Animal, heal thyself
Many Minds
What happens to animals when they get sick? If they’re pets or livestock, we probably call the vet. And the vet may give them drugs or perform a procedure. But what about wild animals? Do they just languish in misery? Well, not so much. It turns out that animals—from bees to butterflies, porcupines to primates—medicate themselves. They seek out bitter plants, they treat wounds, they amputate limbs, they eat clay—the list goes on. This all raises an obvious question: How do they know to do this? How do they know what they know about healing and medicine? It also invites a related...
info_outline
The rise of machine culture
Many Minds
The machines are coming. Scratch that—they're already here: AIs that propose new combinations of ideas; chatbots that help us summarize texts or write code; algorithms that tell us who to friend or follow, what to watch or read. For a while the reach of intelligent machines may have seemed somewhat limited. But not anymore—or, at least, not for much longer. The presence of AI is growing, accelerating, and, for better or worse, human culture may never be the same. My guest today is . Iyad directs the at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Iyad is a...
info_outline
How should we think about IQ?
Many Minds
IQ is, to say the least, a fraught concept. Psychologists have studied IQ—or g for “general cognitive ability”—maybe more than any other psychological construct. And they’ve learned some interesting things about it. That it's remarkably stable over the lifespan. That it really is general: people who ace one test of intellectual ability tend to ace others. And that IQs have risen markedly over the last century. At the same time, IQ seems to be met with increasing squeamishness, if not outright disdain, in many circles. It's often seen as crude, misguided, reductive—maybe a whole lot...
info_outline
Rethinking the "wood wide web"
Many Minds
Forests have always been magical places. But in the last couple decades, they seem to have gotten a little more magical. We've learned that trees are connected to each other through a vast underground network—an internet of roots and fungi often called the "wood wide web". We've learned that, through this network, trees share resources with each other. And we've learned that so-called mother trees look out for their own offspring, preferentially sharing resources with them. There's no question that this is all utterly fascinating. But what if it's also partly a fantasy? My guest today is ....
info_outline
Electric ecology
Many Minds
There's a bit of a buzz out there, right now, but maybe you haven’t noticed. It's in the water, it's in the air. It's electricity—and it's all around us, all the time, including in some places you might not have expected to find it. We humans, after all, are not super tuned in to this layer of reality. But many other creatures are—and scientists are starting to take note. My guest today is . Sam is a sensory ecologist at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, and one of a handful of scientists uncovering some shocking things about the role of electricity in the natural world. Here, Sam...
info_outline
The nature of nurture
Many Minds
The idea of a "maternal instinct"—the notion that mothers are wired for nurturing and care—is a familiar one in our culture. And it has a flipside, a corollary—what you might call “paternal aloofness.” It's the idea that men just aren't meant to care for babies, that we have more, you know, manly things to do. But when you actually look at the biology of caretaking, the truth is more complicated and much more interesting. My guest today is . She is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis and the author of the new book, . In it, she examines...
info_outline
The space of (possibly) sentient beings
Many Minds
We may not know what it's like to be a bat, but we're pretty confident that it's like something—that bats (and other mammals) are sentient creatures. They feel pleasure and pain, cold and warmth, agitation and comfort. But when it comes to other creatures, the case is less clear. Is a crab sentient? What about a termite, or a tree? The honest answer is we just don't know—and yet, despite that uncertainty, practical questions arise. How should we treat these beings? What do we owe them? My guest today is . Jonathan is a Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics and the...
info_outline
From the archive: Cities, cells, and the neuroscience of navigation
Many Minds
Hi friends, we're still on a brief summer break. We'll have a new episode for you later in August. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! ---- [originally aired September 21, 2022] If your podcast listening habits are anything like mine, you might be out for a walk right now. Maybe you’re wandering the neighborhood, just blocks from home, or maybe you’re further afield. In either case, I’m guessing you’re finding your way without too much trouble—you’re letting some intuitive sense steer you, track how far you’ve gone, tell you where to go next. This inner navigator...
info_outline
From the archive: What does ChatGPT really know?
Many Minds
Hi friends, we're on a brief summer break at the moment. We'll have a new episode for you in August. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! ---- [originally aired January 25, 2023] By now you’ve probably heard about the new chatbot called . There’s no question it’s something of a marvel. It distills complex information into clear prose; it offers instructions and suggestions; it reasons its way through problems. With the right prompting, it can even mimic famous writers. And it does all this with an air of cool competence, of intelligence. But, if you're like me,...
info_outline
From the archive: Medieval monks on memory, meditation, and mind-wandering
Many Minds
Hi friends, we're on a brief summer break at the moment. We'll have a new episode for you in August. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! _____ [originally aired May 17, 2023] You know the feeling. You're trying to read or write or think through a project, maybe even just respond to an email, when your attention starts to drift. You may not even notice it until you've already picked up your phone or jumped tabs, until your mind has already wandered way off-piste. This problem of distraction has become a bit of a modern-day obsession. We now fret about how to stay focused, how...
info_outlineWe've all seen those illusions. The dots seem to dance, when in fact they're completely still. The lines look like they bend, but in reality they're perfectly straight. Here's the thing: It doesn't matter that you know the ground truth of these illusions—the dancing and bending won't stop. And that we see the world one way, even though we know it's actually another way, is a fascinating quirk of our minds—and maybe a telling one. It suggests that there's a chasm between perceiving and thinking, that these may be two independent provinces of the mind. But, if so, we're faced with another question: Where does perception end and thinking begin?
My guest today is Dr. Chaz Firestone. Chaz is an Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, and Director of the Perception and Mind lab there. He and his research group study perceiving, thinking, and the interface between the two.
Here, Chaz and I talk about his background in philosophy and how it continues to animate his research. We sketch the differences between perception and cognition and why the two are best considered separate faculties. We consider the idea of so-called "top-down" effects on perception. We discuss the fact that, even if perception and cognition are separate, there's much more to perception than meets the eye. We seem to see things like causes and social interactions; we perceive things like silences and absences. Along the way, Chaz and I touch on the modular view mind, skeletal shapes, the El Greco fallacy, stubborn epistemology, birders and radiologists, retinotopy and visual adaptation, adversarial images, human-machine comparisons, and the case of the blue banana.
This is a fun one, friends. But before we get to it, one humble request. If you've been enjoying Many Minds, now would be a great time to leave us a rating or review. You can do this on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. It would really help us grow and get the word out! It actually looks like our last review on Apple Podcasts is about 10 months old—so, if you have a minute, that could really use some freshening up.
Alright folks, on to my conversation with Chaz Firestone. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
3:00 – Dr. Firestone’s early paper reporting the Times Square experiment and the “skeletal shape” phenomenon.
8:00 – A visual explanation of the “missing bullet holes” graphic.
13:00 – Dr. Firestone has collaborated intensively with the philosopher Ian Phillips.
15:00 – A recent book by Ned Block, The Border Between Seeing and Thinking.
24:00 – Visual illusions are legion, as are inventories of them. See, for instance, this catalogue on Wikipedia or this Reddit thread.
25:00 – An obituary for Jerry Fodor, who died in 2017. The classic book by Zenon Pylyshyn, Computation and Cognition.
28:00 – A paper by Dr. Firestone about the history of the El Greco fallacy. An empirical paper by Dr. Firestone and Brian Scholl showing the El Greco fallacy at work in perception research.
35:00 – A target article (with commentaries) in Behavioral and Brain Sciences by Dr. Firestone and Dr. Scholl about claims of “top-down” effects on perception. Dr. Firestone has published other work on this theme, e.g., here, here, & here.
41:00 – A paper with discussion (and illustration) of the classic Dalmation Mooney image.
45:00 – A study of rapid visual pattern recognition in expert chess players.
50:30 – A paper by J.J. Valenti and Dr. Firestone about the case of the blue banana.
54:00 – A review paper by Alon Hafri and Dr. Firestone reviewing evidence that people actually perceive high-level relations like causality, support, and social interaction.
56:00 – A study by Martin Rolfs and colleagues about the perception of causality.
1:02:00 – A study by Liuba Papeo and colleagues about the perception of social interactions. A related paper showing an inversion effect.
1:04:00 – A paper by Alon Hafri and colleagues on the perception of roles in an interaction.
1:06:00 – A widely cited paper by J. Kiley Hamlin and colleagues on the recognition of social interactions in preverbal infants.
1:06:30 – A review paper on reading in the brain.
1:10:00 – A paper by Rui Goh, Dr. Phillips, and Dr. Firestone on the perception of silence.
1:18:00 – A recent review paper by Jorge Morales and Dr. Firestone about the dialogue between philosophy of perception and psychology, which discusses the perception of absence (among other case studies).
1:22:00 – A recent perspective piece by Dr. Firestone about human-machine comparisons.
1:25:00 - An empirical paper by Zhenglong Zhou and Dr. Firestone on the deciphering of adversarial images by humans.
1:28:00 – For a review of the mirror self-recognition test, see our earlier audio essay.
1:35:00 – Other interesting work going on in Dr. Firestone’s research group has investigated representational momentum, beauty, and epistemic actions, among other topics.
Recommendations
The Modularity of Mind, by Jerry Fodor
The Contents of Visual Experience, by Susanna Siegel
Psych, by Paul Bloom
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.