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The savvy cephalopod
20 januari 2021 · 42 min
Today we've got another "behind the paper" episode for you. In it, we're talking about some of the most alien-seeming yet charismatic creatures around. I chatted with Dr. Alex Schnell, a Comparative Psychologist and Research Fellow at Cambridge University. We discuss a paper she recently published with a few colleagues titled, 'How intelligent is a cephalopod?' Lees meer
I've been charmed by cephalopods for awhile now—octopuses specifically. Maybe you have too. You've probably seen those videos of octopuses carrying coconut shells for protection, or pretending to be a hermit grab or a flounder. Maybe you saw the recent documentary My Octopus Teacher where the main octopus character gathers a bunch of shells into a kind of makeshift armor to protect herself against an imminent shark attack. This is all jaw-droppingly, head-scratchingly cool stuff. But you may have also wondered, as I have, what's really going on—cognitively— behind these behaviors. What's happening in the minds of these creatures when they pull off these fancy feats? Could the mechanisms involved actually be simpler than you might at first guess?
This really is the core issue in Alex's paper and we circle around it for much of the conversation. But, in circling, we touch on a lot. We cover some Cephalopod 101 type stuff—when cephalopods split from vertebrates, what cephalopods brains are like, why octopuses tends to hog the limelight when squid and cuttlefish are pretty impressive, too. We talk about Alex's studies of self-control in cuttlefish, styled on the classic marshmallow experiments. We talk about the cephalopod gift for disguise and whether this gift might suggest a form of bodily awareness or maybe even theory of mind. And we zoom out to talk about the evolution of cognitive sophistication generally and how cephalopods can help us understand the kinds of forces that drive it.
I've been excited about cephalopods for awhile now, but having this conversation made me that much more so. It's convinced…
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Telling tracks
6 januari 2021 · 15 min
Welcome to our first episode of 2021! Super excited to get this year going—we've got, I promise, lots of great conversations in store for you. But this week, to kick things off, we have a brief audio essay. It's about tracks—that's right, footprints. This might seem at first glance like a narrow topic but, fear not, it contains multitudes. Lees meer
I started thinking about this theme a month or so ago after the first snowfall of the winter. It was just a dusting but perfect conditions for clear, distinct footprints. I was out in the park totally transfixed by these crisp perfect animal tracks. (I'm still not sure what kind of animal, some small to medium mammal.) And, anyway, I got to thinking about how many of us have lost touch with tracks—just like we've lost touch with so many other natural phenomena, from bird calls to constellations. And I started thinking about the many meanings of tracks. The roles they've played. What they can tell us.
So that was the seed from which this essay grew. In it we talk about how archaeologists have used trackways to reconstruct our prehistory; about how, according to some, tracking played a role in our cognitive evolution; and we talk about how about tracks are mainstay of myth and metaphor and visual culture. Lots here folks—I think you'll enjoy it.
A text version of this essay is available on Medium.
Notes and links
2:45 – The Laetoli prints have been written about in numerous places. Early reports by Mary Leakey and colleagues are here and here. A brief, accessible, up-to-date overview is here.
4:15 – The 2013 prints from Norfolk, England are widely known as the Happisburgh prints. Read the original report here.
4:40 – Read the paper about the 2020 prints from White Sands National Monument here. A popular article about the trackway can be read here.
6:15 – Read Kim Shaw-Williams' "social trackways theory" paper here. More recently, he has expanded these ideas to cover the evolution of language.
8:20 – A 2003 paper by Deborah…
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Humans, dogs, and other domesticated animals
9 december 2020 · 1 uur 9 min
When you think of domestication, I bet you think of farm animals—you know cows and pigs and alpacas—or maybe house pets. You might think of corn or wheat or rice. You probably don't think of us—humans, Homo sapiens. But, by the end of today's conversation, I'm guessing you will. Lees meer
For this episode I talked with Dr. Brian Hare of Duke University. He's a core member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience there, as well a Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology. Along with Vanessa Woods, he's the author of book published this summer titled Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding our Origins and Rediscovering our Common Humanity.
We talked about Brian's research with dogs, foxes, and bonobos and how it led him to a big idea at the center of this new book. The idea is that, much as we domesticated farm animals to make them tamer and easier to work with, we also seem to have domesticated ourselves at some point in our evolutionary past. This process is known as self-domestication—a selection for friendliness. But beyond making us gentler and smilier, the domestication process also had a bunch of unexpected impacts on our behaviors, bodies, and brains. Really unexpected, like the fact that we have globe-shaped heads. According to Brian and Vanessa's account, self-domestication was in fact the force that allowed ancient humans to develop larger social networks and, in turn, more sophisticated technologies. So it may hold the answer to why we're still around while other hominin species—like the Neanderthals—aren't.
As Brian says at one point in our conversation, the book is really offering an account of human nature. And, importantly, it's a dual nature. Lurking behind our friendliness—co-existing and co-evolved with our newfound chumminess—is a darker side, a capacity for real cruelty.
I consider the human self-domestication hypothesis to be one of the most fascinating ideas of that last decade. Right now it's really at the center of a lot of conversations about huma…
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From where we stand
25 november 2020 · 1 uur 18 min
Welcome back folks! Today's episode is a conversation about the nature of knowledge. I talked with Dr. Briana Toole, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. Briana specializes in epistemology—the branch of philosophy that grapples with all things knowledge-related. In her work she is helping develop a new framework called "standpoint epistemology." The basic idea is that what we know depends in part on our social position—on our gender, our race, and other factors. We flesh out this idea by walking through a bunch of examples that show how where we stand shapes the facts we attend to, believe, accept, and resist. We also talk about our moment present, polarized and fractured as it is. As we discuss, standpoint epistemology might offer tools to help us make sense of what's happening, understand where others are coming from, and maybe even bridge some of the chasms that divide us. Enjoy! Lees meer
A transcript of this show is available here.
Notes and links
2:10 – Learn more about Dr. Toole's outreach organization, Corrupt the Youth. And for more about Dr. Toole's work with the program see this recent profile in Guernica magazine.
6:15 – Socrates was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth.
9:00 – Corrupt the Youth often begins with lessons on the allegory of the cave and the ring of Gyges.
19:50 – For more on the significance of "fake barn country," see this entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Gettier's groundbreaking paper is here.
23:00 – We mention a number of early pioneers in standpoint epistemology, including Rebecca Kukla, Sandra Harding, and Donna Haraway.
26:40 – Jane Addams's letter about women and public housekeeping.
32:20 – Dr. Toole's recent paper—'From Standpoint Epistemology to Epistemic Oppression'—discusses the distinction between marginalized and dominant knowers, among other topics.
32:55 – Kristie Dotson's classic paper on epistemic oppression. You can also listen to a podcast with her here.
37:00 – …
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Lost in translation?
11 november 2020 · 34 min
Today we've got another installment in our "behind the paper" format. In case you missed the first iteration, these are 30-minute or so interviews that dig into recent notable papers. Lees meer
This episode takes on a timeless question: Do concepts differ from one language to the next, or are they basically the same? Maybe you think we already know the answer. You've probably heard of cases where one language labels a concept that other languages don't—the German word schaudenfreude, or the Danish notion of hygge, or, my favorite, the Japan concept of tsundoku.
These examples are fun and get a lot of attention, and they certainly make it clear that there's at least some variation. But a more provocative possibility is that even everyday words that seem easy to translate—words for concepts like chair, beautiful, or walk—might actually differ considerably from one language to the next. Today I talk to Dr. Bill Thompson, a postdoc at Princeton University in the Department of Computer Science and Dr. Gary Lupyan, a Professor at the University of Wisconsin in the Department of Psychology. Along with their co-author Sean Roberts, they published a paper this summer that looks at just this issue, at whether basic words have the same meanings across languages. The paper's title is: "Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment."
We talk about the computational approach they use to quantify the similarity of word meanings. We consider their finding that certain kinds of concepts are more similar across languages than others. We discuss the role of culture in shaping concepts. And we talk a bit about why their paper caused something of a stir online.
I found this to be a really thought-provoking conversation. It circles around one of the deepest questions we can ask about the human mind: Where do our concepts come from? Spoiler: we don't settle the question once and for all here. But we do throw some light on it—perhaps.
Without further ado,…
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Revising the Neanderthal story
28 oktober 2020 · 1 uur 18 min
You probably think you know the Neanderthals. We've all been hearing about them since we were kids, after all. They were all over the comics; they were in museum dioramas and on cartoons. They were always cast as mammoth-eating, cave-dwelling dimwits—nasty brutes, in other words. You probably also learned that they died off because they couldn't keep pace with us, Homo sapiens, their svelter, savvier superiors. Lees meer
That's story we had long been told anyhow. But, over the past few decades, there's been a slow-moving sea change—a revolution in how archaeologists understand our closest cousins. For this episode I talked to Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes about this revolution. She is a Neanderthal specialist and the author of the new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art.
Rebecca and I discuss the new picture of Neanderthals emerging from the latest archaeological research. We talk about where they lived, what they ate, the tools and clothing they made. We talk about the evidence that they had a considerable degree of cognitive sophistication and—very possibly—an aesthetic sense. Once we put all this together—and let the new picture come into focus—the gap long thought to separate them from us from them starts to close. And this makes the question of why they vanished about 40 thousand years ago all the more puzzling.
I really hope you enjoy this one—I certainly did. And if you do, I definitely encourage you to check out Kindred!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
Most of the topics we discuss are treated in detail in Rebecca Wragg Sykes's book, Kindred.
5:40 – Earlier book-length treatments of the Neanderthals include The Smart Neanderthal and Neanderthals Revisited.
9:15 – The archaeological site of Atapuerca in Spain, which includes the Sima de los Huesos (Pit of Bones).
11:20 – The Neander Valley in Germany was the site of the very first Neanderthal find in 1856.
11:50 – Another early site was Krapina, Croatia, which is now…
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The root-brain hypothesis
14 oktober 2020 · 14 min
Welcome back folks! Today is a return to one of our favorite formats: the audio essay. If you like your audio essays short, concise, and full of tidbits, then this mini will not disappoint. Lees meer
We take a look at a 140-year-old idea but very much a radical one—the root-brain hypothesis. It was proposed by Charles Darwin in a book published in the twilight of his career. The idea, in short, is that plants have a structure that is, in some ways, brain-like—and it is located underground, at their roots. We talk about how Darwin and his son Francis arrived at this idea, why it was ignored for so long, and how it's recently stirred to life.
Enjoy!
A text version of this "mini" is available here.
Notes and links
2:15 – The last page of Darwin's The Power of Movement in Plants (1880).
3:25 – The 2009 paper by Dr. Baluška and colleagues about the history and modern revival of the "root-brain hypothesis."
6:00 – The tinfoil hats experiment—and its influence—is discussed in this 2009 paper.
8:00 – The dust-up between Darwin and Sachs is described in this 1996 paper.
8:47 – The 2011 paper listing many of the environmental variables plants are now known to be sensitive to.
9:28 – Dr. Gagliano and colleagues' paper on associative learning in plant and on plants' use of sounds to find water. The possibility of echolocation is discussed here.
9:45 – For broader context surrounding the question of plants may have something like a brain, see Oné R. Pagán's essay titled 'The brain: A concept in flux.'
9:57 – The 2006 paper that inaugurated the field of "plant neurobiology."
10:34 – Discussions of the "transition zone" of the root can be found in the 2009 paper by Baluška and colleagues, as well as in this more technical paper from 2010.
11:00 – The response letter to the original "plant neurobiology" paper, signed by 36 plant biologists.
12:00 – Michael Pollan's 2013 article 'The Intelligent Plant' in The New Yorker.
12:05 – Anthony Trewavas's letter, highlighting the pow…
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When the mind's eye can't see
30 september 2020 · 1 uur 6 min
Imagine a friend's face. How much detail do you see? Do you see the color of their hair? What about the curve of their smile? For many people, this mental image will be relatively vivid. A somewhat watered down picture, sure, but still a picture—still something similar to what they would see if that friend were sitting across from them. For other folks, though, there's no image there at all. There's just no way to will it into being. Such people have what is now known as "aphantasia"—the inability to generate visual imagery. Lees meer
Today I talk with Dr. Rebecca Keogh, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of New South Wales in Australia. Dr. Keogh is one of the leading researchers in the new, fast-evolving study of aphantasia. We talk about the work she and her colleagues are doing to explore the full spectrum of individual differences in visual imagery ability, how these differences arise in the brain, and how they impact different aspects of everyday life, from how we dream, to how we envision the future, to how we respond to trauma. We also talk about folks on the other end of the spectrum—those with so-called "hyperphantasia," who experience visual images in extraordinary detail. And we get a sneak preview of some of the questions that Rebecca and her colleagues are taking on next.
This episode takes us, for the first time on Many Minds, into the fascinating terrain of individual differences—into questions about how other human minds may differ from our own, often in ways that invisible and unexpected. This is terrain we definitely plan to revisit in future episodes. Had a blast with this one folks—hope you enjoy it, too!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
3:16 – The 2015 paper in Cortex that introduced the term "aphantasia," but the spectrum of visual imagery ability has been studied since the 1800s.
5:08 – In the 1980s Martha Farah and colleagues studied a case of acquired "aphantasia," though they didn't use the term at the…
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Do baboons understand death?
16 september 2020 · 32 min
We've got a little something different for you today—a new format we'll be experimenting with over the next few months. You can think of it as a kind of "behind the paper" series. The idea is to take notable articles from the last year or so and talk to their authors. We'll delve into each paper's backstory, sketch its broader context, and dig up some of that fun stuff that just doesn't get mentioned in a formal scientific write-up. We'll still be doing our longform interviews as well, but we'll be mixing in shorter ones in this style. Lees meer
For this first installment we're discussing a paper published in March of this year titled 'Baboon thanatology'. It describes a truly startling behavior: when an infant baboon dies, it's mother may carry its corpse around for days, sometimes a week or longer. She might continue to groom it or care for it in other ways. The paper is one of a raft of recent articles on how animals respond to death and dying. This new research area of "comparative thanatology" asks whether animals truly understand this basic bodily process, whether they grieve, whether they get that death is final and irreversible.
To talk about this deep stuff, I'm joined in this episode by not one but two of the study's authors—Dr. Alecia Carter, who is a Lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology at University College London and Dr. Elise Huchard, a CNRS Research Scientist at the Institute of Evolutionary Sciences, at the University of Montpellier.
Hope you enjoy this format. As always, let us know what you think. On to my conversation with Alecia and Elise. Enjoy!
The paper we discuss—by Alecia Carter, Alice Baniel, Guy Cowlishaw, and Elise Huchard—is here. A transcript of this interview is available here.
Notes and links
2:25 – More info about the Tsaobis Baboon Project in Namibia. Dr. Carter and Dr. Huchard co-direct the project with Dr. Guy Cowlishaw.
7:35 – A 2018 special issue on 'Evolutionary thanatology' that helped crystallize the field and another one fr…
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Clever crows and cheeky keas
2 september 2020 · 1 uur 21 min
Welcome back everyone! Hope you all had a great August. And hope you're all—like me—jazzed about the start of Season 2 of Many Minds. Lees meer
There's a viral video clip from 2014—maybe you've seen it. It features a subject in a pretty remarkable psychology experiment. He's put in room full of different apparatuses, one of which contains reward. After sizing up the room, the subject gets started. The first thing he does is tug on a string until he can reach a short stick that's tied to the end of it. He then uses that stick to retrieve a stone that was just out of his reach, behind some bars; then he retrieves another stone in the same way; then a third. One at a time, he picks up the stones, takes them across the way, and plunks them down a tube. Nothing happens at first but, after the third stone, the combined weight lowers a trap door, releasing a long stick. The subject then uses that long stick to carefully pry out his reward from a deep hole.
It's an impressive display of problem solving. But what's most remarkable is that the subject in question is not a Psych 101 student but a bird—a New Caledonian crow, to be exact—and his name is 007.
My guest on today's show is Alex Taylor, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Auckland. He's the one who devised this challenge for 007—it brings together a number of tasks he's used with New Caledonian crows over the years to try to understand their striking capacities for tool use, for planning, and for reasoning of different kinds.
We talk about how Alex got interested in crows and how he studies them; we talk about what seems to be going on in their minds when they solve multi-step puzzles; we talk about the kinds of tools that crows make and use in the wild and the emerging evidence that using those tools puts them in a good mood. We then zoom out to discuss some of the leading ideas about what drives the evolution of intelligence behavior, whether in crows or chimps or children. We also touch on some of…
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What kindled your interest in minds?
29 juli 2020 · 26 min
If you're listening to this podcast, it's a safe bet that you're interested in minds. You probably have been for awhile. But what sparked it in you? What's kept it going? For some folks it may have been something they learned in school. Perhaps it was a stray factoid. It could have been a museum visit, or a scientific finding they heard about on the radio. Lees meer
But very often it seems that what sparks or stokes our interest in minds comes from elsewhere—from outside the classroom, from outside non-fiction writing, from outside science altogether. In this episode, we asked a group of creative folks to reflect on what got them thinking about minds. All our contributors are past participants in the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (or DISI)—and specifically in the storyteller program. This is a residency for creative folks working in any medium. So here's the exact question we asked them:
"What is one work of fiction—movie, novel, short story, etc—that has kindled your interest in mind, cognition, and intelligence? This could be from childhood or college or just last week."
Here are their answers. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Contributor / work referenced:
MOsley WOtta / The Point (film)
Ada Brunstein / The Neapolitan Novels (book series)
Abeer Hoque / The Bluest Eye (book)
Angel Teng / 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)
Amey Zhang / Maniac (TV show)
Richa Rudola / Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (film)
Mallessa (Les) James / The Dictionary
Taylor Beck / The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (poem)
Boris Oicherman / The Weather Project (art installation)
Laura Sydell / When Things Fall Apart (book)
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and A…
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The shaman, the witch, and the folktale
15 juli 2020 · 1 uur 21 min
Welcome back all! Today's episode is a conversation with Dr. Manvir Singh. Manvir recently finished his PhD in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and will soon begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. Manvir studies human culture. In particular, he focuses on certain cultural practices and products that spring up over and over again across the world's societies—often in strikingly similar form. To explain these similarities, Manvir appeals to the human mind. He argues that our universal mental machinery plays a powerful role in molding our cultural traditions and products. Lees meer
We start by diving deep into the topic of shamanism. We talk about why humans around the world have long put their trust in shamans—and why they still do today. We discuss why it is that, to secure that trust, shamans everywhere enter trance states, deny themselves worldly comforts, and undergo harrowing initiation rituals. We then move beyond shamanism. We talk about why we believe in witches and why we like stories about orphans and other sympathetic characters. We consider why people the world over know a lullaby when they hear one.
Part of what I admire about Manvir's work is his balanced interest in both universal cultural patterns and fine-grained particulars. He's interested in the forest, definitely, but also in the trees. And, trust me, there are a lot of fascinating trees here.
Hope you enjoy this one as much as I did. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Manvir Singh.
A transcript of this interview is available here.
Notes and links
3:00 – An 1896 article by Frans Boaz titled, 'The limitations of the comparative method in anthropology.'
6:15 – Read Dr. Singh's article, 'The cultural evolution of shamanism.'
20:45 – A popular article by Dr. Singh on money managers as modern shamans.
24:30 – On the question of whether magicians believe in their own powers, see Nicholas Humphrey's essay 'Behold the Man: Human …
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WEIRD: Adventures of an acronym
1 juli 2020 · 13 min
Welcome to our 10th episode! Today's show is another in our 'mini minds' series. We've been experimenting with different formats for our minis, as you may have noticed, but today we've got another in the classic blogpost style. Lees meer
The topic is the acronym WEIRD—maybe you've heard it used. It stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It's become a shorthand for the idea that people in WEIRD societies are a bit unusual relative to the rest our species. The term was first introduced 10 years ago. On this episode I talk about its origins and the far-reaching influence it's had since.
As with all episodes, be sure to check out the show notes for a smorgasbord of links and tidbits. There was a lot I had to leave on the cutting room floor with this one. But I swept some of it up and put it in the notes for anyone who's interested.
Enjoy!
A text version of this "mini" is readable here.
Notes and links
2:00 – The birthplace of the acronym: 'The weirdest people in the world?'
2:44 – A 2008 paper by Jeffrey Arnett that provided key support for the first part of Henrich et al.'s two-part argument.
3:35 – The visual illusion in question is the Müller-Lyer Illusion.
3:52 – These cultural differences in spatial conceptualization were first widely reported by Stephen Levinson and colleagues. See his book for the full story (or see a popular article of mine for a much shorter version).
4:33 – See the commentary by Meadon and Spurrett titled 'It's not just the subjects – there are too many WEIRD researchers.'
4:45 – See the commentary by Rozin titled 'The weirdest people in the world are a harbinger of the future of the world.' For an expansion of Rozin's argument, with more examples, see my article on "global WEIRDing".
5:45 – See David F. Lancy, The Anthropology of Childhood. (Note that only the second edition came out after the WEIRD article was published.) One part of child development that proves unexpectedly variable across cultures is learni…
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How do chimps communicate?
17 juni 2020 · 1 uur 32 min
Welcome back everyone! My guest on today's show is Dr. Cat Hobaiter. Cat is a Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, where she's part of research unit called the Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution. Cat spends a good chunk of her time, not in Scotland, however, but in Africa, where she conducts fieldwork on great apes. Her primary research site is in the Budongo Forest Reserve in Uganda. Along with her team there, she studies the social behavior of wild chimpanzees—in particular, how they communicate with each other. Lees meer
Much of our conversation centers on how chimps communicate through gesture—through bodily theatrics like stomping, drumming, clapping, somersaulting, and pirouetting. We discuss when chimps use these gestures, how they acquire them, and the thorny issue of what they mean. We also talk about how the gestures of chimpanzees compare to the gestures of other primates—including those bonobos, gorillas, and human toddlers. Cat and I do make our way over to other topics, too—we touch on some work she and her colleagues have done on the so-called "cooperative eye" hypothesis. We talk about the day-to-day of what it's like to do fieldwork on great apes. And we talk about how the chimps at Budongo are faring in these pandemic times.
Not many of us get the opportunity to observe our closest primate cousins in the wild. I've certainly never been so lucky. But maybe the next best thing is to hear from someone who has—particularly someone like Cat who has spent more than a decade watching chimps closely, puzzling out their propensities, and generally just figuring out what they're up to.
I learned a lot from this conversation—and had fun to boot. I think you will do. So without any more preamble, here is my conversation with Dr. Cat Hobaiter!
A transcript of this interview is available here.
Notes and links
2:45 – Learn more about the Budongo Forest Reserve here.
7:45 – Chimpanzees are "neophobic"—afraid of new things, like humans. As a resu…
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A mini minds with many voices
3 juni 2020 · 20 min
A warm welcome back! On this "mini minds" installment, we tried something a little different. We reached out to former participants in the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI)—including grad students, post docs, and faculty—to ask them a couple questions. What we've done for this episode put together a selection of their answers. Here were the questions: Lees meer
1. What is a book you've read over the last couple months and would recommend—perhaps because it offered insight, comfort, context, or escape?
2. As we start to look beyond the pandemic, what are some changes you think—or hope—may be in store for academic research?These could be changes to your own practices or priorities as a researcher; to your subfield; to academic culture or practices generally; or to the role of science in society.
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Contributors
Anna Corwin, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Saint Mary's College of California
Nadya Vasilyeva, Postdoctoral Researcher, Princeton University/ UC Berkeley/ UCLA
Brian Bruya, Professor of Philosophy, Eastern Michigan University
Dániel Czégel, Graduate Student at Eötvös University, Budapest Hungary
Amalia Bastos, Graduate Student in Comparative Psychology at the University of Auckland
Jacob Foster, Founding Co-Director of DISI, Associate Professor of Sociology, UCLA
Colin Conwell, Graduate Student in the Department of Psychology, Harvard University
Alina Arseniev-Koehler, Graduate Student in the Department of Sociology, UCLA
Efrén Cruz Cortés, Eberly Postdoctroal Research Fellow, Penn State University
Chris Krupenye, Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Psychology, Durham University (UK)
Haleh Yazdi, Graduate Student in the Departments of Psychology, UCSD
Book recommendations
Man Is Not Alone, by Abraham Joshua Heschel
At the Existentialist Café, by Sarah Bakewell
Confucius Beyond the Analects, by Michael Hunter
The Book of Life, edited by Stephen Jay Gould
What is Life, by…
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Message to the stars
20 mei 2020 · 1 uur 8 min
Greetings all—and a warm welcome back for another episode! Today's show is a conversation with Daniel Oberhaus. Daniel is a staff writer for Wired magazine and the author of the book Extraterrestrial Languages, published by MIT Press in 2019. The book charts the history of humanity's efforts at "interstellar communication"—our attempts to send messages to the stars in the hopes that alien life forms might receive them. Daniel and I talk about what these messages have contained, what forms they've taken, and the thinking and theories behind them. Lees meer
As you might guess, the history of interstellar communication is packed full of colorful episodes, charismatic characters, and quirky passion projects. But it's also full of deep questions—questions about the very nature of communication, about the essence of human language, about why minds think in the ways they do, about the origins of mathematics, about what can and should be said on behalf of our species—or our planet. Apologies for the long list, but there really is a lot in play here—we touch on a bunch of it but for the fuller story, I definitely recommend you check out Daniel's book.
Thank you so much for joining us, as always. Enjoy and take care!
A transcript of this interview is available here.
Notes and links
Most of the topics we discuss are treated in detail in Daniel Oberhaus's book, Extraterrestrial Languages.
2:38 – In 1960 the mathematician Hans Freudenthal published a book called Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse. Here is Daniel's original article profiling Freudenthal and his ideas.
5:08 – There were a number of fanciful early schemes for communicating with aliens. For example, Carl Friedrich Gauss, better known for his contributions to mathematics, reportedly proposed building a large right triangle as a kind of message.
10:30 – The Arecibo message was devised and sent by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan in 1974.
11:25 – Two important acronyms in this world: the search for extraterr…
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Me, my umwelt, and I
6 mei 2020 · 11 min
Welcome to the sixth episode of Many Minds! Today we have another 'mini minds' for you. We'll be talking about umwelt theory—the idea that every species has its own self-world, its own private and peculiar mode of sensing and being. The theory was first put forth in the 1900s by a theoretical biologist named Jakob von Uexküll. He developed the umwelt concept in a short treatise that blended scientific and literary in striking and whimsical way. Remarkably—despite its age—umwelt theory is not dead yet. To the contrary, as you'll hear, it's seems more influential than ever. Lees meer
I'm not sure about you, but in my part of the world nature is coming alive right now. The mornings are thick with birdsong; everything is greener than it was a month ago. It's a good time, in other words, to head outside—maybe to the nearest meadow, perhaps for a sun-dappled daydream, or a bit of frolic. And, while your out there, it's a good time to think about the many umwelts that surround us.
Thanks for listening friends! I hope you enjoy this one.
A text version of this "mini" is readable here.
Notes and links
2:04 – More info about Nagel's famous paper.
2:40 – More info about Jakob von Uexküll.
3:05 – A link to the "little monograph" in which von Uexküll sets out his umwelt theory. A new English edition was released in 2010.
8:00 – Kindred spirits of umwelt theory include Maturana's autopoeisis, J.J. Gibson's ecological psychology, niche construction, and enactivism. See also this recent article, which discusses some of these links.
8:30 – A paper in which Donald Hoffman and colleagues lay out the "interface theory of perception."
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hild…
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Born to be cultured
22 april 2020 · 1 uur 19 min
Welcome back! Today's episode is a conversation with Cristine Legare. Cristine is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on how our minds allow us to do culture—to learn it, to create it, and to pass it on. Among other things, we talk about cumulative culture and the human capacities for imitation and innovation. We talk about the power of ritual and about thorny questions surrounding human uniqueness. We touch on work that Cristine and her team have done in Vanuatu. And we muse about the problems facing psychology—in particular the so-called WEIRD problem. For those who may not know, this is the issue of psychologists unduly focusing on a thin slice of humanity—namely, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) folks. I found Cristine's perspective on this issue—and really on all these issues—super insightful. Lees meer
Without further ado, here is my conversation with Dr. Cristine Legare. Hope you enjoy it! And please be well.
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
2:35 – An article about "cumulative culture."
3:25 –There is debate about whether any non-human animals show evidence of cumulative culture. Here is one review of the topic.
6:30 – A paper by Dr. Legare and a colleague on imitation and innovation as "dual engines of cultural learning."
10:53 – One of Dr. Legare's studies examining children's flexible understanding of when to imitate faithfully.
13:07 – A popular article about the puzzle of why chimps in Zambia started to put grass in their ears. The primary research was reported here.
14:25 – The literature on so-called "over-imitation" is substantial. Here is a recent review.
19:14 – An encyclopedia article by Dr. Legare and a colleague on ritual. See also their paper on the social functions of rituals.
25:45 – Here is the original paper report on the "illusion of explanatory depth."
28:42 – A paper on how a culture's history of migration af…
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Artificial Olympians
8 april 2020 · 20 min
Welcome to our next 'Mini Minds' installment! Lees meer
As I mentioned before, we're still figuring out what we want this format to be, so you can expect a bit of tinkering over the coming months. Our first mini was a short audio blogpost of sorts, and today's mini is a mini interview. I chatted with Matt Crosby. He's a postdoc at Imperial College London and has been spearheading a super cool project called the Animal AI Olympics. (If you recall, this is something that Marta Halina and I touched on briefly in our last episode, but it seemed intriguing enough to merit a longer look.) The basic idea behind the project, as Matt and I discuss, was to have a bunch of artificial agents—submitted by teams from around the world—compete in a gauntlet of tests. The wrinkle was that these weren't the kinds of tests usually given to artificial systems. They were tests usually given to animals: some involved avoiding obstacles; others involved remembering locations; still others involved solving physical puzzles, like the celebrated "trap tube" task. This all sounds like good fun—and no doubt it was. But there were also deeper motivations for the project. Matt and I talk about those. We also talk a bit about how the contestants performed, about whether he was impressed, and about his team's plans for the next iteration of the Olympics, to be held in 2021.
Enjoy the mini—and thanks for listening!
A transcript of this interview is available here.
Notes and links
2:23 – An article by Dr. Crosby and colleagues about the Animal AI Olympics and the motivations behind it.
3:45 – An article about recent successes in getting AIs to play Atari games.
5:45 – For details about the Animal AI environment and the types of tasks use, see here.
8:28 – A little more about object permanence.
12:48 – Variants of the "trap tube" task have been widely used in animal cognition research. Here's an example of a paper using it in apes, and here is a video of a dog attempting this kind of task.
14:15 – A…
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Can artificial minds think creatively?
25 maart 2020 · 56 min
Welcome back! Our guest today is Marta Halina, a University Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Lees meer
Marta's current focus is the philosophy of artificial intelligence. We discuss what philosophers can contribute to AI. We talk about AlphaGo and its stunning defeat of one of the world's most celebrated Go champions. We puzzle over whether artificial minds can think creatively. (We also touch briefly on a project that Marta has been involved in called the Animal AI Olympics. Consider this part of our conversation a teaser—our next 'mini' episode is going to take a longer look at this initiative.)
Marta brings a distinctive perspective to all these issues. As you'll hear, she's worked on great ape minds as well as artificial minds, and she's run scientific experiments in addition to her philosophical work.
As always, thanks for listening—we hope you enjoy the conversation.
A transcript of this interview can be found here.
Notes and links
8:45 – The key distinction between artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial narrow intelligence (ANI).
10:25 – AlphaGo's victory against Go master Lee Sedol.
12:00 – More about Go.
15:57 – Lee Sedol announces his retirement.
17:00 – An article by Marta Halina and colleagues describing the Animal AI Olympics. (Stay tuned for our upcoming "mini" episode about this!)
23:05 – Demis Hassabis is the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind. You can listen to an interview with him here.
26:45 – On the idea that creative ideas are new, surprising, and valuable, see this collection of essays.
28:45 – A blogpost on DeepMind's system AlphaFold, part of its effort to develop AIs that support scientific discovery.
30:32 – For Margaret Boden's distinction between P-creativity and H-creativity, see this article (or this book).
35:45 - An article about Stephen Hawking's 2016 presentation at the launch of the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence.…
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The monkey in the mirror
11 maart 2020 · 10 min
Welcome to our second episode—and our very first installment of Mini Minds! Mini Minds is a short, snack-sized format that will alternate with our longer conversations. Today's Mini is a primer on the mirror self-recognition test. This is a classic paradigm in comparative psychology—and, as we'll see, it continues to generate both results and criticism. Lees meer
Thanks for listening, and we hope you enjoy the mini format!
A text version of this "mini" is readable here.
Notes and links
2:58 – Wilhelm Preyer's observations on ducks.
3:15 – Wolfgang Kohler's The Mentality of Apes.
3:33 – The original mirror test study by Gordon Gallup.
6:09 – Frans de Waal's 2019 paper, offering a gradualist perspective on self-awareness in animals.
6:45 – Alexandra Horowitz's 2017 paper, innovating an olfactory version of the mirror test for use in dogs.
8:56 – A recent study correlating brain structures in chimps with their performance on the mirror test.
9:05 – A recent study correlating chimps' performance on the mirror test with other measures of their social cognition abilities.
The research surrounding the mirror test is truly vast—much vaster than could be covered in a short episode. Here are a couple recommendation for further reading:
A recent Aeon essay by Virgina Morell
A popular article about a recent finding of mirror self-recognition in the wrasse fish
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).
You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you…
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Of bees and brains
26 februari 2020 · 1 uur 9 min
Welcome to our first full-length episode! The guest for our inaugural interview is Dr. Andrew Barron, a neuroethologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. (In case you're wondering what a neuroethologist is, don't' worry, we get to that.) Lees meer
Andrew specializes in honey bees. He studies their minute brains, their natural behaviors, and their remarkable cognitive abilities. We probably don't have to tell you that bees are cool. Humans have been fascinated with them for centuries. But one thing that makes Andrews's work especially cool is how it sheds light on questions that are bigger than bees—questions about how minds work, about how brains support conscious experience, about learning and memory, and a lot else. As you may have heard, bees have seen better days—like so much else in our natural world, they're starting to show signs of stress. We talk about that, too.
Thanks for listening, and we hope you enjoy the conversation.
A transcript of this interview can be found here.
Notes and links
7:30 – A very brief introduction to honey bee dance communication. A more in-depth introduction.
11:15 – A paper by Andrew Barron and Colin Klein on consciousness in the animal kingdom, including which species have it and which don't. See also this popular write-up.
12:11 – A paper by Bjorn Merker about the role of the midbrain in supporting conscious awareness.
26:30 – A connectome is a map of neural connections.
32:00 – A popular article about new 3d maps of the insect brain. A new pre-print that includes some of the latest maps of the Drosophila brain.
33:55 – Thomas Nagel's classic paper, 'What is it like to be a bat?'
38:30 – Bees are able to navigate using polarized light.
41:00 – A popular article by Andrew Barron on bees' ability to discriminate between art styles. Barron's demonstration builds on the earlier studies by Judith Reinhard and colleagues.
54:05 – A recent paper that summarizes our understanding of cephalopod brains.
54:40 – The word "s…
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Introducing 'Many Minds'
15 februari 2020 · 4 min
Welcome to 'Many Minds,' a podcast about the curious ways that mind manifests—in humans, animals, and machines. We spotlight the findings, theories, and phenomena that are changing how we think about minds. Lees meer
A text version of this episode is available here.