From the archive: Cities, cells, and the neuroscience of navigation
Release Date: 08/07/2024
Science, AI, and illusions of understanding
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AI will fundamentally transform science. It will supercharge the research process, making it faster and more efficient and broader in scope. It will make scientists themselves vastly more productive, more objective, maybe more creative. It will make many human participants—and probably some human scientists—obsolete… Or at least these are some of the claims we are hearing these days. There is no question that various AI tools could radically reshape how science is done, and how much science is done. What we stand to gain in all this is pretty clear. What we stand to lose is less obvious,...
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The primeval soil of play
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Puppies wrestling and mock-biting each other. Toddlers playing hide and seek. Kittens pouncing—repeatedly—on a toy mouse. You've no doubt looked on at scenes like this with amusement. And you've no doubt seen some of those viral videos—of ravens sledding down hills, of bumble bees playing with balls. All these moments make us smile, maybe even giggle. But the scientific questions they raise merit serious attention. Where do we see play in the animal kingdom? Where do we not? What functions does play serve? Do we—and many other creatures—have an elemental need for play? My guest today...
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The big five and beyond
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If you've heard anything about the study of human personality, you've probably heard about the “big five.” This is a framework that attempts to characterize human personality in terms of five broad factors or dimensions—neuroticism, extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. The big five framework has been enormously influential, generating heaps and heaps of data, and study after study on the stability of personality, on the factors that shape our personalities, on how our personalities predict success and satisfaction. But is the big five really the best we can do?...
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Philosophers on psychedelics
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Some call it the "psychedelic renaissance." In the last decade or so, interest in psychedelic drugs has surged—and not just among Silicon Valley types and psychiatrists and neuroscientists. It's also surged among a stereotypically soberer crowd: academic philosophers. The reasons are clear. With their varied and sometimes transformative effects, psychedelics raise ethical questions, epistemological questions, metaphysical questions, questions about the nature of experience and the nature of the mind. My guest today is . Chris is a philosopher of cognitive science at the University of Western...
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The cuttlefish and its coat of many colors
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We humans have a hard time becoming invisible. For better or worse, we're basically stuck with the skin and body we have; we’re pretty fixed in our color, our shape, our overall appearance. And so we're fascinated by creatures that aren't—creatures that morph to meet the moment, that can functionally disappear, that can shape-shift on a dime. And no creatures are more skilled, more astonishing, more bedazzling in their abilities to do this kind of thing than the cephalopods. But how do they do this exactly? What's going on in their skin? What's going on under their skin? And what's going...
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Life, free energy, and the pursuit of goals
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You've probably come across the "free energy principle." It's become one of the most influential ideas in the broader cognitive sciences. Since the neuroscientist Karl Friston first introduced it in 2005, the theory has been fleshed out, extended, generalized, criticized, and cited thousands and thousands of times. But what is this idea, exactly? What does it say about the nature of brains and minds? What does it say about the phenomenon of life itself? And is anything that it says really that new? My guest today is . Kate is a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh and the author of the...
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Universal emotions in fact and fiction
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Are human emotions universal? Or do they vary from one place to the next and from one time period to the next? It's a big question, an old question. And every discipline that's grappled with it brings its own take, its own framings and forms of evidence. Some researchers appeal to cross-cultural experiments; others turn to neuroimaging studies or conceptual analysis. Some even look to fiction. My guest today is , an Associate Professor of English Literature at Arizona State University. Brad is the author of a new book, ; in it he maps the landscape of debate around this long-contested topic....
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From the archive: Fermentation, fire, and our big brains
Many Minds
Hi friends, We're taking care of some spring cleaning this week. We'll be back in two weeks with a new episode. In the meantime, enjoy this favorite from our archives! - The Many Minds team ––––––––– [originally aired February 22, 2024] 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...
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Howl, grunt, sing
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The tree of life is a noisy place. From one branch come hoots and howls, from another come clicks and buzzes and whines. And coming from all over you hear the swell of song. But what is all this ruckus about? Why do so many animals communicate with sound? What kinds of meaning do these sounds convey? And—beyond the case of human speech—do any of these sounds merit the label of “language”? My guest today is , a zoologist at Cambridge University. Arik is an expert on vocal communication across the animal kingdom and the author of the recent book . Here, Arik and I talk about why the...
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The development of evolution
Many Minds
Evolution is not what it used to be. A lot has changed since Darwin's day. In the first half of the 20th century, evolutionary theory was integrated with an emerging understanding of genetics. Late in the 20th century, biologists started taking seriously the idea that organisms don't just adapt to their environments, they change them. Recently, researchers have started to acknowledge the role of culture in evolutionary processes. And so slowly our understanding of evolution has been reconsidered, updated, expanded. And more updates are underway. But it's not just our understanding of evolution...
info_outlineHi 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!
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[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 of yours is doing all in the background, as your mind wanders elsewhere, and magically it gets it all right. Most of the time, anyway. But how is it doing it? What allows us to pull this off?
My guest today is Dr. Hugo Spiers, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. His lab studies how our brains "remember the past, navigate the present, and imagine the future.” In recent years Hugo and his group have used a wide variety of methods—and some astonishingly large datasets—to shed light on central questions about human spatial abilities.
Here, Hugo and I do a quick tour of the neuroscience of navigation—including the main brain structures involved and how they were discovered. We talk about research on a very peculiar population, the London taxi driver. We discuss the game Sea Hero Quest and what it's teaching us about navigation abilities around the world. We also touch on what GPS might be doing to us; whether the hippocampus actually resembles a seahorse; the ingenious layout of our brain's inner grids; navigation ability as an early sign of Alzheimer's; how “place cells” actually map more than just place; and how the monarch butterfly finds its way.
Super excited to share this one folks—this is an episode that's been on our wish list for some time. For mobile organisms like us, navigation is life or death—it’s as basic as eating or breathing. So when we dig into the foundations of these spatial abilities, we’re really digging into some of the most basic foundations of mind.
So let’s get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Hugo Spiers. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
4:00 – A brief documentary about a person with developmental topographical disorder.
8:00 – There have been a slew of popular articles about the question of whether GPS is undermining our navigation abilities—see here and here.
12:00 – A classic academic article about path integration in mammals.
14:00 – The classic academic article by Edward Tolman on the idea of “cognitive maps.”
16:00 – A side-by-side comparison of a human hippocampus and seahorse. The resemblance is indeed striking.
18:00 – A classic academic article reporting “place cells” in rats.
21:00 – A research article on seasonal changes in hippocampus size across different species.
22:00 – A recent academic article on interactions between the hippocampus and the striatum in navigation.
23:30 – An article reviewing the first decade of research on “grid cells.” A video showing the activity of grid cells in a rat.
26:00 – The long struggle to calculate longitude is subject of a much-beloved book by Dava Sobel.
27:00 – The press release announcing the Nobel prize for the discovery of grid cells and place cells.
31:00 – A popular article about ‘The Knowledge’—a famed test for London taxi drivers.
33:30 – The celebrated original study by Eleanor Maquire and colleagues on structural changes in the brains of London taxi drivers. The (also-celebrated) follow-up study that Dr. Spiers was part of, comparing London taxi and bus drivers.
37:00 – More about the Taxi Brains project can be found here.
41:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Spiers’ team, led by Eva-Maria Griesbauer, reviews the cognitive neuroscience studies on London taxi drivers and dives deep into the learning techniques the drivers use.
44:30 – A paper by Dr. Spiers and team providing an overview of Sea Hero Quest and the studies it has been used for to date. A video demo of the game, and a popular article describing its motivation. Dr. Spiers developed the idea for the game in collaboration with Michael Hornberger.
50:00 – A recent research article looking at the value of Sea Hero Quest in detecting those at risk for Alzheimers.
53:00 – One of the first studies by Dr. Spiers and colleagues using Sea Hero Quest to test a vast sample and examine effects of variables like age, gender, and nationality.
54:30 – A more recent paper by Dr. Spiers and colleagues examining the effect of growing up in cities that are more or less “griddy.”
57:00 – A study by Dr. Spiers and colleagues showing a relationship between real-world navigation ability and navigation performance in Sea Hero Quest.
1:04:00 – The website of the International Orienteering Foundation. A video showing the sport.
1:06:00 – A review paper by Dr. Spiers and colleagues about the potential roles of cognitive maps in navigation and beyond.
1:07:00 – A review of “concept cells”, aka “Halle Berre cells.”
1:08:00 – A recent opinion piece by Dr. Spiers on the question of how many maps—and of what kind—the hippocampus implements.
1:10:30 – A recent research article on “time cells” in the hippocampus.
1:14:30 – A recent review article about monarch butterfly navigation.
Dr. Spiers recommends:
Human Spatial Navigation, by Ekstrom, Spiers, Bohbot, and Rosenbaum
‘The Cognitive Map in Humans: Spatial Navigation and Beyond,’ by Epstein, Patai, Julian, and Spiers
You can read more about Dr. Spiers 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/).
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