Many Minds

Our world is brimming with beings—human, animal, and artificial. We explore how they think, sense, feel, and learn. Conversations and more, every two weeks.

Animal, heal thyself 11/14/2024

Animal, heal thyself 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 question: How do we humans know what we know? My guests today are and . Jaap is a biologist at Emory University, and has studied animal medication in insects; he’s also the author of a about animal medication across the tree of life. Mike is a primatologist at the University of Nagasaki, and made some of the very first observations about animal self-medication in chimpanzees in the 1980s. Here, Jaap, Mike, and I talk about how they found their way into this field, in both cases kind of by accident. We discuss what defines animal medication generally as well as what defines its more specific subtypes—social medication, allomedication, prophylactic medication, and others. We consider how animals know what they know about healing—whether these medicinal behaviors are mostly driven by innate tendencies, by individual experimentation, by social learning, or by some combination. We talk about the evidence that many of the medical insights that humans have had over the years actually began with observations of animals. Along the way, we touch on medicinal amputation and medicinal cannibalism, geophagy, leaf-folding in primates, animal quackery, bear medicine, why lemurs rub themselves with millipedes, and the anti-parasitic power of cigarette butts. Alright, friends, this is a fun one. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available . Notes and links 3:00 – A describing how birds in Mexico City line their nests with cigarette butts. A showing that they do so in response to increased presence of parasites. 7:30 – Dr. Huffman’s of self-medication by a chimpanzee, using Vernonia amygdalina in Tanzania. 15:00 – Dr. de Roode’s on “transgenerational medicine” in monarch butterflies. 20:00 – For an overview of animal medication, including definitions and examples of its subtypes, see by Dr. de Roode and Dr. Huffman. 25:00 – The on “medicinal amputation” in ants. The on “medicinal cannibalism” in ants. 30:00 – For an overview of medication in insects, see this by Dr. de Roode and colleagues. 34:00 – The by Mascaro and colleagues showing that chimpanzees treat wounds (to the self and others) by applying insects. 38:00 – A recent of geophagy—soil eating—in primates by Paula Pebsworth, Dr. Huffman, and colleagues. 43:00 – A paper by and colleagues on chimpanzee leaf-swallowing in the wild. Dr. Huffman later did a series of experimental studies on this behavior, investigating the role of social learning—see and . 46:00 – An on how goats learn to eat what they eat. 52:00 – An describing the medicinal properties of Vernonia amygdalina. 54:00 – A showing that lemurs rub each other with millipedes in a possible case of animal medication. 57:00 – A by Dr. Huffman in which he describes the use of mulengelele by a sick porcupine. A by Dr. Huffman of what traditional healers have learned from observations of animal medication. 1:01:00 – An about propolis and its medicinal use in bees; an about its medicinal potential in humans. Recommendations , Jaap de Roode (forthcoming) , Cindy Engel , Fred Provenza ‘ Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter () or Bluesky (). /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/33925022

The rise of machine culture 10/31/2024

The rise of machine culture 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 bit hard to categorize. He's equal parts computer scientist and artist; one magazine profile described him as "." Labels aside, his work explores the emerging relationships between AI, human behavior, and society. In a , Iyad and colleagues introduced a framework for understanding what they call "machine culture." The framework offers a way of thinking about the different routes through which AI may transform—is transforming—human culture. Here, Iyad and I talk about his work as a painter and how he brings AI into the artistic process. We discuss whether AIs can make art by themselves and whether they may eventually develop good taste. We talk about how AIphaGoZero upended the world of Go and about how LLMs might be changing how we speak. We consider what AIs might do to cultural diversity. We discuss the field of cultural evolution and how it provides tools for thinking about this brave new age of machine culture. Finally, we discuss whether any spheres of human endeavor will remain untouched by AI influence. Before we get to it, a humble request: If you're enjoying the show—and it seems that many of you are—we would be ever grateful if you could let the world know. You might do this by leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, or maybe a comment on Spotify. You might do this by giving us a shout-out on the social media platform of your choice. Or, if you prefer less algorithmically mediated avenues, you might do this just by telling a friend about us face-to-face. We're hoping to grow the show and the best way to do that is through listener endorsements and word-of-mouth. Thanks in advance, friends. Alright, on to my conversation with Dr. Iyad Rahwan. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available . Notes and links 3:00 – from Dr. Rahwan's ‘Faces of Machine’ portrait series. One of the portraits from the series serves as our tile art for this episode. 11:30 – The “stochastic parrots” term comes from an by Emily Bender and colleagues. 18:30 – A popular about DALL-E and the “avocado armchair.” 21:30 – Ted Chiang’s essay, “.” 24:00 – An with Boris Eldagsen, who won the Sony World Photography Awards in March 2023 with an image that was later revealed to be AI-generated. 28:30 – A description of the concept of “.” 29:00 – Though widely attributed to different sources, to have developed the idea that good science fiction predicts not the automobile, but the traffic jam. 30:00 – The academic describing the Moral Machine experiment. You can judge the scenarios for yourself (or design your own scenarios) . 30:30 – An about the Nightmare Machine project; an about the Deep Empathy project. 37:30 – An by Cesar Hidalgo and colleagues about the relationship between television/radio and global celebrity. 41:30 – An by Melanie Mitchell (!) on AI and analogy. A about that work. 42:00 – A describing the study of whether AIs can generate original research ideas. The preprint is . 46:30 – For more on AlphaGo (and its successors, AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero), see . 48:30 – The finding that the novelty of human Go playing increased due to the influence of AlphaGo. 51:00 – A delving into the idea that ChatGPT overuses certain words, including “delve.” A by Dr. Rahwan and colleagues, presenting evidence that “delve” (and other words overused by ChatGPT) are now being used more in human spoken communication. 55:00 – A using simulations to show how LLMs can “collapse” when trained on data that they themselves generated. 1:01:30 – A of the literature on filter bubbles, echo chambers, and polarization. 1:02:00 – An influential by Dr. Chris Bail and colleagues suggesting that exposure to opposing views might actually increase polarization. 1:04:30 – A by Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen, who are often credited with developing the idea of “generalized Darwinism” in the social sciences. 1:12:00 – An about Google’s NotebookLM podcast-like audio summaries. 1:17:3 0 – An by Ursula LeGuin on children’s literature and the Jungian “shadow.” Recommendations , Joseph Henrich “,” Iyad Rahwan et al. Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter () or Bluesky (). /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/33699777

How should we think about IQ? 10/17/2024

How should we think about IQ? 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 worse. There's no question, after all, that IQ has been misused—that it still gets misused—for all kinds of racist, classist, colonialist purposes. As if this wasn't all thorny enough, the study of IQ is also intimately bound up with the study of genetics. It's right there in the roiling center of debates about how genes and environment make us who we are. So, yeah, what to make of all this? How should we be thinking about IQ? My guest today is . Eric is Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He has studied intelligence and many other complex human traits for decades, and he's a major figure in the field of “behavior genetics.” Eric also has a new book out this fall—which I highly recommend—titled . In a field that has sometimes been accused of rampant optimism, Eric is—as you'll hear—a bit more measured. In this conversation, Eric and I focus on intelligence and its putatively genetic basis. We talk about why Eric doubts that we are anywhere close to an account of the biology of IQ. We discuss what makes intelligence such a formidable construct in psychology and why essentialist understandings of it are so intuitive. We talk about Francis Galton and the long shadow he’s cast on the study of human behavior. We discuss the classic era of Twin Studies—an era in which researchers started to derive quantitative estimates of the heritability of complex traits. We talk about how the main takeaway from that era was that genes are quite important indeed, and about how more genetic techniques suggest that takeaway may have been a bit simplistic. Along the way, Eric and I touch on spelling ability, child prodigies, the chemical composition of money, the shared quirks of twins reared apart, the Flynn Effect, the Reverse Flynn Effect, birth order, the genetics of height, the problem of missing heritability, whether we should still be using IQ scores, and the role of behavior genetics in the broader social sciences. Alright folks, lots in here—let's just get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Eric Turkheimer. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available . Notes and links 3:30 – The 1994 book The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein a Charles Murray, dealt largely with the putative social implications of IQ research. It was extremely controversial and widely discussed. For an overview of the book and controversy, see the Wikipedia article . 6:00 – For discussion of the “all parents are environmentalists…” quip, see . 12:00 – The notion of “multiple intelligences” was popularized by the psychologist Howard Gardner—see for an overview. See for an attempt to test the claims of the “multiple intelligences” framework using some of the methods of traditional IQ research. For work on EQ (or Emotional Intelligence) see . 19:00 – Dr. Turkheimer has also laid out his spelling test analogy in . 22:30 – Dr. Turkheimer’s 1998 paper, “.” 24:30 – For an in-passing treatment of the processing efficiency idea, see p. 195 of Daniel Nettle’s book . See also Richard Haier’s book, . 26:00 – The on the relationship between pupil size and intelligence. A more recent study that those findings. 31:00 – For an argument that child prodigies constitute an argument for “nature,” see . For a memorable narrative account of one child prodigy, see . 32:00 – A of the Flynn effect. We have previously discussed the Flynn Effect in an with Michael Muthukrishna. 37:00 – James Flynn’s book, On the reversal of the Flynn Effect, see . 40:00 – The phrase “nature-nurture” originally comes from Shakespeare and was picked up by Francis Galton. In The Tempest, Prospero describes Caliban as “a born devil on whose nature/ Nurture can never stick.” 41:00 – For a biography of Galton, see . For an article-length account of Galton’s role in the birth of eugenics, see . 50:00 – For an account of R.A. Fisher’s 1918 paper and its continuing influence, see . 55:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer’s on the “nonshared environment”—E in the ACE model. 57:00 – A coming out of the Minnesota Study of Twins reared apart. A New York Times recounting some of the interesting anecdata in the Minnesota Study. 1:00:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer’s 2000 on the “three laws of behavior genetics.” Note that this is not, in fact, Dr. Turkheimer’s most cited paper (though it is very well cited). 1:03:00 – For another view of the state of behavior genetics in the postgenomic era, see . 1:11:00 – For Dr. Turkheimer’s work on poverty, heritability, and IQ, see . 1:13:00 – A recent of birth order effects on personality. 1:16:00 – For Dr. Turkheimer’s take on the missing heritability problem, see and . 1:19:00 – A recent on the missing heritability problem in the case of height. 1:30:00 – On the dark side of IQ, see Chapter 9 of Dr. Turkheimer’s book. See also Radiolab’s . 1:31:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer’s Substack, . Recommendations , Kathryn Paige Harden , Stuart Ritchie , Richard Nisbett (Ted talk), James Flynn Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: . For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter () or Bluesky (). /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/33495702

Rethinking the "wood wide web" 10/03/2024

Rethinking the "wood wide web" 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 . Justine is a forest ecologist at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on mycorrhizas—these are the symbioses formed between fungi and plant roots that are thought to be the basis of the "wood wide web." Last year, Justine and colleagues published in which they argued that some of the claims around the wood wide web have gotten out of hand. These new ideas about forests, they argued, have gotten decoupled from the actual on-the-ground—or under-the-ground—science. In reality, it’s a field still riddled with unknowns and mixed findings. Here, Justine and I do a bit of mycorrhiza 101—we talk about what mycorrhizas are, how they evolved, and what the structures actually look like. We discuss the original 1997 study that inspired the term "wood wide web." We consider why it's so hard to figure out what's actually going on, mechanistically, under the forest floor. We discuss the increasingly popular notion of plant intelligence and what it means to empirical researchers in this area like Justine. We talk about why people—both members of the public and scientists themselves—have found wood wide web ideas so charming. And, finally, we discuss the question of whether a little bit of hype is really so bad—particularly if it gets people excited about forests, about science, and about conservation. I got as excited about the "wood wide web" as anyone. The idea totally captured my imagination a couple of years ago. So I was intrigued—if also a little dismayed—to learn recently that these ideas were getting some pushback. And I knew immediately we should talk to one of the researchers leading that pushback. Alright friends, let's get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Justine Karst. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available . Notes and links 5:00 – Popular treatments sometimes mentioned as over-hyping the wood wide web (and associated ideas) include , , and the novel . 9:30 – The landmark by Simard et al. that kicked off interest in the so-called wood wide web. 11:00 – A showing that fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants. 11:30 – For more on the new interest in “plant intelligence” see our previous episodes and . On the notion of “fungal intelligence,” see . 18:00 – A presenting a hypothesis about the origins of land plants. 20:00 – The California “” mentioned. 23:00 – A on the differences between arbuscular mycorrhizas and ectomycorrhizas. 23:30 – Richard Powers’ influential novel, . Note that the novel doesn’t exclusively focus on the wood wide web; it covers ideas and findings about trees and forests, many of which are uncontroversial. 36:00 – Dr. Karst co-authored her perspective piece in Nature Ecology & Evolution with and . 50:00 – For more on aspens and how they constitute clonal organisms, see . 52:00 – The “mother tree” idea was popularized in Dr. Suzanne Simard’s book, . 1:04:00 – Another recent critique of the wood wide web and mother tree idea is . In it the authors write: “Reaching out to the general public to make people care about forests is certainly a praiseworthy goal, but not when it involves the dissemination of a distorted view of the plant world. In other words: the end does not justify the means.” 1:05:30 – Others influenced by The Overstory include and . 1:09:00 – A on myco-heterotrophic plants. 1:13:00 – See a recent presentation by Dr. Jared Farmer on trees and “chronodiversity” . Recommendations ‘,’ Stella Stanford ‘’, Daniel Immerwahr Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter () or Bluesky (). /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/33309952

Electric ecology 09/19/2024

Electric ecology 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 and I have a wide-ranging conversation about electroreception—which is the perception of electrical stimuli—and electric ecology—which is the study of the ecological roles of electricity. We talk about how an interest in electroreception first got started, and why it's recently resurged. We discuss aquatic electroreception versus aerial electroreception, active electroreception versus passive electroreception. We talk about how electroreception is actually kind of easy to evolve. Along the way, we consider electrolocation and, its analog in sound, echolocation. We touch on dolphins, sharks, echidnas, ticks, caterpillars, bees, and spiders. We zoom in on electrostatic pollination, and what is inarguably the coolest sounding anatomical structure known to biology: the ampullae of Lorenzini. I think you'll enjoy this one, friends. As Sam describes here, electroreception is one of those "alien senses"—it really challenges the imagination. And electric ecology is one of those frontiers in our understanding of the natural world. So without further ado, here's my chat with Dr. Sam England. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available . Notes and links 3:00 – For many of the topics discussed in this episode, see this comprehensive of electroreception and electric ecology by Dr. England and a colleague. 7:30 – A the (contested) phenomenon of electromagnetic hypersensitivity in humans. 9:30 – An on electroreception in monotremes. 13:00 – An of electrolocation in “weakly electric” fish. 17:00 – A popular about the discovery of electroreception in sharks. 20:30 – A showing that bumblebees detect the electric fields around flowers. 23:30 – A recent of electroreception and its evolution in fish. 25:00 – A demonstrating electroreception in the Guiana dolphin. 34:00 – A recent by Dr. England and colleagues showing that static electricity pulls ticks onto hosts. 43:00 – For more on echolocation, see our on bats. 47:00 – A by Dr. Ryan Palmer, examining the theoretical possibilities of electroreception in air. 52:30 – A (controversial) on possibly language-like communication in fungi via electricity. 55:00 – Another on electroreception in bees, this one in honeybees. 56:30 – An a describing the role that electricity plays in spider ballooning. 1:00:00 – Dr. England’s showing that caterpillars can detect the electric fields around wasps. 1:03:00 – A of triboelectric effects. 1:11:00 – Dr. England’s of electrostatic pollination in butterflies and moths. 1:19:00 – A arguing that the sexual organs of flowers may have evolved to take advantage of electrostatic pollination. 1:25:00 – For more on spider eyes, see our all about spiders. Recommendations ‘’ William Crampton , Ed Yong (a !) Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter () or Bluesky (). /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/33119452

The nature of nurture 09/05/2024

The nature of nurture 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 paternal care, the biology that supports it, and the norms and practices that sometimes suppress it. In this conversation, Sarah and I set her new book, Father Time, in the context of her four previous books. We discuss the surprising prevalence of male care in fish and amphibians. We talk about how Charles Darwin noted the plasticity of caretaking in animals, only to ignore that plasticity when talking about humans. We consider how time in intimate proximity with babies activates capacities for nurturing—not just in fathers, but in caretakers of all kinds. Along the way, we touch on langurs and owl monkeys; emus and cassowaries; cichlid fish and fairy shrimp; prolactin and oxytocin; patriarchy and patriarchal notions. We talk about what seems to be distinctive about the human capacity for care; and about what happens when males spend too much time competing for status, and not enough time snuggling babies. You'll probably get a sense for this from our conversation, but there are very few researchers who take both biology and culture as seriously as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy does. She does not shy away from digging deep into either domain. And she does not shy away from trying to trace the tangled links between the two. Alright friends, I hope you enjoy this one. On to my conversation with Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. A transcript of this episode is available . Notes and links 3:00 – A on male parental care in fishes. 7:00 – Dr. Hrdy’s previous books include , , , and . 13:00 – A on “cooperative breeding” in birds. 16:30 – The full text of Charles Darwin’s book, . 21:00 – Read about Caroline Kennard and her correspondence with Darwin . 23:30 – A of a recent book on Nancy Hopkins and her (quantitative) efforts to expose sexism at MIT. 26:00 – The on the brains of fathers in different caretaking roles. 37:00 – A by Larry Young and a colleague on the role of ancient peptides (like oxytocin) in sociality. 40:00 – The of Dr. Lauren O’Connell, who studies physiology and social behavior in poison dart frogs. 42:00 – A of paternal care in primates. 47:00 – For more on Michael Tomasello’s “mutualism hypothesis”—and a lot else—see our with Dr. Tomasello. 49:00 – For more on the costliness of the human brain, see our earlier episodes and . 58:00 – The by Esther Herrmann, Michael Tomasello, and colleagues on the human specialization for social cognition. 59:00 – A of children’s early “ostensive gestures” of showing and offering. 1:02:00 – An for the ethnographer Lorna Marshall. 1:09:00 – An of ostracods and the traces they leave in the fossil record. Recommendations , Michael Numan , George Eliot , Sean Carroll , Neil Shubin , Sean Carroll Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter () or Bluesky (). /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/32904992

The space of (possibly) sentient beings 08/22/2024

The space of (possibly) sentient beings 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 author of the new book . In it, he presents a framework for thinking about which beings might be sentient and about how our policies should account for this. Here, we talk about Jonathan's work at the nexus of philosophy, science, and policy—in particular, his role in advising the UK government on the welfare of cephalopods and decapods. We discuss what it means to be sentient and what the brain basis of sentience might be. We sketch his precautionary framework for dealing with the wide-ranging debates and rampant uncertainty around these issues. We talk about several prominent edge cases in the natural world. And, finally, we consider whether AI might become sentient and, if so, by what route. Along the way, Jonathan and I touch on: plants, crayfish, bees, larvae, and LLMs. We talk about "sentience candidates" and the "zone of reasonable disagreement"; about Jonathan's stances on octopus farming and live-boiling of crabs; about the “run-ahead principle” and the “gaming problem”; and about the question of whether all conscious experience has a valence. Jonathan's book is a remarkably clear and compelling read—if you find yourself intrigued by our conversation, I definitely recommend that you check out The Edge of Sentience as well. Alright friends, without further ado, on to our sixth season of Many Minds and on to my conversation with Dr. Jonathan Birch. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available . Notes and links 3:00 – The full report prepared by Dr. Birch and colleagues for the UK government is available . 4:30 – Listen to our earlier episode with Dr. Alex Schnell . 7:00 – Dr. Birch’s 2017 , from an earlier chapter of his career during which he focused on kin selection and social behavior. 11:00 – A by Dr. Birch on the UK government’s response to the pandemic. 16:00 – A classic 1958 on sentience by the philosopher Herbert Feigl. 20:30 – Read Dr. Birch’s general audience on the case of live-boiling crabs. 28:30 – Advocates of the idea that regions of the midbrain support sentience include Antonio Damasio, Jaak Panskepp (whose work we discussed in this ), and Bjorn Merker (whose work we discussed in this ). 31:30 – A of the possibility of sentience in plants, with Paco Calvo. 34:30 – Peter Godfrey Smith’s recent book, . 35:30 – A paper by Dr. Birch and colleagues titled ‘.’ 39:30 – A reporting conditioned place avoidance in octopuses. 40:30 – A reporting anxiety-like states in crayfish. 42:00 – A on "nociception" (which Kensy mispronounces in this segment). 44:00 – A by Dr. Birch and colleagues arguing against octopus farming. 47:00 – A about welfare concerns in farmed insects. 49:00 – A showing that bees will selectively groom an antenna that was touched with a heat probe. 51:00 – The . 1:02:00 – A by Dr. Birch and Kristin Andrews about developing better markers for understanding AI sentience. The question of defining “markers” of conscious experience was also a central topic of with Tim Bayne. Recommendations , Peter Godfrey-Smith , Lars Chittka , Martha Nussbaum Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter () or Bluesky (). /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/32687757

From the archive: Cities, cells, and the neuroscience of navigation 08/07/2024

From the archive: Cities, cells, and the neuroscience of navigation 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 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 , 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 . Notes and links 4:00 – A brief 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 and . 12:00 – A classic about path integration in mammals. 14:00 – The classic by Edward Tolman on the idea of “cognitive maps.” 16:00 – A of a human hippocampus and seahorse. The resemblance is indeed striking. 18:00 – A reporting “place cells” in rats. 21:00 – A on seasonal changes in hippocampus size across different species. 22:00 – A on interactions between the hippocampus and the striatum in navigation. 23:30 – An reviewing the first decade of research on “grid cells.” A showing the activity of grid cells in a rat. 26:00 – The long struggle to calculate longitude is subject of a by Dava Sobel. 27:00 – The announcing the Nobel prize for the discovery of grid cells and place cells. 31:00 – A about ‘The Knowledge’—a famed test for London taxi drivers. 33:30 – The celebrated by Eleanor Maquire and colleagues on structural changes in the brains of London taxi drivers. The (also-celebrated) follow-up that Dr. Spiers was part of, comparing London taxi and bus drivers. 37:00 – More about the Taxi Brains project can be found . 41:00 – A 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 by Dr. Spiers and team providing an overview of Sea Hero Quest and the studies it has been used for to date. A demo of the game, and a describing its motivation. Dr. Spiers developed the idea for the game in collaboration with . 50:00 – A looking at the value of Sea Hero Quest in detecting those at risk for Alzheimers. 53:00 – One of the 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 by Dr. Spiers and colleagues examining the effect of growing up in cities that are more or less “griddy.” 57:00 – A by Dr. Spiers and colleagues showing a relationship between real-world navigation ability and navigation performance in Sea Hero Quest. 1:04:00 – The of the International Orienteering Foundation. A showing the sport. 1:06:00 – A review by Dr. Spiers and colleagues about the potential roles of cognitive maps in navigation and beyond. 1:07:00 – A of “concept cells”, aka “Halle Berre cells.” 1:08:00 – by Dr. Spiers on the question of how many maps—and of what kind—the hippocampus implements. 1:10:30 – A on “time cells” in the hippocampus. 1:14:30 – A about monarch butterfly navigation. Dr. Spiers recommends: , by Ekstrom, Spiers, Bohbot, and Rosenbaum ‘,’ by Epstein, Patai, Julian, and Spiers You can read more about Dr. Spiers work on his and follow him on . Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , 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 (). 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 !** 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: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/32460767

From the archive: What does ChatGPT really know? 07/24/2024

From the archive: What does ChatGPT really know? 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, you’ve probably also been wondering: What’s really going on here? What are ChatGPT—and other large language models like it—actually doing? How much of their apparent competence is just smoke and mirrors? In what sense, if any, do they have human-like capacities? My guest today is . Murray is Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London and Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind. He's the author of numerous articles and several books at the lively intersections of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and philosophy. Very recently, Murray put out a paper titled ’, and it’s the focus of our conversation today. In the paper, Murray argues that—tempting as may be—it's not appropriate to talk about large language models in anthropomorphic terms. Not yet, anyway. Here, we chat about the rapid rise of large language models and the basics of how they work. We discuss how a model that—at its base—simply does “next-word prediction" can be engineered into a savvy chatbot like ChatGPT. We talk about why ChatGPT lacks genuine “knowledge” and “understanding”—at least as we currently use those terms. And we discuss what it might take for these models to eventually possess richer, more human-like capacities. Along the way, we touch on: emergence, prompt engineering, embodiment and grounding, image generation models, Wittgenstein, the intentional stance, soft robots, and "exotic mind-like entities." Before we get to it, just a friendly reminder: applications are now open for the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (or DISI). DISI will be held this June/July in St Andrews Scotland—the program consists of three weeks of intense interdisciplinary engagement with exactly the kinds of ideas and questions we like to wrestle with here on this show. If you're intrigued—and I hope you are!—check out for more info. Alright friends, on to my decidedly human chat, with Dr. Murray Shanahan. Enjoy! The paper we discuss is . A transcript of this episode is . Notes and links 6:30 – The by Vaswani and colleagues. 8:00 – A about GPT-3. 10:00 – A about some of the impressive—and not so impressive—behaviors of ChatGPT. For more discussion of ChatGPT and other large language models, see another with Dr. Shanahan, as well as interviews with , , and (CEO of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT). 14:00 – A widely discussed by Emily Bender and colleagues on the “dangers of stochastic parrots.” 19:00 – A about “prompt engineering”. Another about the concept of Reinforcement Learning through Human Feedback, in the context of ChatGPT. 30:00 – One of Dr. Shanahan’s books is titled, . 39:00 – An example of a robotic agent, , which is connected to a language model. 40:30 – On the notion of embodiment in the cognitive sciences, see the classic book by Francisco Varela and colleagues, . 44:00 – For a detailed primer on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, see . 45:00 – See Dr. Shanahan’s on “conscious exotica" and the space of possible minds. 49:00 – See Dennett’s book, . Dr. Shanahan recommends: , by Melanie Mitchell (see also our earlier episode with Dr. Mitchell) , by M. Shanahan and M. Mitchell You can read more about Murray’s work on and follow him on . Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , 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 (). 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 !** 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: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/32271942

From the archive: Medieval monks on memory, meditation, and mind-wandering 07/10/2024

From the archive: Medieval monks on memory, meditation, and mind-wandering 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 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 , Professor of History at the University of Georgia. Jamie is the author of a new book titled . 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 . Notes and links 4:00 – A devoted to the Ark of Hugh of Saint Victor. 6:30 – For a detailed (and positive) review essay about The Wandering Mind, see . 11:30 – The books, by Brian Jacques, are well known for featuring elaborate feasts. An about some of the best of these. 18:30 – For more on how the body was understood in the early Christian world, see . 26:30 – Text written continuously is known as . 27:30 – Articles that celebrate medieval marginalia can be found , , and . 40:00 – An about the Six Wings mnemonic. For more on mnemonic techniques in the medieval world, see Mary Carruthers’ . 53:00 – On the idea of “pure prayer,” see the book, . 57:30 – Dr. Kreiner’s , 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 . Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/32066337

A new picture of language 06/26/2024

A new picture of language If you've taken Linguistics 101, you know what language is. It's a system for conveying meaning through speech. We build words out of sounds, and then complex ideas out of those words. Remarkably, the relationship between the sounds and the meanings they convey is purely arbitrary. Human language consists, in other words, of abstract symbols. Now, of course, there are also sign languages, but these operate in the same way, just in a different medium. This, anyway, is the view of language that has dominated and defined linguistics for many decades. But some think it gets some pretty fundamental things pretty wrong. Some think we need a new picture of language altogether. My guest today is . Neil is Associate Professor at the Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication, in the Netherlands; he is also the director of the at Tilburg. For about two decades, Neil has been studying the rich properties of graphic systems—especially comics—and has built an argument that some constitute full-blown languages. His latest book, co-authored with, Joost Schilperoord, is titled . It challenges that longstanding, deeply held view of what language is. Instead, the book argues that the human language capacity combines three different modalities—the vocal modality (as in speech), the bodily modality (as in gesture), and the graphic modality (as in comics and other visual narratives). And each of these modalities is naturally able to support full-blown languages. Here, Neil and I talk about the basic assumptions of modern linguistics and where those assumptions come from. We discuss the idea that there are three expressive modalities that come naturally to humans, with each modality optimized for certain kinds of meaning. We talk about Neil's career, not only as an academic, but as an illustrator. We discuss cross-cultural differences and similarities in comics, and how comics have changed over the last century. And, finally, we consider how Neil's framework challenges current theorizing about the evolution of language. Along the way, Neil and I touch on sign languages and homesign systems, visual style vs visual language, Peircean semiotics, animal tracks, cave art, emoji, upfixes, sand drawing, Manga, the refrain "I can't draw," and the idea that the graphic modality is the only one that's truly unique to our species. After this episode we'll be taking a bit of a summer break, but we'll be posting some old favorites to tide you over. Alright friends, hope you enjoy this one. On to my conversation with Neil Cohn. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available . Notes and links 3:30 – An earlier by Dr. Cohn on the well-worn refrain “I can’t draw.” His more recent covering the topic. 9:00 – An of research on homesign systems. For a broader discussion of differences between gesture, homesign systems, and established sign languages, see . 15:00 – A , ‘Chinese Room,’ commissioned by the philosopher Dan Dennett and drawn by Dr. Cohn. 19:30 – The of Dr. Cohn’s graduate mentor, Ray Jackendoff. 25:00 – A brief by Dr. Cohn and Dr. Schilperoord on the need to “reimagine language.” 25:30 – The , based on lecture notes, by Ferdinand de Saussure, ‘Course in General Linguistics.' 44:00 – For an overview of “bimodal bilingualism,” see . 50:00 – A by Dr. Cohn and colleagues on the processing of emoji substituted for words. 56:00 – A by Dr. Cohn and colleagues on anaphora in visual narratives. 58:30 – For our previous audio essay on animal (and human) tracks, see . 1:01:30 – For examples of scholarship on non-Western methods of visual storytelling, including Aboriginal Australian sand drawing, see Dr. Cohn’s earlier edited volume . For a deeper dive into sand drawing, see the monograph by Jenny Green . 1:03:00 – Dr. Cohn also recently published a book on cross-cultural aspects of comics, . The book is the fruit of his lab’s . 1:11:00 – For a video of Aboriginal Australian sand drawing, see . 1:13:00 – See Dr. Cohn’s earlier book, 1:15:00 – A on “upfixes” by Dr. Cohn and a colleague. 1:22:00 – A by Dr. Cohn on the linguistic status of emoji. 1:31:00 – For a deep dive into Peircean semiotics, see . 1:36:00 – For my own general-audience treatment of “gesture first” theories of language evolution and the “modality transition” problem, see . 1:37:00 – A by Dr. Jackendoff and Eva Wittenberg outlining their “complexity hierarchy.” 1:50:00 – For the Getty museum exhibit associated with Dr. Cohn’s lecture, see . Recommendations , by Jenny Audring and Ray Jackendoff , by John Goldsmith and Bernard Laks , hosted by James McElvenny Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/31899397

Climate, risk, and the rise of agriculture 06/12/2024

Climate, risk, and the rise of agriculture It's an enduring puzzle. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors were nomadic, ranging over large territories, hunting and gathering for sustenance. Then, beginning roughly 12,000 years ago, we pivoted. Within a short timeframe—in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas—humans suddenly decided to settle down. We started to store our food. We domesticated plants. We set off, in other words, down a path that would reshape our cultures, our technologies, our social structures, even our minds. Yet no one has yet been able to account for this shift. No one has been able to fully explain why agriculture happened when it happened and where it happened. Unless, that is, someone just did. My guest today is . Andrea is an economist at the University of Torino, in Italy, with a focus on economic history. In a , he puts forward an ambitious, unifying theory of the rise of agriculture in our species. He argues that the key trigger was a spike in seasonality—with certain parts of the world, particularly parts of the northern hemisphere, suddenly experiencing warmer summers and colder winters. This led risk-averse humans in these places to start to store food and, eventually, to experiment with farming. In this conversation, Andrea and I talk about how he developed his theory, in steps, over the course of almost 20 years. We consider the weaknesses of earlier explanations of agriculture, including explanations that focused on climate. We discuss how he wrangled vast historical datasets to test his theory. And we talk about some of the downstream effects that agriculture seems to have had. Along the way we touch on: salmon, wheat, taro, and milk; agriculture as a franchise model; Milankovitch Cycles; risk-aversion and consumption-smoothing; interloping in the debates of other disciplines; the possibility of a fig-based civilization; and how we inevitably project our own concerns onto the past. Alright friends, I hope you enjoy this one. As I said at the top, the origins of agriculture is just one of those irresistible, perennial puzzles—one that cuts across the human sciences. And, I have to say, I find Andrea's solution to this puzzle quite compelling. I'll be curious to hear if you agree. Without further ado, on to my conversation with Andrea Matranga. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available . Notes and links 8:00 – Various versions of the fable ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ are compiled . 13:00 – One of the last remaining ziggurat complexes is . 16:00 – The by anthropologist Alain Testart on food storage among hunter-gatherers. 19:30 – An emphasizing that agriculture occurred after the Ice Age due to warming conditions. Other studies have posited that other features of climate may have led to the rise in agriculture (e.g., ). 21:00 – An (illustrated) explanation of . 27:00 – For Marshall Sahlins’ discussion of ‘The Original Affluent Society,’ see . 32:00 – Jared Diamond’s popular article, ‘.’ 33:00 – A criticizing the particularistic focus of many archaeological treatments of the origins of agriculture. 36:30 – Dr. Matranga used a variety of data sources to test his theory, including a compiling dates of agricultural adoption. 42:00 – A detailing evidence of agriculture in Kuk Swamp in New Guinea. 43:00 – The book , by Rachel Laudan. 44:00 – A by Luigi Pascali and collaborators on the rise of states and the “appropriability” of cereals. 1:01:00 – A about the Natufian culture, which is considered to occupy an intermediate step on the road to agriculture. Recommendations What We Did to Father (republished as ), by Roy Lewis , by Jack Harlan , by Richard Lee and Irven Devore Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/31708627

Consider the spider 05/30/2024

Consider the spider 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 all—but it's a woefully incomplete and drab caricature. Your idea of spiders, in other words, may be due for a refresh. My guest today is , Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand. Ximena is the author of the new book, . It’s an accessible and stunningly illustrated survey of spider behavior, ecology, and cognition. In this conversation, Ximena and I do a bit of ‘Spiders 101’. We talk about spider senses—especially how spiders use hairs to detect the minutest of vibrations and how they see, usually, with four pairs of eyes. We talk about web-making—which, by the way, the majority of spiders don't do—and silk-making—which all do, but for more reasons than you may realize. We talk about how spiders hunt, jump, dance, pounce, plan, decorate, cache, balloon, and possibly count. We talk about why so many spiders mimic ants. We take up the puzzle of “stabilimenta”. We talk about whether webs constitute an extended sensory apparatus—like a gigantic ear—and why spiders are an under-appreciated group of animals for thinking about the evolution of mind, brain, and behavior. Alright friends, this one is an absolute feast. So let's get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Ximena Nelson. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available . Notes and links 3:00 – A about our “collective arachnid aversion” to spiders. 8:00 – An by Dr. Nelson about jumping spider behavior. 8:30 – In addition to spiders, Dr. Nelson also studies kea parrots (e.g., ). 12:00 – A about the thousands of spider species known to science—and the thousands that remain unknown. 16:30 – A about a mostly vegetarian spider, Bagheera kiplingi. 18:00 – For the mating dance of the peacock spider, see . 20:00 – A on spider “hearing” via their webs. 24:00 – The iNaturalist profile of the . 29:30 – A of extended sensing in humans during tool use. 33:00 – A of vision (and other senses) in jumping spiders. 40:00 – An earlier of spider webs and silk. 45:00 – For a primer on bird’s nests, see . 48:00 – An describing the original work on how various drugs alter spiders’ webs. 49:00 – A in the long-standing stabilimenta debate. 54:00 – A about “ballooning” in spiders. 57:00 – An by Dr. Nelson and a colleague about jumping spiders as an important group for studies in comparative cognition. 1:01:00 – A of reversal learning in jumping spiders, which found large individual differences. 1:07:00 – A of larder monitoring in orb weaver spiders. 1:10:00 – A by Dr. Nelson and a colleague on numerical competence in Portia spiders. 1:16:00 – An on the so-called insect apocalypse. Recommendations , by M. Herberstein ‘,’ by F. Barth ‘’, by H. Japyassú and K. Lala Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/31525447

Can we measure consciousness? 05/16/2024

Can we measure consciousness? A cluster of brain cells in a dish, pulsing with electrical activity. A bee buzzing its way through a garden in bloom. A newborn baby staring up into his mother's eyes. What all these entities have in common is that we don't quite know what it’s like to be them—or, really, whether it's like anything at all. We don't really know, in other words, whether they’re conscious. But maybe we could know—if only we developed the right test. My guest today is . Tim is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He’s a philosopher of mind and cognitive science, with a particular interest in the nature of consciousness. Along with a large team of co-authors, Tim recently published an article titled .' In it, they review the current landscape of consciousness tests—or “C-tests”, as they call them—and outline strategies for building more and better tests down the road. Here, Tim and I discuss what consciousness is and why theories of it seem to be proliferating. We consider several of the boundary cases that are most hotly debated right now in the field—cases like brain organoids, neonates, and split-brain patients. We sketch a few of the most prominent current consciousness tests: the command following test, the sniff test, the unlimited associative learning test, and the test for AI consciousness. We talk about how we might be able to inch our way, slowly, toward something like a thermometer for consciousness: a universal test that tells us whether an entity is conscious, or to what degree, or even what kind of conscious it is. Along the way, Tim and I talk about zombies, chatbots, brains in vats, and islands of awareness. And we muse about how, in certain respects, consciousness is like temperature, or perhaps more like happiness or wealth or intelligence, and maybe even a bit like fire. I think you'll enjoy this one, friends—it's a thought-provoking conversation on a foundational topic, and one that takes us far and wide. So without further ado, here's my interview with Dr. Tim Bayne. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available . Notes and links 4:45 – The philosopher Dan Dennett, who passed away in April, was known for his writings on consciousness—among them his 1991 book, . 7:00 – The on the neural correlates of consciousness, by Francis Crick and Christof Koch. 9:00 – A of theories of consciousness by Anil Seth and Dr. Bayne. 10:00 – David Chalmers’ on the “hard problem” of consciousness. 13:00 – Thomas Nagel’s on what it’s like to be a bat. 20:00 – A by James Croxford and Dr. Bayne arguing against consciousness in brain organoids. 23:00 – A by Dr. Bayne and colleagues about the emergence of consciousness in infants. 27:00 – A by Dr. Bayne and colleagues about consciousness in split-brain patients. An by Dr. Bayne on the same topic. 30:00 – A by Dr. Bayne, Dr. Seth, and Marcello Massimini on the notion of “islands of awareness.” 35:00 – The using the “(covert) command following test” in a patient in a so-called vegetative state. 38:00 – A introducing the “sniff test.” 40:00 – A on the “unlimited associative learning” test. 43:00 – An (preview only), by the philosopher Susan Schneider, proposing the AI consciousness test. 50:00 – The history of the scientific understanding of temperature is detailed in Hasok Chang’s book, . 53:30 – Different markers of consciousness in infants are reviewed in Dr. Bayne and colleagues’ . 1:03:00 – The ‘New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness’ was announced in April. Read about it . Recommendations , Anil Seth , Adrian Owen , Peter Godfrey-Smith Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/31331697

Rehabilitating placebo 05/02/2024

Rehabilitating placebo 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, . 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 phenomena—phenomena 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 realize—it'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 . 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 essay—'Rehabilitating placebo’—written and read by Urte Laukaityte. Enjoy! A text version of this episode will be available soon. Notes and links 3:30 – A describing the FIDELITY trial. 8:00 – For a neuroscientific overview of placebo research, see this . The landmark 1978 study is . 9:00 – The using naloxone in rats. 10:30 – A of placebo effects in Parkinson’s disease. 13:00 – The showing placebo effects in allergy sufferers. For more on placebo and conditioning in the immune system, see . 13:30 – An of the results on whether placebo “can replace oxygen.” 16:00 – For the “milkshake” study, see . 20:00 – A on open-label placebos. A of the efficacy of open-label placebos. 22:00 – A of nocebo-induced side effects within the placebo groups of trials. 24:00 – On the idea of “good placebo responders,” see . 27:30 – The book , by Jacob Stegenga. 28:00 – A of the use of placebo by clinicians. 29:30 – A on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and placebo. 30:30 – A of factors modulating placebo effects. 34:00 – For the “signaling theory of symptoms,” see . Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/31082628

Cosmopolitan carnivores 04/18/2024

Cosmopolitan carnivores 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 . Sarah is Assistant Professor of Forest and Conservation Sciences and Zoology at the University of British Columbia; she also directs the 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 species—and certain members of these species—to thrive in dynamic, daunting urban spaces. We also talk about the big picture of the evolution of intelligence—and 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 . Notes and links 8:50 – A of manual dexterity in raccoons. 11:30 – A featuring raccoon chittering, among other vocalizations. 12:00 – A on the categorization of wildlife responses to urbanization—avoider, adapter, exploiter—with some critical discussion. 14:00 – A of how animals are becoming more nocturnal in response to humans. 18:00 – An on the Social Intelligence Hypothesis, by one of its originators, Richard Byrne. A of how the hypothesis has fared across different taxa. 18:30 – A recent by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues surveying carnivore cognition. 25:00 – On the question of urban vs rural animals, see the popular article, ‘?’ 28:00 – A by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues using puzzle boxes to study behavioral flexibility in captive raccoons. See also her , conducted with a large team of neuroscience collaborators, examining the brains of raccoons who successfully solved the puzzle boxes. 34:30 – An by Dr. Benson-Amram on innovative problem solving in hyenas. 36:30 – Our on animal personality with Dr. Kate Laskowski. 39:00 – A by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues exploring raccoons’ ability to solve the Aesop’s Fable task. She has also used this task . 44:00 – A by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues examining reversal learning in raccoons, skunks, and coyotes. 49:00 – An articulating the “cognitive buffer hypothesis.” 51:00 – A discussing—and “reviving”—the so-called ecological intelligence hypothesis. 53:00 – A by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues comparing brain size and problem-solving ability in mammalian carnivores. 56:00 – A 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 – A on bin-opening in cockatoos and how it might be leading to an “innovation arms race.” Recommendations , Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth by Frans De Waal , by Ed Yong (featured in a !) , by Stanley D. Gehrt, Seth P. D. Riley, and Brian L. Cypher Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/30879328

From the archive: Myths, robots, and the origins of AI 04/04/2024

From the archive: Myths, robots, and the origins of AI 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. What’s 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 is a Research Scholar in the Department of Classics at Stanford University and the author of the 2018 book, . Our second guest is ; Elly is Associate Professor in the History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the 2015 book, . 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 . Notes and links 4:00 – See Adrienne’s , the “first robot.” See also Adrienne’s for the Long Now Foundation. 7:15 – The Throne of Solomon does not survive, but it was often rendered in art, for example in by Edward Poynter. 12:00 – For more on Adrienne’s broader research program, see her ; for more on Elly’s research program, see her . 18:00 – For more on the etymology of ‘robot,’ see . 23:00 – A recent about Aristotle’s writings on slavery. 26:00 – An about the fact that Greek and Roman statues were much more colorful than we think of them today. 30:00 – A about the Antikythera mechanism. 34:00 – See Adrienne’s about the robots that guarded the relics of the Buddha. 38:45 – See Elly’s about how automata figured prominently in tombs. 47:00 – See Elly’s about mechanical clocks and the “invention of time.” For more on the rise of mechanistic thinking—and clocks as important metaphors in that rise—see Jessica Riskin’s book, . 50:00 – An about a “torture robot” of ancient Sparta. 58:00 – A of the “Iron Knight” in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Adrienne Mayor recommends: , by Armand D’Angour , edited by Brett Rogers and Benjamin Stevens , by George Zarkadakis , by Peter James and Nick Thorpe Elly Truitt recommends: , edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon , by Aifric Campbell You can read more about Adrienne’s work on her and follow her on . You can read more about Elly’s work on her and follow her on . Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , 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 (). 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 !** 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: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/30674293

The borderlands of perception 03/21/2024

The borderlands of perception 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 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 . Chaz is an Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, and Director of the 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 or on . 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 . Notes and links 3:00 – Dr. Firestone’s early reporting the Times Square experiment and the “skeletal shape” phenomenon. 8:00 – A of the “missing bullet holes” graphic. 13:00 – Dr. Firestone has collaborated intensively with the philosopher . 15:00 – A recent book by Ned Block, . 24:00 – Visual illusions are legion, as are inventories of them. See, for instance, on Wikipedia or this . 25:00 – An for Jerry Fodor, who died in 2017. The classic book by Zenon Pylyshyn, . 28:00 – A by Dr. Firestone about the history of the El Greco fallacy. An by Dr. Firestone and Brian Scholl showing the El Greco fallacy at work in perception research. 35:00 – A (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., , , & . 41:00 – A with discussion (and illustration) of the classic Dalmation Mooney image. 45:00 – A of rapid visual pattern recognition in expert chess players. 50:30 – A by J.J. Valenti and Dr. Firestone about the case of the blue banana. 54:00 – A by Alon Hafri and Dr. Firestone reviewing evidence that people actually perceive high-level relations like causality, support, and social interaction. 56:00 – A by Martin Rolfs and colleagues about the perception of causality. 1:02:00 – A by Liuba Papeo and colleagues about the perception of social interactions. A related showing an inversion effect. 1:04:00 – A by Alon Hafri and colleagues on the perception of roles in an interaction. 1:06:00 – A widely cited by J. Kiley Hamlin and colleagues on the recognition of social interactions in preverbal infants. 1:06:30 – A on reading in the brain. 1:10:00 – A by Rui Goh, Dr. Phillips, and Dr. Firestone on the perception of silence. 1:18:00 – A recent 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 by Dr. Firestone about human-machine comparisons. 1:25:00 - 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 . 1:35:00 – Other interesting work going on in Dr. Firestone’s research group has investigated , , and , among other topics. Recommendations , by Jerry Fodor , by Susanna Siegel , by Paul Bloom Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/30468963

Social memory in our closest cousins 03/07/2024

Social memory in our closest cousins 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 head— for at least a little while. This is true not just for humans but—we have to assume—for 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 and . 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 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 apes—and 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 . Notes and links 4:30 – Dr. Lewis and Dr. Krupenye worked together in the lab of Dr. Brian Hare, a on the podcast. 8:30 – The of Mama and the primatologist Jan van Hooff. 12:00 – For research on the remarkably long social memories of dolphins, see . 14:00 – For research on long-term voice recognition in bonobos, see . 19:30 – Another collaborator on the paper we’re discussing was , affiliated with the . 29:30 – For more on the use of eye-tracking with primates, see a by Dr. Lewis and Dr. Krupenye. 34:00 – For the previous study by Dr. Lewis, Dr. Krupenye, and colleagues about how bonobos and chimpanzees attend to current groupmates, see . 41:00 – A reviewing bonobo social behavior. 54:30 – A on individual recognition by scent in chimpanzees. 55:30 – A on individual recognition by butt in chimpanzees. Recommendations Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/30266883

Fermentation, fire, and our big brains 02/22/2024

Fermentation, fire, and our big brains 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 and—spoiler—it's a bit funky. My guests today are , Postdoctoral Fellow at Aix-Marseille University, and , Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. Katherine, Erin, and another colleague are the authors of 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 fermentation—which basically happens whether you want it to or not—would have been cognitively easier to harness than fire. Along the way, we touch on kiviaq, chicha, makgeolli, hákarl, 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 . 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 . Notes and links 3:00 – A about the “infectiously delicious confection” that is salt-rising bread. A for the bread. 6:00 – An about makgeolli, a Korean rice wine. An article about , the traditional corn-based fermented beverage that has been banned in some places. 11:30 – An about the role of the arcuate fasciculus in language processing. A by Dr. Bryant and colleagues comparing the arcuate in humans and chimpanzees. 12:30 – A by Dr. Hecht and colleagues on the evolutionary neuroscience of domestication. 13:00 – For discussions of the encephalization quotient (aka EQ) and of human brain evolution, see our previous episodes and . 15:00 – The on the “expensive tissue hypothesis.” 22:00 – An about the role of meat in human evolution; an about the role of tubers. The cooking hypothesis is most strongly associated with Richard Wrangham and his book, . 26:00 – A on evidence for the widespread control of fire in human groups by around 400,000 years ago. 31:30 – A on how fermenting cassava reduces its toxicity. 38:30 – 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 . 44:30 – A about kiviaq. 45:00 – The from the New Yorker, by Rebecca Mead, about the foodways of the Faroe Islands. 53:00 – For more discussion of the so-called drunken monkey hypothesis, see our about intoxication. 1:00:30 – A about hákarl, which is fermented Greenland shark. Recommendations , by Michael Pollan , by Sandor Katz , by Sandor Katz “,” by Karin Isler & Carel van Schaik Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/30060663

Of molecules and memories 02/08/2024

Of molecules and memories 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 memory—it'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 story—that 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 account—a 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 show—if you like the conversations we have and the questions we ask—it's a safe bet that you'd like DISI. You can find more info at —that's . 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 . Notes and links 4:00 - A on planarian memory transfer experiments and the scientist who conducted them, James V. McConnell. 8:00 - For more on Dr. Gershman’s research and general approach, see his and the on his lab website. 9:30 - A explaining long-term potentiation. An of “Hebbian Learning.” The phrase “neurons that fire together wire together” was, contrary to widespread misattribution, coined by Dr. Carla Shatz . 12:30 - The of Dr. Jeremy Gunawardena, Associate Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard University. A from Dr. Gunawardena’s lab on the avoidance behaviors exhibited by the single-celled organism Stentor (which vindicates some disputed, century-old findings). 14:00 - A by C. R. Gallistel describing some of his views on the biological basis of memory. 19:00 - The term “engram” refers to the physical trace of a memory. See recent reviews about the so-called search for the engram , , and . 20:00 - An on the importance of H.M. in neuroscience. 28:00 - A about the phenomenon of spike-timing dependent plasticity. 33:00 - An , co-authored by former guest , on the evidence for memory persistence despite radical remodeling of brain structures. See our episode with Dr. Levin . 35:00 - A reporting the persistence of memories in decapitated planarians. A about these findings. 36:30 - An reviewing one chapter in the memory transfer history. Another reviewing evidence for “vertical” memory transfer (between generations). 39:00 - For more recent demonstrations of memory transfer, see and . 40:00 - A by Dr. Gershman, Dr. Gunawardena, and colleagues reconsidering the evidence for learning in single cells and describing the contributions of Dr. Beatrice Gelber. A about Gelber following the publication of the paper by Dr. Gershman and colleagues. 45:00 – A arguing for the need to understand computation in single-celled organisms to understand how computation evolved more generally. 46:30 – of classical conditioning in paramecia, led by Dr. Todd Hennessey. 49:00 – For more on plant signaling, see with Dr. Paco Calvo and Dr. Natalie Lawrence. 56:00 – A on “serial reversal learning” and its neuroscientific basis. 1:07:00 – A demonstrating a role for methylation in memory. Recommendations , by Herbert Spencer Jennings , by C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King , by Dennis Bray Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/29853098

Energy, cooperation, and our species' future 01/25/2024

Energy, cooperation, and our species' future Welcome back folks! The new season of Many Minds is quickly ramping up. On today’s episode we’re thrilled to be rejoined by . Michael is Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics. He’s 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 on—not just because he was an audience favorite—but because he’s got a new book out. It’s titled . In this conversation, Michael and I talk about the book and lay out that grand theory mentioned in the title. We discuss energy and how—since the very origins of life—it’s 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 Michael’s “theory of everyone” 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 as well. But more importantly, you may want to get your hands on Michael’s book. It’s 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 . Notes and links 8:30 – Dr. Muthukrishna completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia, where he was advised by . He also worked with , , and others. 9:30 – Previous books on dual-inheritance theory and cultural evolution mentioned here include by Joseph Henrich, by Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, and by Kevin Lala. 16:30 – Dr. Muthukrishna’s in psychology, drawn from his dissertation. 17:10 – The classic paper ‘,’ about the need for theory-building in science. 22:00 – For a brief overview of Dr. Muthukrishna’s understanding of human intelligence and human uniqueness, see . For an overview of cumulative culture in comparative perspective, see . 23:00 – For the 2005 issue of Science magazine showcasing 25 big unanswered questions, see . 23:30 – For the review paper on cooperation by Dr. Muthukrishna and Dr. Henrich, see . 26:00 – For Dr. Muthukrishna’s empirical work that attempts to induce corruption in the lab, see . 28:00 – The scholar , mentioned here, is well-known for his research on corruption. 29:00 – See the preprint by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues titled ‘.’ 33:30 – A laying out the RNA world hypothesis. 45:00 – For more on the evolution of human brain size, see our with Dr. Muthukrishna, as well as with Jeremy DeSilva. 47:00 – For the metric known as Energy Return on Investment (EROI), see . 54:00 – For more on the cross-cultural variation in numeracy, see . 55:20 – To correct the record, according to of rare numeral systems, there is only a single known base 8 system in the world’s languages. 57:15 – In our (around 42:00), we discussed the work by Luria on ‘If P, then Q’ reasoning. 57:30 – For more on the so-called WEIRD problem, see our . 1:00:30 – For some experimental evidence consistent with the idea that language improves the transmission of cultural information, see . 1:07:00 – For data on the acceleration of urbanization, see . 1:16:00 – For a brief primer on land value taxes, see . 1:18:30 – For the idea that Machiavelli’s The Prince was satire, see . Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/29640388

Dawn of the smile 01/11/2024

Dawn of the smile And we’re back! It’s been a while, friends. Hope you enjoyed your fall and your holidays. Thanks so much for re-joining us—we’re super excited to be kicking off a brand-new season of the Many Minds podcast. We thought we’d 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 folks—and we’ll see you again in a couple weeks with our first interview of 2024. Now on to ‘Dawn of the smile.’ Enjoy! A text version of this episode is available . Notes and links 3:00 – Darwin describes his children’s first smiles in his 1872 book, 4:10 – On so-called Duchenne smiles, see this . 5:00 – For a summary of “basic emotions” theory, see any number of Paul Ekman’s writing (e.g., , ). For a recent articulation of the “social tools” theory, see writings by Alan J. Fridlund (e.g., ). For another influential recent critique of “basic emotions” theory, see . 6:00 – For the classic bowling study, see . 7:00 – For a recent review of facial expressions in blind people, see . 7:45 – For a review of smiling and gender (and the importance of “rules and roles”), see . For one of the studies linking smiliness to historical migration patterns, see . 8:30 – For the historical shift in smiling—and its possible relation to the Kodak company—see . For the yearbook photo analysis, see . 9:30 – See Darwin’s discussion of infant laughter in 10:30 – For Darwin’s observations of laughter and smiles in primates, again, See Jan van Hooff’s classic study . 11:30 – For the study comparing laughter across the Great Apes, see . For the study of an “ape-like” stage in human laughter, see . 12:30 – For a review of play vocalizations and laughter across species, see . 13:20 – For the Marina Davila-Ross’s suggestion that laughter and smiles share a common evolutionary source, see . 13:30 – For research on human infants’ open-mouthed smiles, see . 14:00 – For the idea of the “acoustic origin” of the smile, see . Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/29437888

From the archive: The point of (animal) personality 12/27/2023

From the archive: The point of (animal) personality 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. We’re all a bit different, in other words—and when I say “we” I don’t just mean humans. Over the last couple of decades there's been an explosion of research on personality differences in animals too—in 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 . 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 fish—the Amazon molly—as a model system for understanding animal personality (or as she sometimes calls it “consistent individual behavioral variation”). In this episode, Kate and I discuss 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 Kate’s 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 you’ll enjoy it, too. On to my conversation with Kate Laskowski! A transcript of this episode is available . Notes and links 3:00 – A by Dr. Laskowski and a colleague on strong personalities in sticklebacks. 5:30 – The for the lab that Dr. Laskowski directs at UC-Davis. 7:00 – The paper we focus on—‘Consistent Individual Behavioral Variation: What do we know and where are we going?’—is available . 11:00 – A on sticklebacks. 13:00 – A of two sea anemones fighting. A about fighting (and personality) in sea anemones. 15:00 – A classic the “Big 5” model in human personality research. 17:00 – The proposing five personality factors in animals. 22:30 – A on the “Pace-of-Life syndromes” framework. 27:00 – A on evidence for the “fluctuating selection” idea in great tits. 29:00 – A by Dr. Laskowski and colleagues on “behavioral individuality” in clonal fish raised in near-identical environments. 32:10 – A by Dr. Laskowski and colleagues extending their earlier findings on clonal fish. 39:30 – The of the Many Birds project. The for the project. Dr. Laskowski recommends: , by Kevin Mitchell , by Lulu Miller , by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/29249408

From the archive: A smorgasbord of senses 12/13/2023

From the archive: A smorgasbord of senses Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy! ---- [originally aired July 20, 2022] The world is bigger than you think. I don’t 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 don’t usually experience, that we might actually never be able to experience. Our senses just aren’t wired to take it all in. We’re simply not tuned to all the dimensions of reality’s 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 . Ed is a science writer for The Atlantic and the author of an exceptional earlier book on the microbiome called . This new book tours the wide diversity of animal senses. It asks what it’s like to be a bat, sure, but also what it’s 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. There’s a lot of praise I could lavish on this book, but I’ll 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 we’ll 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 you’ve 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 it’s 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 . Notes and links 3:30 – One of our earlier audio essays——profiled von Uexküll and his concept of an Umwelt. 6:00 – The classic Nagel article ‘?’; Mike Tomasello’s recent variant, ‘?’, which we discussed just . 10:00 – of many articles by Ed about COVID-19. He was awarded a for his coverage of the pandemic. 14:30 – A on proprioception. 19:00 – A on the evolution of opsin proteins. 20:00 – A on echolocation. 25:00 – A on heat-sensitive pits in snakes. 26:30 – An academic about the “star” of the star-nosed mole. A showing the star-nosed mole in action. 31:00 – A about the eyes of starfish. 32:00 – A of research articles about the Ampullae of Lorenzini. 35:00 – A very about spider webs as “outsourced” hearing. 38:00 – A about aspects of bird song that humans can’t hear. 40:00 – A by Lucy Bates and colleagues about how elephants operate with a spatial model of where their kin are. You can read more about Ed’s work at , catch up on his stories in , or follow him on . Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/29061748

From the archive: Children in the deep past 11/29/2023

From the archive: Children in the deep past Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re 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, too—lots of them—no 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 everywhere—activities 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 “secret spaces”. 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 wouldn’t want a monthly dose of Many Minds right in their inbox? You can find a in the show notes. Alright friends, on to my conversation with Dr. Michelle Langley. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available . Notes and links 2:30 – A from Les Espélugues cave in France. 6:00 – A classic by Conkey & Spector that helped initiate a wave of feminist archaeology. 7:30 – Dr. Langley’s to examine children’s leavings in the archaeological record. 8:30 – See for discussion and examples of perforated batons or bâton percés. 9:30 – Dr. Langley’s paper, co-authored with Mirani Litster, ‘’ 14:00 – An of ethnographic analogies in archaeology. 18:30 – A on the interpretation of Dorset miniature harpoon heads. 23:30 – An on the Neanderthal ornamental use of raptor feathers. 29:00 - Dr. Langley’s on identifying children’s secret spaces in the archaeological record. 30:30 – A by David Sobel on children’s special spaces. 34:00 – A about the site of Étiolles. 40:00 – A showing the layout of the Bruniquel Cave, including the secondary structures. 41:00 – More about the mammoth bone huts of Ukraine. 44:00 – A by Dr. Langley and Thomas Suddendorf on bags and other “mobile containers” in human evolution. 47:00 – A showing a sea otter using their underarm “pocket” to store objects. 50:00 – The “carrier bag theory of evolution” was proposed by Elizabeth Fisher in . This later inspired Ursula Le Guin to propose the “.” 51:30 – An by Dr. Langley and colleagues on children’s emerging intuitions about the use of containers and bags. 55:30 – A by Dr. Langley and colleagues on early symbolic behavior in Indonesia. Dr. Langley recommends: , by April Nowell You can read more about Dr. Langley’s work at and follow her on . Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/28846698

From the archive: The puzzle of piloerection 11/15/2023

From the archive: The puzzle of piloerection Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re 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! We’ve got an audio essay for you this week. It touches on art, music, the skin, the spine, individual differences, vestigial responses, tiny muscles. There’s even some Darwin thrown in there. It’s a fun one. Hope you enjoy it! A text version of this essay is available on . Notes and links 1:30 – The that very recently gave me goosebumps. 2:00 – A of Nabokov and his ideas about the tell-tale tingle. 2:45 – Some for goosebumps in other languages. 3:00 – A on skin anatomy. 4:00 – A on the thermoregulatory function of piloerection in primates and other animals. 4:25 – Read Darwin’s Expression . 5:00 – A about “nails on chalkboard chills.” A that discusses claims that piloerection attends awe (but which fails to find evidence for this association in a lab setting). A on goosebumps in religious experiences. A that references mathematicians getting goosebumps when seeing proofs. 5:30 – The 1980 by Goldstein on “thrills.” 6:45 – The Darwin passage is quoted in . 7:00 – A 1995 by Panskepp, as well as his 2002 with a co-author. 7:40 – A recent on chills in response to films; on poetry. 9:15 – The by McCrae reporting the association between “openness to experience” and chills. 10:00 – A by Fiske and colleagues on kama muta, the “sudden devotion emotion.” 11:10 – Panskepp’s “separation call” hypothesis is perhaps best described in his 2002 . Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/28645448

From the archive: The scents of language 11/01/2023

From the archive: The scents of language Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy! ---- [originally aired June 23, 2021] You’ve no doubt heard that—as humans—our sense of smell is, well, kind of pathetic. The idea goes all the way back to Aristotle, that we have advanced senses—especially sight and hearing—and then lowly, underdeveloped ones—taste and smell. It’s 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 can’t 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. She’s Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of York in the UK. For a decade now, Asifa’s 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 Asifa’s 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 one’s ability to discriminate odors. And we venture beyond Asifa’s own work, to touch on a bunch of recent highlights from the broader science of olfaction. This was such a fun conversation, folks! I’ve admired Asifa’s work on this topic since her very first paper. She’s a truly interdisciplinary thinker and, as you’ll hear, she’s 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 . Notes and links 3:40 – A on the 19th century rise of the myth that humans are poor smellers. 6:00 – A estimating that humans can discriminate possibly a trillion different odors. 7:30 – A theoretical by Dr. Majid and a collaborator on “differential ineffability” and the senses. 9:20 – Dr. Majid’s collaborator in her work on Jahai, a Malaysian language, was . 11:00 – A on the idea of “basic terms” in the domain of color, which provide an analogy for basic terms in the domain of smell. 12:30 – A first by Dr. Majid and Niclas Burenhult describing the language of olfaction in Jahai. 14:45 – Dr. Majid’s comparing odor naming (and color naming) in Jahai and English. 20:00 – Dr. Majid has also examined smell lexicons in several other languages, including , , , and . 25:40 – A follow-up by Dr. Majid and a collaborator on two groups within Malaysia who contrast in subsistence mode. 29:30 – A detailing cultural practices surrounding smell among the Jahai. 31:00 – Dr. Majid discusses the factors shaping cultural variation in olfaction (as well as a number of other interesting issues) in her most recent review . 39:00 – The “deodorization” hypothesis was discussed in a on the cultural history of aroma. 39:40 – In a recent , Dr. Majid and collaborators failed to find evidence that the frequency of smell language has fallen off since industrialization. 45:50 – Dr. Majid led a comparing 20 languages across the world in terms of how expressible their speakers found different sensory experiences. 53:00 – Some possible reasons for the general trend toward the ineffability of smell are considered in Dr. Majid’s recent review . 57:00 – Along with her collaborators, Dr. Majid has examined the smell-naming abilities of wine experts. See one paper . 1:02:45 – A recent by Dr. Majid and colleagues showing that wine experts’ smell-naming abilities are not dependent on “thinking in” language. 1:05:35 –Some from “verbal interference” tasks suggests that, when carrying out color discrimination tasks, people rely on language in the moment. 1:09:00 – The . 1:10:20 – The of Noam Sobel’s lab. Dr. Majid’s end of show recommendations: , by Avery Gilbert , by Andreas Keller , by Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synott , by Gordon Shepard , by Bianca Bosker You can keep up with Dr. Majid on Twitter (@asifa_majid). Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/28481495

From the archive: Aligning AI with our values 10/18/2023

From the archive: Aligning AI with our values Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy! ---- [originally aired February 17, 2021] Guess what folks: we are celebrating a birthday this week. That’s right, Many Minds has reached the ripe age of one year old. Not sure how old that is in podcast years, exactly, but it’s definitely a landmark that we’re proud of. Please no gifts, but, as always, you’re encouraged to share the show with a friend, write a review, or give us a shout out on social. To help mark this milestone we’ve 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: , published in 2011; , co-authored with Tom Griffiths and published in 2016; and most recently, . It was published this past fall and it’s the focus of our conversation in this episode. The alignment problem, put simply, is the problem of building artificial intelligences—machine learning systems, for instance—that do what we want them to do, that both reflect and further our values. This is harder to do than you might think, and it’s more important than ever. As Brian and I discuss, machine learning is becoming increasingly pervasive in everyday life—though it’s sometimes invisible. It’s 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, Brian’s 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 detail—and 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, it’s also propelling those advances. This is a wide-ranging and illuminating conversation folks. And, if I may say so, it’s 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 it—and talks about it here—with such clarity and insight. I hope you enjoy this one. And, if you do, be sure to check out Brian’s book. Happy birthday to us—and on to my conversation with Brian Christian. Enjoy! A transcript of this show is available . Notes and links 7:26 - Norbert Wiener’s article from 1960, ‘’. 8:35 - ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ is from the animated film, Fantasia (1940). Before that, it was by Goethe. 13:00 - A well-known in which Google’s nascent auto-tagging function went terribly awry. 13:30 - The ‘Labeled Faces in the Wild’ database can be viewed . 18:35 - A in ProPublica on the biases inherent in the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) tool. 25:00 – The website of the Future of Humanity Institute, mentioned in several places, is . 25:55 - For an account of the collaboration between Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch, see . 29:35- An about the racial biases built into photographic film technology in the 20th century. 31:45 - The much-investigated involving a driverless car and a pedestrian: 37:17 - The psychologist developed the “law of effect.” Here is of his papers on the law. 44:40 - A highly influential 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 ‘Montezuma’s Revenge.’ 47:38 - A on the classic “preferential looking” paradigm in developmental psychology: 53:40 - A discussing the relationship between dopamine in the brain and temporal difference learning. Here is the paper in in which this relationship was first articulated. 1:00:00 - A on the concept of “coherent extrapolated volition.” 1:01:40 - An on the notion of “iterated distillation and amplification.” 1:10:15 - The fourth edition of a seminal textbook by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, AI a Modern approach, is available here: 1:13:00 - An on Warren McCulloch’s poetry. 1:17:45 - The concept of “” is central in computer science and mathematics. Brian Christian’s end-of-show reading recommendations: , written by Rohin Shah , by Caroline Criado Perez: , Alison Gopnik: You can keep up with Brian at his or on . Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/28350920

From the archive: Intoxication 10/04/2023

From the archive: Intoxication Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re 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 joke—it’s 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 one—in the spirit of the holiday season—is intoxication and our guests are and . Oné is a Professor of Biology at West Chester University and our pharmacologist in residence for this episode. He just published Ted is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia and our resident philosopher. He is the author of the recent book . We range over a lot of ground in this conversation. We talk about alcohol as a kind of pharmacological “hand grenade”—whereas other substances are more like “scalpels”. 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 monkey”, "stoned ape”, and "beer before bread" hypotheses. And though we mostly keep things light and festive here, we also do delve into the dark side of intoxication—which may have gotten that much darker with the advent of distilled liquor. Whether you're a tippler or a teetotaler, I’m guessing you’ll 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 friends—be well, be merry, and be safe this holiday season. We’ll be back in mid-January after a not so long winter’s nap. Now on to my conversation with Dr. Oné Pagán and Ted Slingerland. Cheers! A transcript of this episode is . Notes and links 4:00 – The “write drunk, edit sober” idea is to Ernest Hemingway. 8:00 – Dr. Pagán wrote an about his favored model organism, the planaria (or flatworms). You may recall we discussed planaria in with Dr. Michael Levin. 10:10 – Dr. Slingerland wrote an about the Chinese ideal of wu-wei. See this of his ideas in The Marginalian. 13:00 – The idea of alcohol as pharmacological “hand grenade” is a metaphor due to . 19:30 – An in Science about “why cats are crazy for catnip.” 21:20 – A in The Conversation about Asian flushing genes. 26:00 – Thomas Hunt Morgan, who won the , pioneered the use of drosophila as an animal model. 28:20 – An article on the (with an accompanying illustration). 33:00 – The biologist Robert Dudley the “drunken monkey” hypothesis. A recent by Dudley. 38:00 – Not to be confused with the “stoned ape” hypothesis, which was introduced by . A on the hypothesis. 41:00 – The idea of psychedelics as introducing “mutagens” into culture comes from , by Michael Pollan. 44:00 – A recent on the “beer before bread” hypothesis. The idea was originally proposed . 48:50 – Pharmaceutical practices of non-human animals are called “.” A of findings about animal self-medication. 53:00 – The in Science on the “flower burial” in Shanidar cave. 56:20 – The appears to be drinking (alcohol?) from a horn. 59:20 – An article describing case of Tusko the elephant. 1:03:50 – One example of practices that moderate alcohol’s dangerous effect is the . 1:08:00 – A brief , which is a relatively recent invention. 1:11:00 – Planaria are widely used as an animal model for , among other intoxicating substances. Dr. Slingerland recommends the following books: , by Steven Braun , by Iain Gately , by Mark Forsyth Dr. Pagán recommends the following book: , by Ronald Siegel You can find Dr. Slingerland on Twitter () and follow him at ; you can find Dr. Pagán on Twitter (), follow him at , and listen to . Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Our transcripts are created by . 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 ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Twitter: . /episode/index/show/manyminds/id/28216694

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