From the archive: Medieval monks on memory, meditation, and mind-wandering
Release Date: 07/10/2024
Of breeds and brains
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It's hard to say exactly when, but some tens of thousands of years ago, our best friends were born. I'm referring, of course, to dogs. This didn't happen overnight—it was a long process. And it not only changed how those canids behaved and what they looked like, it also changed their brains. As wolves gave way to proto-dogs, and proto-dogs gave way to dingoes and dalmatians and Dobermanns and all the rest, their brains have continued to change. What can we learn from this singular saga? What does it tell us about dogs, about domestication, and about brains? My guest today is . Erin is...
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Monsters and their makers
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It seems we've always had monsters among us. We've long been enthralled by dragons and giants, by the likes of Frankenstein and Godzilla and Dracula, by witches and werewolves and countless others. They roam our maps and creation myths; they crop up in our dreams, in our children's books, in our political rhetoric. Where do these beings spring from? What do they do for us? How have they changed over time? And, ultimately, what do our monsters say about their makers? My guests today are and . Both are historians of science and authors of recent books on monsters: Natalie's book is . Surekha's...
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The age of social AI
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AI therapists and caregivers. Digital tutors and advisors and friends. Artificial lovers. Griefbots trained to imitate dead loved ones. Welcome, to the bustling world of AI-powered chatbots. This was once the stuff of science fiction, but it's becoming just the stuff of everyday life. What will these systems do to our society, to our relationships, to our social skills and motivations? Are these bots destined to leave us hollowed out, socially stunted, screen-addicted, and wary of good-old-fashioned, in-the-flesh human interaction? Or could they actually be harnessed for good? My guest today...
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Brains of a feather
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Birds do the darnedest things. They fly, of course. They sing. They hunt in pitch darkness. They hide their food and remember where they put it. They use tools and migrate over astonishingly vast distances—sometimes even sleeping while in flight. How do they do all this? What's going on in their brains that makes these and other remarkable behaviors possible? How did their evolutionary path mold them into the incredible creatures they are today? My guests today are and . Andrew is a comparative neuroscientist and Associate Professor at the University of Lethbridge in Canada. Georg is a...
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How nature restores the mind
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One afternoon you decide to snub your responsibilities and go for a hike. You spend a few hours in the woods or the mountains. You study the bark of trees, you bathe in birdsong, you let your eyes roam along a distant ridgeline. And you come back feeling better, restored somehow—like you have more energy, more patience, more bandwidth. We've all, I'm guessing, had experiences like this. But what's behind these effects? Why would nature restore us? What's the evidence that it really does? And what is even being restored, actually? My guest today is . Marc is an Associate Professor in the...
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From the archive: Revisiting the dawn of human cognition
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Hi friends! We're taking a much-needed summer pause—we'll have new episodes for you later in September. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! ------- [originally aired June 1, 2023] There's a common story about the human past that goes something like this. For a few hundred thousand years during the Stone Age we were kind of limping along as a species, in a bit of a cognitive rut, let’s say. But then, quite suddenly, around 30 or 40 thousand years ago in Europe, we really started to come into our own. All of a sudden we became masters of art and ornament, of symbolism and...
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From the archive: Of molecules and memories
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Hi friends! We're taking a much-needed August pause—we'll have new episodes for you in September. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! _____ [originally aired February 8, 2024] 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...
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From the archive: Consider the spider
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Hi friends! We're taking a much-needed August pause—we'll have new episodes for you in September. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! _____ [originally aired May 30, 2024] Maybe your idea of spiders is a bit like mine was. You probably know that they have eight legs, that some are hairy. Perhaps you imagine them spending most of their time sitting in their webs—those classic-looking ones, of course—waiting for snacks to arrive. Maybe you consider them vaguely menacing, or even dangerous. Now this is not all completely inaccurate—spiders do have eight legs, after...
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The shaman with a thousand faces
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When you hear the word "shaman," I'm guessing a web of associations starts to form in your mind. Perhaps you imagine strange ceremonies and strong substances; maybe you think of an earlier time when magic and superstition reigned. But shamanism is not just some relic of the past, or a curio from exotic lands. It's part of our present, and it will almost certainly be part of our future. This is because the roots of shamanism lie within us all. My guest today is . Manvir is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis and to The New Yorker. He's also the author...
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Varieties of childhood
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Childhood is a special time, a strange time. Children are adored and catered to—they're given their own menus and bedrooms. They're considered delicate and precious, and so we cushion them from every imaginable risk. Kids are encouraged to play, of course—but very often it's under the watchful eye of anxious adults. This, anyway, is how childhood looks in much of the United States today. But is this the way childhood looks everywhere? Is this the way human childhoods have always been? My guests today are and . Dorsa is an Assistant Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke...
info_outlineHi 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!
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[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 to avoid time-sucks, how to use our attention wisely. But it turns out this fixation of ours—contemporary as it may seem—is really not so new.
My guest today is Dr. Jamie Kreiner, Professor of History at the University of Georgia. Jamie is the author of a new book titled The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell us about Distraction. In the book, Jamie shows that Christian monks in late antiquity and the early middle ages were—like us—a bit obsessed with attention. And their understanding of attention fit within a broad and often remarkably detailed understanding of the mind.
In this conversation, Jamie and I talk about why monks in this era cared so much about distraction. We discuss how they understood the relationship between mind and body; how they conceptualized memory, meditation, and mind-wandering. We discuss some of the mnemonic techniques they used, some of the graphical and textual devices that helped keep them focused, and some of the metaphors and visualization techniques they innovated. Along the way we also touch on fasting, sleep, demons and angels, the problem of discernment, the state of pure prayer, the Six Wings mnemonic device, metacognitive maneuvering, and much more.
I’ll just say I really enjoyed The Wandering Mind. As Jamie and I chat about here, the book illuminates an earlier understanding of human psychology that feels deeply familiar in some ways, and delightfully strange in others. I think you definitely get a sense of that in this conversation.
Alright friends, on to my chat with Dr. Jamie Kreiner. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
4:00 – A webpage devoted to the Ark of Hugh of Saint Victor.
6:30 – For a detailed (and positive) review essay about The Wandering Mind, see here.
11:30 – The Redwall books, by Brian Jacques, are well known for featuring elaborate feasts. An article about some of the best of these.
18:30 – For more on how the body was understood in the early Christian world, see The Burden of the Flesh.
26:30 – Text written continuously is known as scripta continua.
27:30 – Articles that celebrate medieval marginalia can be found here, here, and here.
40:00 – An article about the Six Wings mnemonic. For more on mnemonic techniques in the medieval world, see Mary Carruthers’ book.
53:00 – On the idea of “pure prayer,” see the book, The Ladder of Prayer and the Ship of Stirrings.
57:30 – Dr. Kreiner’s next book, which comes out in January 2024, is a translation of some of John Cassian’s work on distraction.
Dr. Kreiner’s book recommendations can be found in a recent article 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.
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