1:18:30 â For the idea that Machiavelliâs 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.
-
And weâre back! Itâs been a while, friends. Hope you enjoyed your fall and your holidays. Thanks so much for re-joining usâweâre super excited to be kicking off a brand-new season of the Many Minds podcast. We thought weâd 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 folksâand weâll see you again in a couple weeks with our first interview of 2024.
Now on to âDawn of the smile.â Enjoy!
A text version of this episode will be available soon.
Notes and links
3:00 â Darwin describes his childrenâs first smiles in his 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
4:10 â On so-called Duchenne smiles, see this classic investigation.
5:00 â For a summary of âbasic emotionsâ theory, see any number of Paul Ekmanâs writing (e.g., here, here). For a recent articulation of the âsocial toolsâ theory, see writings by Alan J. Fridlund (e.g., here). For another influential recent critique of âbasic emotionsâ theory, see here.
6:00 â For the classic bowling study, see here.
7:00 â For a recent review of facial expressions in blind people, see here.
7:45 â For a review of smiling and gender (and the importance of ârules and rolesâ), see here. For one of the studies linking smiliness to historical migration patterns, see here.
8:30 â For the historical shift in smilingâand its possible relation to the Kodak companyâsee here. For the yearbook photo analysis, see here.
9:30 â See Darwinâs discussion of infant laughter in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
10:30 â For Darwinâs observations of laughter and smiles in primates, again, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. See Jan van Hooffâs classic study here.
11:30 â For the study comparing laughter across the Great Apes, see here. For the study of an âape-likeâ stage in human laughter, see here.
12:30 â For a review of play vocalizations and laughter across species, see here.
13:20 â For the Marina Davila-Rossâs suggestion that laughter and smiles share a common evolutionary source, see here.
13:30 â For research on human infantsâ open-mouthed smiles, see here.
14:00 â For the idea of the âacoustic originâ 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.
-
Hi friends! We've been on hiatus for the fall, but we'll be back with new episodes in January 2024. In the meanwhile, enjoy another favorite from our archives!
----
[originally aired November 2, 2022]
Some of us are a little shy; others are sociable. There are those that love to explore the new, and those happy to stick to the familiar. Weâre all a bit different, in other wordsâand when I say âweâ I donât just mean humans. Over the last couple of decades there's been an explosion of research on personality differences in animals tooâin 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 fishâthe Amazon mollyâas a model system for understanding animal personality (or as she sometimes calls it âconsistent individual behavioral variationâ).
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 Kateâs 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 youâll enjoy it, too. On to my conversation with Kate Laskowski!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
3:00 â A paper by Dr. Laskowski and a colleague on strong personalities in sticklebacks.
5:30 â The website for the lab that Dr. Laskowski directs at UC-Davis.
7:00 â The paper we focus onââConsistent Individual Behavioral Variation: What do we know and where are we going?ââis available here.
11:00 â A brief encyclopedia entry on sticklebacks.
13:00 â A video of two sea anemones fighting. A research article about fighting (and personality) in sea anemones.
15:00 â A classic article reviewing the âBig 5â model in human personality research.
17:00 â The original article proposing five personality factors in animals.
22:30 â A recent special issue on the âPace-of-Life syndromesâ framework.
27:00 â A recent paper on evidence for the âfluctuating selectionâ idea in great tits.
29:00 â A 2017 paper by Dr. Laskowski and colleagues on âbehavioral individualityâ in clonal fish raised in near-identical environments.
32:10 â A just-released paper by Dr. Laskowski and colleagues extending their earlier findings on clonal fish.
39:30 â The Twitter account of the Many Birds project. The website for the project.
Dr. Laskowski recommends:
Innate, by Kevin Mitchell
Why Fish Donât 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.
-
Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, weâre putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!
----
[originally aired July 20, 2022]
The world is bigger than you think. I donât 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 donât usually experience, that we might actually never be able to experience. Our senses just arenât wired to take it all in. Weâre simply not tuned to all the dimensions of realityâs 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 itâs like to be a bat, sure, but also what itâs 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.
Thereâs a lot of praise I could lavish on this book, but Iâll 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 weâll 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 youâve 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 itâs 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 â One of our earlier audio essaysâ'Me, my umwelt, and Iââprofiled von UexkĂŒll and his concept of an Umwelt.
6:00 â The classic Nagel article âWhat is it like to be a bat?â; Mike Tomaselloâs recent variant, âWhat is it like to be a chimpanzee?â, which we discussed just last episode.
10:00 â One of many articles by Ed about COVID-19. He was awarded a Pulitzer prize for his coverage of the pandemic.
14:30 â A popular article on proprioception.
19:00 â A research article on the evolution of opsin proteins.
20:00 â A primer on echolocation.
25:00 â A brief article on heat-sensitive pits in snakes.
26:30 â An academic article about the âstarâ of the star-nosed mole. A video showing the star-nosed mole in action.
31:00 â A popular article about the eyes of starfish.
32:00 â A collection of research articles about the Ampullae of Lorenzini.
35:00 â A very recent article about spider webs as âoutsourcedâ hearing.
38:00 â A research article about aspects of bird song that humans canât hear.
40:00 â 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 Edâs 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.
-
Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, weâre putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!
----
[originally aired May 25, 2022]
When we think about ancient humans, we often imagine them doing certain kinds of things. Usually very serious things like hunting game and making tools, foraging for food and building fires, maybe performing the occasional intricate ritual. But there was definitely more to the deep past than all this adulting. There were children around, tooâlots of themâno 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 everywhereâactivities 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 âsecret spacesâ. 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 wouldnât 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 â A 15,000 year old horse figurine from Les EspĂ©lugues cave in France.
6:00 â A classic paper by Conkey & Spector that helped initiate a wave of feminist archaeology.
7:30 â Dr. Langleyâs first paper to examine childrenâs leavings in the archaeological record.
8:30 â See here for discussion and examples of perforated batons or bĂąton percĂ©s.
9:30 â Dr. Langleyâs paper, co-authored with Mirani Litster, âIs it ritual? Or is it children?â
14:00 â An influential discussion of ethnographic analogies in archaeology.
18:30 â A paper on the interpretation of Dorset miniature harpoon heads.
23:30 â An article on the Neanderthal ornamental use of raptor feathers.
29:00 - Dr. Langleyâs paper on identifying childrenâs secret spaces in the archaeological record.
30:30 â A book by David Sobel on childrenâs special spaces.
34:00 â A website about the site of Ătiolles.
40:00 â A figure showing the layout of the Bruniquel Cave, including the secondary structures.
41:00 Ââ More information about the mammoth bone huts of Ukraine.
44:00 â A paper by Dr. Langley and Thomas Suddendorf on bags and other âmobile containersâ in human evolution.
47:00 â A video showing a sea otter using their underarm âpocketâ to store objects.
50:00 â The âcarrier bag theory of evolutionâ was proposed by Elizabeth Fisher in Womenâs Creation. This later inspired Ursula Le Guin to propose the âcarrier bag theory of fiction.â
51:30 â An experimental study by Dr. Langley and colleagues on childrenâs emerging intuitions about the use of containers and bags.
55:30 â 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. Langleyâs 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.
-
Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, weâre putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. This week's episode is in our audio essay format. Enjoy!
----
[originally aired May 26, 2021]
Welcome back folks! Weâve got an audio essay for you this week. It touches on art, music, the skin, the spine, individual differences, vestigial responses, tiny muscles. Thereâs even some Darwin thrown in there. Itâs a fun one. Hope you enjoy it!
A text version of this essay is available on Medium.
Notes and links
1:30 â The novel that very recently gave me goosebumps.
2:00 â A brief discussion of Nabokov and his ideas about the tell-tale tingle.
2:45 â Some terms for goosebumps in other languages.
3:00 â A primer on skin anatomy.
4:00 â A paper on the thermoregulatory function of piloerection in primates and other animals.
4:25 â Read Darwinâs Expression here.
5:00 â A paper about ânails on chalkboard chills.â 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 â The 1980 paper by Goldstein on âthrills.â
6:45 â The Darwin passage is quoted in McCrae 2007.
7:00 â A 1995 paper by Panskepp, as well as his 2002 study with a co-author.
7:40 â A recent paper on chills in response to films; another on poetry.
9:15 â The paper by McCrae reporting the association between âopenness to experienceâ and chills.
10:00 â A paper by Fiske and colleagues on kama muta, the âsudden devotion emotion.â
11:10 â Panskeppâs âseparation callâ 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.
-
Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, weâre putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!
----
[originally aired June 23, 2021]
Youâve no doubt heard thatâas humansâour sense of smell is, well, kind of pathetic. The idea goes all the way back to Aristotle, that we have advanced sensesâespecially sight and hearingâand then lowly, underdeveloped onesâtaste and smell. Itâs 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 canât 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. Sheâs Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of York in the UK. For a decade now, Asifaâs 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 Asifaâs 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 oneâs ability to discriminate odors. And we venture beyond Asifaâs own work, to touch on a bunch of recent highlights from the broader science of olfaction.
This was such a fun conversation, folks! Iâve admired Asifaâs work on this topic since her very first paper. Sheâs a truly interdisciplinary thinker and, as youâll hear, sheâs 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 â A paper on the 19th century rise of the myth that humans are poor smellers.
6:00 â A paper estimating that humans can discriminate possibly a trillion different odors.
7:30 â A theoretical paper by Dr. Majid and a collaborator on âdifferential ineffabilityâ and the senses.
9:20 â Dr. Majidâs collaborator in her work on Jahai, a Malaysian language, was Niclas Burenhult.
11:00 â A classic book on the idea of âbasic termsâ in the domain of color, which provide an analogy for basic terms in the domain of smell.
12:30 â A first paper by Dr. Majid and Niclas Burenhult describing the language of olfaction in Jahai.
14:45 â Dr. Majidâs first experiment comparing odor naming (and color naming) in Jahai and English.
20:00 â Dr. Majid has also examined smell lexicons in several other languages, including Seri, Thai, Maniq, and Chaâpalaa.
25:40 â A follow-up study by Dr. Majid and a collaborator on two groups within Malaysia who contrast in subsistence mode.
29:30 â A paper detailing cultural practices surrounding smell among the Jahai.
31:00 â 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 â The âdeodorizationâ hypothesis was discussed in a classic book on the cultural history of aroma.
39:40 â 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 â Dr. Majid led a study comparing 20 languages across the world in terms of how expressible their speakers found different sensory experiences.
53:00 â Some possible reasons for the general trend toward the ineffability of smell are considered in Dr. Majidâs recent review paper.
57:00 â Along with her collaborators, Dr. Majid has examined the smell-naming abilities of wine experts. See one paper here.
1:02:45 â A recent paper by Dr. Majid and colleagues showing that wine expertsâ smell-naming abilities are not dependent on âthinking inâ language.
1:05:35 âSome evidence from âverbal interferenceâ tasks suggests that, when carrying out color discrimination tasks, people rely on language in the moment.
1:09:00 â The Odeuropa project.
1:10:20 â The website of Noam Sobelâs lab.
Dr. Majidâs 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.
-
Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, weâre putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!
----
[originally aired February 17, 2021]
Guess what folks: we are celebrating a birthday this week. Thatâs right, Many Minds has reached the ripe age of one year old. Not sure how old that is in podcast years, exactly, but itâs definitely a landmark that weâre proud of. Please no gifts, but, as always, youâre encouraged to share the show with a friend, write a review, or give us a shout out on social.
To help mark this milestone weâve 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 itâs the focus of our conversation in this episode.
The alignment problem, put simply, is the problem of building artificial intelligencesâmachine learning systems, for instanceâthat do what we want them to do, that both reflect and further our values. This is harder to do than you might think, and itâs more important than ever.
As Brian and I discuss, machine learning is becoming increasingly pervasive in everyday lifeâthough itâs sometimes invisible. Itâs 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, Brianâs 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 detailâand 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, itâs also propelling those advances.
This is a wide-ranging and illuminating conversation folks. And, if I may say so, itâs 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 itâand talks about it hereâwith such clarity and insight. I hope you enjoy this one. And, if you do, be sure to check out Brianâs book.
Happy birthday to usâand on to my conversation with Brian Christian. Enjoy!
A transcript of this show is available here.
Notes and links
7:26 - Norbert Wienerâs article from 1960, âSome moral and technical consequences of automationâ.
8:35 - âThe Sorcererâs Apprenticeâ 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 Googleâs nascent auto-tagging function went terribly awry.
13:30 - The âLabeled Faces in the Wildâ 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 â 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 âlaw of effect.â 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 âMontezumaâs Revenge.â
47:38 - A chapter on the classic âpreferential lookingâ 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 âcoherent extrapolated volition.â
1:01:40 - An article on the notion of âiterated distillation and amplification.â
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 McCullochâs poetry.
1:17:45 - The concept of âreductionsâ is central in computer science and mathematics.
Brian Christianâs 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.
-
Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, weâre putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!
---
A pharmacologist and a philosopher walk into a bar... This is not the start of a jokeâitâs 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 oneâin the spirit of the holiday seasonâis intoxication and our guests are Dr. OnĂ© PagĂĄn and Dr. Edward Slingerland. OnĂ© 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 âhand grenadeââwhereas other substances are more like âscalpelsâ. 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 monkeyâ, "stoned apeâ, and "beer before bread" hypotheses. And though we mostly keep things light and festive here, we also do delve into the dark side of intoxicationâwhich may have gotten that much darker with the advent of distilled liquor.
Whether you're a tippler or a teetotaler, Iâm guessing youâll 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 friendsâbe well, be merry, and be safe this holiday season. Weâll be back in mid-January after a not so long winterâs nap. Now on to my conversation with Dr. OnĂ© PagĂĄn and Ted Slingerland. Cheers!
A transcript of this episode is now available.
Notes and links
4:00 â The âwrite drunk, edit soberâ idea is sometimes (mis)attributed to Ernest Hemingway.
8:00 â Dr. PagĂĄn 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 â 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 â The idea of alcohol as pharmacological âhand grenadeâ is a metaphor due to Steven Braun.
19:30 â An article in Science about âwhy cats are crazy for catnip.â
21:20 â A recent article in The Conversation about Asian flushing genes.
26:00 â Thomas Hunt Morgan, who won the Nobel Prize in 1933, pioneered the use of drosophila as an animal model.
28:20 â An article on the inebriometer (with an accompanying illustration).
33:00 â The biologist Robert Dudley introduced the âdrunken monkeyâ hypothesis. A recent synopsis by Dudley.
38:00 â Not to be confused with the âstoned apeâ hypothesis, which was introduced by Terrence McKenna. A recent popular article on the hypothesis.
41:00 â The idea of psychedelics as introducing âmutagensâ into culture comes from How to Change Your Mind, by Michael Pollan.
44:00 â A recent popular article on the âbeer before breadâ hypothesis. The idea was originally proposed in 1953.
48:50 â Pharmaceutical practices of non-human animals are called âzoopharmacognosy.â A 2014 summary of findings about animal self-medication.
53:00 â The original report in Science on the âflower burialâ in Shanidar cave.
56:20 â The Laussel Venus appears to be drinking (alcohol?) from a horn.
59:20 â An article describing the tragic case of Tusko the elephant.
1:03:50 â One example of practices that moderate alcoholâs dangerous effect is the Greek symposium.
1:08:00 â A brief history of distillation, which is a relatively recent invention.
1:11:00 â 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. PagĂĄn 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. PagĂĄn 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.
-
Hi friends, we will be on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, weâre putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Sadly, the guest featured in this week's archive pickâKaren Bakkerâpassed way last month. Her colleagues at UBC posted a rememberance here.
âââ
Consider the peacock. Its plumage is legendaryâthose 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, andâyesâpeacocks.
If you enjoy our conversation, I strongly recommend Karen's book. Itâs really bursting with insight, science, and storiesâall 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, weâd 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 â A range of bat sounds are available on the website of Dr. Mirjam Knörnschild (who was previously featured on the show!).
4:30 â The winner of the 2014 âMost Beautiful Sound in the Worldâ contest was a recording of a froggy swamp in Malaysia.
10:30 â A popular article profiling the relatively young field of âbioacoustics.â A recent academic article by Dr. Bakker and a colleague about âconservation acousticsâ in particular.
11:30 â A popular article about the use of acoustic technologies to discover and monitor whale populations.
17:00 â A research article about the involvement of infrasound in peacock mating displays.
23:30 â A research study showing that coral larvae move toward reef sounds.
28:00 â A review paper by Camila Ferrara and colleagues about sound communication in Amazonian river turtles.
31:00 â A research article by Heidi Appel and a colleague about plants responding to the sounds of leaf-chewing.
35:00 â 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 â A popular article profiling the field of âbiosemiotics.â
48:00 â An essay by Dr. Bakker about honeybee communication and how technologies may be helping us understand it.
53:00 â 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 âsounds of lifeâ are collected at Dr. Bakkerâs 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 Karenâs 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.
-
Hi friends, we will be on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, weâre 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!
âââ
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 storyâa kind of unexpected epilogue. You see, after our brains grew, they shrank. But when this shrinkage happened andâof course, whyâhave remained mysterious. My guest today is Jeremy DeSilva, a paleoanthropologist at Dartmouth College. Heâs 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, Jerryâs team was able to establish that this shrinkage event happened much more recently than previously thoughtâa 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. Thatâs 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. Itâs about origins of upright walking in humansâwhich it turns out, is bound up with all kinds of other important aspects of being human. So definitely check that out!
Thanks folksâon 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 Ââ A podcast episode from the Leakey Foundation about the so-called âobstetrical dilemma.â
5:40 â A refresher for those who have trouble keeping their âcenesâ 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 â An article discussing the issue of unethical collections of human remains.
10:30 â The key figure form Dr. DeSilvaâs paperâshowing the changing âslopesâ of brain size over timeâis available here.
19:30 â The original article by Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler on the âexpensive tissue hypothesis.â A more recent popular article on the hypothesis.
20:45 â 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 â A recent paper by Jeff Stibel and an older preprint by John Hawks evaluating the âbody sizeâ explanation of recent brain shrinkage.
24:00 â See our earlier episode on human self-domestication with Brian Hare.
29:00 â One of Dr. DeSilvaâs collaborators on this research is Dr. James Traniello, who specializes in ants.
34:45 â An overview of the earliest history of writing.
37:20 â Dr. DeSilvaâs book, First Steps, came out in 2021.
39:00 â 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.
-
Hi friends, we will be on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, weâre putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!
âââ
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 thatâs quickly gaining ground. According to this alternative, we don't just react to the world, we anticipate it. Weâre not leaning back but trying to stay a step aheadâour minds are fundamentally active and predictive. And our predictions aren't just idle guesses, eitherâthey're shaping how we experience the world. This new view is known as the âpredictive processing frameworkâ, 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 â 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 â Dr. Miller co-hosts the Contemplative Science podcast, a project of M3CS.
7:30 â For one introduction to the predictive processing framework, see this article by Dr. Miller and colleagues.
11:00 â See Dr. Millerâs essay in Aeon on social media, co-authored with Ben White, as well as this more detailed treatment for an academic audience.
12:00 â See a paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues on depression.
14:00 â An introduction to the subfield of âcomputational psychiatry.â
17:00 â Andy Clarkâs âwatershedâ paper on the predictive processing framework.
18:00 â A recent book on âactive inferenceâ (which is largely synonymous with the predictive processing approach).
22:00 â A chapter on the idea of the âbody as the first prior.â
24:30 â A demo of the âhollow faceâ illusion.
29:00 â On the potential value of psychedelics in jarring people out of trenches and ruts, see also our earlier episode with Alison Gopnik.
31:00 â See our recent episode with Dimitris Xygalatas.
34:30 â A popular article on children wanting to hear the same stories over and over.
38:00 â A paper by Coltan Scrivner and colleagues on horror fans and psychological resilience during COVD-19.
42:30 â A recent article by Dr. Miller and colleagues about the âpredictive dynamics of happiness and well-being,â which covers much of the same terrain as this episode.
46:00 â A recent paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues on the evocative notion of âgrip.â
50:00 â A recent paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues about video games and predictive processing.
57:00 â 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. Millerâs 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.
-
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 colleaguesâthe philosophers Marta Halina and Colin Kleinâjust 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 transitionsâfundamental 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 stagesâor portals, as we refer to themâand 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 aheadâit 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 â For further information about the âmajor transitionsâ project, see the projectâs web page here.
7:00 â Many transitional accounts of evolution draw inspiration from the classic book The Major Transitions in Evolution.
8:00 â 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 â A brief introduction to cnidaria.
18:00 â The idea of cellular memory has been garnering more and more attentionâsee, e.g., this popular article.
21:00 â The idea of âreflectiveâ systems is also used in computer science.
26:00 â 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 â The âteleological fallacyâ as Dr. Barron and colleagues describe it in their paper is the fallacy of âappeal[ing] to later benefits to explain earlier changes.â
34:00 â A brief introduction to the phylum gastropoda.
37:00 â For an overview of Dr. Barronâs work on the neuroscience of honey bees, see our previous episode.
48:30 â Itâs commonly observed in popular coverage of octopuses that their brains are âdecentralizedâ (e.g., here, here, and here).
55:00 â 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 â On the notion of âTuring completeness,â see here. The idea of an âInfinite Improbability Driveâ comes (apparently) from The Hitchhikerâs Guide to the Galaxy.
1:00:06 â For a discussion of eusociality and individuality in the context of âmajor transitionsâ 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.
- Laat meer zien