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It's one of the most powerful ideas in the history of science. That a brain is, in essence, a computer. That we can look past its gelatinous flesh and see through to its underlying workings. That these workings are best described in the language of programs and computations, algorithms and representations. There's no question that this "brain as computer" analogy has been—in many ways—enormously generative. But in other ways could it be leading us astray?  My guest today is Dr. Mazviita Chirimuuta. Mazviita is a Philosopher of Mind and Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland. She's the author of the widely acclaimed and widely discussed 2024 book, The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience.  Here, Mazviita and I talk about the early days of her career spent trying to build computational models of cells in the visual system—and how this informed her later philosophical work. We discuss how neuroscience—indeed all science—involves key simplifying strategies: analogy, mathematization, and reductionism. We talk about the history of the "brain as computer" analogy and the different ways of understanding its status. We consider how a computational understanding of the brain feeds directly into certain ideas about technology—for example, the idea that machines are on the cusp of consciousness or the idea that we may one day soon upload our minds to the digital realm. Along the way, we touch on Marr's levels of analysis, maps and territories, biological naturalism, medium dependence and independence, analog vs digital computing, neuromorphic AI, Moravec's paradox, the lower bounds of cognition, and whether consciousness is more like the game of chess or more like soccer.  I learned a lot from this one, folks—and I think you will, too. On to my conversation with Dr. Mazviita Chirimuuta. Enjoy!   Notes 7:00 – Dr. Chirimuuta's book, again, is here. You can also read a précis of the book here, which was published along with commentaries here. 9:00 – Dr. Chirimuuta's paper, 'Prediction versus understanding in computationally enhanced neuroscience.' 12:30 – The (very) short Borges story, 'On Exactitude in Science.' 17:00 – The classic essay by Eugene Wigner, 'The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.' 19:00 – For more on metaphor and analogy in science, see our earlier episode. For another perspective on the "brain as computer" analogy, see here. 27:00 – The classic article from 1943 by McCulloch and Pitts, one of the earliest articulations of the idea of computation in the brain. 30:00 – For a primer on Marr's levels of analysis, see here. 36:00 – For some perspectives on the controversial idea of "mind uploading," see here. 42:00 – For an articulation of biological naturalism, see, e.g., work by Anil Seth here and here. 43:00 – John Haugeland's classic book, Artificial intelligence: The very idea. 48:00 – An influential academic discussion of "neuromorphic computing." A general-audience discussion of "analog computing." 51:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Chirimuuta on medium (in)dependence and neuromorphic computing. For more of Dr. Chirimuuta's recent ideas about AI, see her recent talk honoring her receipt of the 2025 Lakatos Award. 57:00 – For further discussion of Moravec's paradox, see our earlier episode. 1:03:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Chirimuuta, 'A mark of the noncognitive.' 1:11:00 – For an example of recent work by Dr. Earl K. Miller and colleagues, see here.   Recommendations Elusive Cures, by Nicole Rust Realism for Realistic People, by Hasok Chang The Eye of the Master, by Matteo Pasquinelli   Tile art credit:  Illustration by Galina Nelyubovavia via Unsplash   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Subscribe to Many Minds on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Overcast, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the **new** 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 Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Culture can be a little hard to wrap our minds around. It's seemingly everywhere, enveloping us—but where is it exactly? What are its core properties? How does culture change? Why does it change? What tools and techniques should we be using to understand its vagaries? How can we illuminate this living, breathing, omnipresent, amorphous thing?  My guest today is Dr. Jacob Foster. Jacob is a Professor of Informatics and Cognitive Science at Indiana University – Bloomington; he's also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. For more than a decade now, Jacob has been bringing together different disciplinary strands to develop a theory of culture and a toolkit for studying it. Here, Jacob and I talk about what culture is—and whether cultural ideas are, in an important sense, alive. We discuss Jacob's path through physics to complexity science to sociology and to cognitive science. We talk about the nature and value of computational thinking. We dig into Jacob's framework for thinking about culture as a set of chains that weave from mind to world and back, across time and space. We dig into a colossal new paper of Jacob's in which he and his co-authors characterize the dynamics of culture through the case of metal music—a genre that has been evolving, splintering, growing, and withering for more than 50 years.  Along the way, Jacob and I touch on metaphors for culture as dark matter, as amphibian, as a set of companion species, as living vines on a human trellis. We touch on foxes and hedgehogs; personal culture and public culture; how to be a wizard; ecological carrying capacity and cultural carrying; schismogenesis; the ideas of Sperber, Heidegger, Jung, and Culianu; ideal objects and morphodynamics; and how viewing culture as alive gives us a different stance toward the dead. This is not my first chat with Jacob. As you'll hear, we overlapped in our undergraduate years, also in our postdoc years, and since 2018 have worked together at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute or DISI—which, of course, is the sponsor and incubator of this very podcast. Jacob and his wife Dr. Erica Cartmill founded DISI and are the current directors. I always have fun talking to Jacob—I always learn a bunch from him. And so I think you'll enjoy this one, friends. Alright, without further ado: here's my conversation with Dr. Jacob Foster.   Notes 4:00 – For more about the Santa Fe Institute workshop on "multiple life," see here. 7:00 – For an example of work by the socio-narratologist Art Frank, see here. For Donna Haraway's idea of "companion species," see here. 9:00 – Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind. 10:00 – For Dr. Foster's theoretical paper on computational thinking in the study of culture, see here. 11:00 – For the paper on models in science by Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener, see here. 14:00 – For the classic 1952 treatment of the challenges of defining culture, reviewing 164 definitions of the term, see  here. 15:00 – Dr. Foster has collaborated on theoretical papers about culture in non-human animals. See here and here. 17:00 –The classic essay about "foxes" and "hedgehogs." 24:30 – For examples of Dr. Foster's work with James Evans in the science studies and science of science vein, see here and here. 30:00 – For more on how Dr. Foster defines culture, see (again) here. 32:00 – For more on the personal culture vs public culture distinction in sociology, see here. 35:00 – For more on Dan Sperber's ideas about culture, see Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. 39:00 – Pierre Bayard's How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read. 48:00 – The still in-press paper 'The Evolutionary Dynamics of Cultural Change (As Told Through the Birth and Brutal, Blackened Death of Metal Music),' by Bernard Koch, Daniele Silvestro, and Dr. Foster. Dr. Koch's website is here. 51:00 – For the earlier study using phylogenetic analyses to understand American cars, see here. 53:00 – The Encyclopaedia Metallum. 57:30 – For a discussion of the emic/etic distinction, see here. 1:20:00 – For Dr. Koch's and Dr. Foster's work on the culture of machine learning, see here. 1:21:00 – For our earlier episode on linguistic diversity, see here. For the original discussion of "schismogenesis" by Gregory Bateson, see here. 1:25:00 – The essay by Dr. Foster—written with Phil Ford and J.F. Martel—on the care of the dead. For the episode of the Weird Studies podcast about the paper, see here. 1:31:00 – For Dr. Foster's thoughts on the work of Ioan Culianu, see the general discussion in the metal paper. For a recent talk in which Dr. Foster discusses Culianu's work (among other topics we touch on in this interview), see here. 1:32:00 – Culianu's book Tree of Gnosis. 1:39:00 – For discussion of some of these recent turns in evolutionary theory, see our episode with Dr. Kevin Lala.   Recommendations The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse Work by John Crowley Work by James Tynion IV Brahms: Intermezzi, Op. 117 – Klavierstücke, Opp. 188 & 119, recording by Anna Fedorova The Final Piano Pieces, recording by Sir Stephen Hough   Tile art credit: Photo by Ingrid Martinussen via Unsplash   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Subscribe to Many Minds on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Overcast, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the **new** 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 Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Tool use is rare in the animal kingdom—but maybe not as rare as we once thought. Since Jane Goodall famously observed a chimpanzee fishing for termites, many new examples of animals using tools have come to light. Birds using sticks to forage for grubs. Sea otters using rocks to smash open mussels. Digger wasps using stones to close off their burrows. But as these examples mount, so do the scientific questions. What is tool use, really? What different forms does it take? Does it always imply a high degree of intelligence? And perhaps the biggest question of all: Why do some creatures use tools while so many others don't? My guest today is Dr. Alice Auersperg. Alice is a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. She and her lab study innovation, technical cognition, and tool use in animals—especially in a species of parrot known as the Goffin's cockatoo. Here, Alice and I talk about her lab's recent work with a certain remarkable cow. We discuss the wide variation in definitions of tool use across studies, and why some kinds of tool use are perhaps more impressive than others. We walk through some of her lab's most striking findings about tool use in the Goffin's cockatoo: for example, the finding that these birds don't just use tools but also make them—and can make the same tool out of different materials; the finding that they learn to use tools from others; and the finding that they recognize in some way the value of tools. We dig into some of Alice's ideas about the big picture—why certain species use tools, and why so many tool users seem to live on islands. Along the way, Alice and I talk about whether tool use in birds is fundamentally different from tool use in primates; we talk about play and boldness; the allure of the sea mango; intrinsic motivation to combine objects; why tool use differs in captivity, at least in Great Apes; and why Goffin's cockatoos like to dunk their noodles in blueberry soy yogurt. Before we get to it, a brief announcement. We've been steadily expanding the ways you can engage with us. We recently revived our newsletter, in the form of a Substack. And our episodes are now up on YouTube (albeit in audio-only format, for the time being). And of course you can still find us on Spotify, LinkedIn, and on Bluesky. You are warmly encouraged to subscribe to us or follow us on any and all of these channels. And maybe this goes without saying but we do like hearing from you—so please do leave us a comment!  Alright friends, without further ado, on to my interview with Dr. Alice Auersperg. Enjoy!   Notes 3:30 – The recent study by Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró and Dr. Auersperg on Veronika the cow's flexible tool use; a video about the findings. Dr. Auersperg's book on innovation in animals (in German). 9:30 – We discussed gifted word-learning dogs in a recent episode. 11:00 – A paper on tool use in digger wasps. A paper on "anting" in birds. A paper on macaques' use of human hair as dental floss. 18:00 – The chapter by Fragaszy and Mangalam in which the concept of "tooling" was introduced. For a discussion of this framework by Dr. Auersperg and colleagues, see here. 23:00 – A recent discussion by Jen Colbourne and Dr. Auersperg, which touches on the (somewhat outdated) idea that avian and primate tool use are quite different. 25:00 – For more on tool use in New Caledonian crows, see our (much) earlier episode with Alex Taylor. 30:00 – An example of Dr. Auersperg's early work with kea. 34:00 – The study by Dr. Auersperg and team describing the innovation of tool use by the cockatoo named Figaro. 38:00 – A follow-up study on social learning of tool use. A follow-up study showing that Goffin's cockatoos can make the same tool from different materials (video abstract). 47:00 – A study showing that Goffin's cockatoos will (learn to) safekeep their tools. 50:00 – The study from Dr. Auersperg's lab documenting the use of "tool sets" in wild Goffin's cockatoos (video abstract). 58:00 – For more on the origins and drivers of tool use across species, see this recent discussion by Jen Colbourne and Dr. Auersperg. 1:02:00 – A paper by Jean-Baptiste Leca and a colleague about object play and its relation to tool use. 1:04:00 – A paper discussing how tool use differs in captivity in primates. 1:05:00 – The study of noodle flavoring behavior in Goffin's cockatoos by Jeroen Stephan Zewald and Dr. Auersperg (video abstract). 1:09:00 – For an initial discussion of island ecology and its effects on tool use, by Dr. Auersperg and a colleague, see here. Dr. Auersperg's fuller treatment of the island effect remains to be published. 1:19:00 – A study of tool use in sea otters. 1:22:00 – The book Delicious by Rob Dunn (former guest) and Monica Sanchez.   Recommendations A Bird's IQ, by Louis Lefebvre Animal Tool Behavior, by Robert W. Shumaker, Kristine R. Walkup, & Benjamin Beck 'Tooling,' by Dorothy Fragaszy & Madhur Mangalam   Tile art credit: Photo by Alice Auersperg   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Subscribe to Many Minds on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Overcast, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the **new** 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 Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

For thousands of years—maybe for as long as we've been human—we've offloaded our thinking. We've counted on our fingers. We've carved tallies into bone. We've invented a long series of tools to help us reason, remember, and manage information—tools like abacuses, calendars, writing systems, calculators, smartphones, and many, many more. So cognitive offloading is hardly new—but the questions around it seem newly urgent. As cognitive technologies accumulate, as opportunities for offloading tempt us at every turn, as headlines warn of "digital dementia" and "cognitive surrender," it seems like a good time to take stock. Yes, cognitive offloading can save us time and effort. But what are its other consequences? My guest today is Dr. Sam Gilbert. Sam is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. Sam and his colleagues have been trailblazers in the study of cognitive offloading—when we do it, why we do it, what it does for us and to us.  Here, Sam and I talk about what cognitive offloading is, how deep it goes in our species' history, and how it pervades our everyday lives. We talk about the different forms that offloading takes. We discuss why some people offload more than others, and why we offload in certain situations. We walk through three bodies of research on the consequences of cognitive offloading—research on the so-called Google effect, on the photo-taking impairment effect, and on the impact of using GPS to navigate. Of course, we also address the elephant in the room: How should we think about the possible dangers—and benefits—of cognitive offloading in the new era of AI? Before we get to it, some news: We have re-launched the Many Minds newsletter, as a Substack! We'll be sharing each of our episodes there, as well as other morsels from time to time. We've been wanting to do this, in part, to give you a better way to engage with us—and with each other. Were there questions we should have asked? Are there connections you made that we didn't? Counterarguments we overlooked? Et cetera. All that stuff can now go in the comments for each episode. So, if you're a fan of the show, please do consider subscribing and following along with us there. Alright friends, on to my conversation with Dr. Sam Gilbert. Enjoy!   Notes 4:00 – For a sampling of recent discussions of AI and its possible harms, see here, here, and here. 7:30 – For a scholarly discussion of "shifting baseline syndrome," see here. 12:30 – For an earlier influential overview of the phenomenon of cognitive offloading, see  this article by Dr. Gilbert and a colleague. 15:00 – For more on the phenomenon of tilting one's head to view a tilted image (aka "external normalization"), see here. For an example of recent work on finger counting in children, see here. 18:00 – For some of Dr. Gilbert's work on cognitive effort in cognitive offloading, see here. For another recent discussion of the construct, see here. 23:00 – For a recent review of "intention offloading" by Dr. Gilbert and colleagues, see here. 29:00 – For work by Dr. Gilbert and colleagues on the role of metacognition in offloading, see here and here. 33:00 – For recent work by Dr. Gilbert and colleagues on offloading in older and younger adults, see here. See also a recent review of cognitive offloading in children by Dr. Gilbert and a colleague. 39:00 – The original study of the "Google effect" by Sparrow and colleagues. For more on "transactive memory," see here. 45:00 – For the original demonstration of the "photo-taking impairment effect," see here. For recent work by Dr. Gilbert and colleagues exploring this effect, see here. 53:00 – A recent meta-analysis of whether GPS impairs navigation ability. 59:00 – The 'Your Brain on ChatGPT' preprint. 1:02:00 – For a meta-analysis of the effects of calculators on math education, see here.   Recommendations 'The Intelligent Use of Space,' by David Kirsh Cognition in the Wild, by Edwin Hutchins   Tile art credit: Image by NASA via Wikipedia   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. 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 **new** 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 Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

It's a familiar story in many ways. A child is born, and for years afterward is adored and indulged and anchored to home and family. But then the child grows up and starts crossing that long threshold into adulthood. The transition proves—to say the least—a bit turbulent. Now when I say this story is familiar, I don't just mean familiar to us as human beings. After all, a similar story has long played out among our closest cousins, the chimpanzees. My guest today is Dr. Rachna Reddy. Rachna co-directs the longstanding Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in Uganda and is an incoming Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. For more than a decade now, she has been closely observing the chimpanzees at Ngogo—and especially the adolescents. Here Rachna and I talk about why adolescence—in all its intensity—is such a scientifically fascinating life-stage. We sketch the Ngogo research site, home to the largest group of chimpanzees ever studied. We unpack the different stages of chimpanzee life history. We zoom in on chimpanzee adolescence using a variety of different lenses—we talk about greetings, dominance hierarchies, grooming, social rejection, mentorship, deference, patrolling, female dispersal, and more. We discuss the so-called civil war that has taken root at Ngogo. And, finally, we talk about Rachna's in-progress novel (if that's the right word), which tells the story of one chimpanzee's coming of age in immersive detail.   I think you'll enjoy this one, folks. Chimpanzees offer us a kind of parallel universe, a funhouse mirror version of human life—one that is deeply relatable in some ways, and totally alien to us in others. And the parallels and non-parallels are arguably all the more striking in adolescence. But before we get to it, one humble ask: As the new season of Many Minds ramps up, this would be a great time to support the show. You could do this by rating us, writing a review on Apple Podcasts or a comment on Spotify, or by doing the old-fashioned thing of just recommending us to a friend or colleague. Your support is—as always—much appreciated.  Alright friends, without further ado. Here's my conversation with Dr. Rachna Reddy. Enjoy!   Notes 4:00 – Damien and several other chimpanzees discussed in this episode feature in the Netflix documentary series Chimp Empire. 8:00 – See here for a study by Dr. Reddy and a colleague on caregiving behavior in recently orphaned chimpanzee siblings. 13:00 – See here for a comprehensive recent article by Dr. Reddy and colleagues about puberty and adolescence in chimpanzees. 16:00 – The Ngogo fission—and subsequent "civil war"—is treated in detail in Chimp Empire and was the subject of a recent, widely discussed research paper (which includes Dr. Reddy as an author). 26:00 – "Tanner stages" are a widely used scale for measuring different phases of puberty in humans. 29:00 – For more discussion of life history stages and how these differ across species, see our earlier episodes here and here. For a recent report that Ngogo females experience menopause, see here. 36:00 – For some of Dr. Reddy's work on dominance hierarchies in adolescent male chimps, see here. 39:00 – For a detailed discussion of the chimpanzee "pant grunt" and its development, see here. 47:00 – For a study of female dispersal in a different chimpanzee population, see here. 54:00 – A video of a Tai chimpanzee playing "airplane" with her baby. 1:04:00 – A classic study of boundary patrolling at Ngogo. 1:11:00 – A study by Dr. Reddy and a colleague on sociosexual behavior in chimpanzees. 1:15:00 – A study by Dr. Reddy and a colleague on relationships between chimpanzee mothers and sons. 1:17:00 – A recent study conducted by Dr. Laura Simone Lewis (former guest!), Dr. Reddy, and others on social curiosity in chimpanzees and human children. 1:26:00 – For classic work by Jane Goodall featuring chimpanzee characters, see her 1971 book, In the Shadow of Man.   Recommendations Work by Kazuya Toda in bonobos (e.g., here) Work by Caitlin A. O'Connell in orangutans (e.g., here) Work by Ella Brown in gorillas (e.g., here)   Tile art credit: Image of Jarman at age 11, courtesy of Rachna Reddy   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. 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 **new** 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 Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Thousands of languages are used around the world today, and this linguistic diversity is a precious part of our human heritage. But it's also more than that. Linguistic diversity provides clues—a vast crazy quilt of clues—about how language works, about how history has unfolded, about the dynamics of culture, and about the nature of the human mind. My guest today is Dr. Damián Blasi. Damián is an ICREA Research Professor based at the Center for Brain & Cognition at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Over the last decade or so, Damián's emerged as one of the most innovative researchers in the study of language and linguistic diversity. He's been widely recognized for this work, and most recently was awarded the 2026 FABSS Early Career Impact Award from the Cognitive Science Society. In this conversation, Damián and I talk about why scientists should care about linguistic diversity. We do a bit of linguistic diversity 101—how many languages there are, how we can enumerate them, how they vary. We discuss a recent paper in which Damián and his colleagues reconstructed the explosive rise and precipitous fall of human linguistic diversity over the last 12,000 years. We talk about the factors that drive language change. And we discuss how cognitive science relies too much on English and English speakers—and how this may be holding the field back. Along the way, Damián and I touch on the Tower of Babel, a golden age of linguistic diversity, the human bite configuration, scientific aesthetics, whether children shape language, polygenetic theories of language evolution, the pace of language change, schooling, linguistic inequality and behemoth languages, and why Damián thinks that the possibility space of human language might be bigger and wilder than we currently imagine. This is a special episode of the Many Minds podcast. As I mentioned, Damián is this year's winner of an award from the Cognitive Science Society, in recognition of his outstanding early-career contributions to the field. He recently gave a keynote at the society's annual conference in Rio de Janeiro, and we've partnered with the Cognitive Science Society to feature this conversation about his work. I'll also mention that this wasn't my first time chatting with Damián—he's an alumnus of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI), the sponsor & incubator of this podcast. We met there a couple years ago, and so it was all the more fun to reconnect with him here. Alright friends, without further ado, on to my conversation with Dr. Damián Blasi. Enjoy!   Notes 10:00 – The UNESCO page on multilingualism and linguistic diversity. 17:00 – The Ethnologue database. 20:00 – For examples of Dr. Blasi's work on "behemoth languages" and on how languages are not represented equally in terms of technological and development investment, see here and here. 26:00 - For the paper in which Dr. Blasi and colleagues introduced Grambank, see here. For the database itself, see here. 29:00 – For Dr. Blasi's earlier work on sound-meaning associations across languages, see here. 33:00 – For discussion of Darwin's views on monogenesis vs polygenesis and race, see our recent episode. 36:00 – For more about pronouns—and how they do and do not vary across the world's languages—see several chapters in the World Atlas of Language Structures. 39:00 – The paper—'Babies aren't persons'—by David Lancy. 41:00 - For Dr. Blasi and colleagues' recent Science paper on the rise and fall of human linguistic diversity, see here. 59:00 – For a recent study of linguistic diversification, including discussion of so-called schismogenesis, see here. For an example of Cristina Moya's work on ethnic identity in the Andes region, see here. 1:00:00 – For an example of Dr. Blasi's work on how ecology shapes language—a topic not discussed in this conversation—see here. 1:01:00 ­– For the study by Dr. Blasi and colleagues about changes in the human bite configuration and how these changes have shaped sound systems, see here. 1:14:00 – For the recent paper by Dr. Blasi and colleagues about the (non-)role of children in language change, see here. 1:22:00 – The paper by Dr. Blasi and colleagues about the over-reliance on English in the cognitive sciences (and how it hinders the field). 1:24:00 – See here for work by Aitor Egurtzegi, in collaboration with Dr. Blasi and others, on ergativity and gaze patterns across languages. 1:27:00 – For the preprint—'Which humans?'—led by Mohammad Atari (and including Dr. Blasi and others), see here. 1:30:00 – For a recent argument that psychology needs to overcome its "ahistorical" bent, see here.   Recommendations A Myriad of Tongues, Caleb Everett The Secret of Our Success, Joseph Henrich Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time, Johanna Nichols   Tile art credit: Painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (detail)   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. 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 **new** 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 Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Hi friends! We're still taking a bit of a summer pause. We'll be back at the end of August—in the meanwhile, enjoy this listener favorite from our archives! ----- [originally aired September 19, 2024] 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 Dr. Sam England. 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 here.   Notes and links 3:00 – For many of the topics discussed in this episode, see this comprehensive recent review of electroreception and electric ecology by Dr. England and a colleague. 7:30 – A paper reviewing the (contested) phenomenon of electromagnetic hypersensitivity in humans. 9:30 – An encyclopedia article on electroreception in monotremes. 13:00 – An early study of electrolocation in "weakly electric" fish. 17:00 – A popular article about the discovery of electroreception in sharks. 20:30 – A 2013 study showing that bumblebees detect the electric fields around flowers. 23:30 – A recent review of electroreception and its evolution in fish.   25:00 – A study demonstrating electroreception in the Guiana dolphin. 34:00 – A recent study by Dr. England and colleagues showing that static electricity pulls ticks onto hosts. 43:00 – For more on echolocation, see our earlier episode on bats. 47:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Ryan Palmer, examining the theoretical possibilities of electroreception in air. 52:30 – A (controversial) 2022 paper on possibly language-like communication in fungi via electricity. 55:00 – Another 2013 study on electroreception in bees, this one in honeybees. 56:30 – An animated video describing the role that electricity plays in spider ballooning. 1:00:00 – Dr. England's recent study showing that caterpillars can detect the electric fields around wasps. 1:03:00 – A discussion of triboelectric effects. 1:11:00 – Dr. England's recent study of electrostatic pollination in butterflies and moths. 1:19:00 – A study 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 recent episode all about spiders.   Recommendations 'Electroreception, electrogenesis and electric signal evolution,' William Crampton An Immense World, Ed Yong (a previous guest!)   Tile image credit: Francisco Jesús Navarro Hernández via Unsplash   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].  For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Hi friends! We're taking a bit of a summer pause. We'll be back soon—in the meanwhile, enjoy this listener favorite from our archives! ----- [originally aired July 10, 2025] Childhood is a special time, a strange time. Children are adored and catered to—they're given their own menus and bedrooms. They're considered delicate and precious, and so we cushion them from every imaginable risk. Kids are encouraged to play, of course—but very often it's under the watchful eye of anxious adults. This, anyway, is how childhood looks in much of the United States today. But is this the way childhood looks everywhere? Is this the way human childhoods have always been? My guests today are Dr. Dorsa Amir and Dr. Sheina Lew-Levy. Dorsa is an Assistant Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University, where she runs the Mind and Culture Lab. Sheina is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Durham University in the UK, where she co-directs the Forager Child Studies research group. Both Sheina and Dorsa have spent much of their careers thinking about how childhoods differ across cultures—and why. In this conversation, I talk with Dorsa and Sheina about their fieldwork with indigenous groups in Ecuador and the Congo, respectively. We discuss the different ways that childhood differs in these places—for instance, in terms of parents' attitudes toward risk, in terms of the social structures and activities in which kids are embedded, and in terms of the freedom that children are granted. We discuss developmental psychology's "WEIRD problem." We talk about the quasi-autonomous cultures that children create among themselves—sometimes called "peer cultures"—and discuss how these kid-driven cultures end up shaping and benefit the larger community. Along the way, we touch on adult supremacy, adverse childhood experiences, walking the forest and climbing papaya trees, parenting norms, ding dong ditch and "nananabooboo", the pioneering work of the folklorists Iona and Peter Opie, teaching, toys, and the enduring question of what childhood is for.   Alright friends, lots to think about here. On to my conversation with Sheina Lew-Levy and Dorsa Amir. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 9:30 – For an overview of work on how culture shapes motor development, see here. 11:00 – The paper by Dr. Lew-Levy's and a colleague about "walking the forest." 16:00 – Dr. Amir's TedX talk, 'How the Industrial Revolution Changed Childhood.' 17:30 – For some of Dr. Amir's work on risk across cultures, see here. 35:00 – For a recent paper by Dr. Lew-Levy and colleagues about the evolution of childhood, see here. 39:00 – The popular article by Ann Gibbons, 'The Birth of Childhood.' 41:00 – For the idea of the "patriarch hypothesis," see here. 42:00 – For more on the "WEIRD problem" in developmental psychology, see here. 48:00 – A paper by Dr. Lew-Levy and colleagues about toys in hunter-gatherer groups. For more on the material culture of childhood, see our earlier episode with Michelle Langley. 52:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Lew-Levy on the prevalence of "child-to-child" teaching. 56:00 – A paper by Dr. Amir and a colleague about the concept of "adverse childhood experiences" in cross-cultural perspective. 1:04:00 – The paper by Dr. Amir and Dr. Lew-Levy on "peer cultures" and children as agents of cultural adaptation. 1:08:00 – For more on the idea of children as the "research and development" wing of the species, see our earlier episode with Alison Gopnik. 1:10:00 – For more on the Opies, see here. 1:13:00 – For the work of (past guest) Olivier Morin on children's culture, see here. 1:23:00 – For the paper by Dr. Camilla Morelli, 'The River Echoes with Laughter,' see here.   Recommendations The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, by Iona and Peter Opie The Gardener and the Carpenter, by Alison Gopnik The Anthropology of Childhood, by David Lancy Intimate Fathers, by Barry Hewlett   Tile image credit: Image by Lora Moore-Kakaletris via Unsplash   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].    For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Hi friends! We're taking a bit of a summer pause. We will be back soon—in the meanwhile, enjoy this listener favorite from our archives! ----- [originally aired May 14, 2025] Some call it the "psychedelic renaissance." In the last decade or so, interest in psychedelic drugs has surged—and not just among Silicon Valley types and psychiatrists and neuroscientists. It's also surged among a stereotypically soberer crowd: academic philosophers. The reasons are clear. With their varied and sometimes transformative effects, psychedelics raise ethical questions, epistemological questions, metaphysical questions, questions about the nature of experience and the nature of the mind. My guest today is Dr. Chris Letheby. Chris is a philosopher of cognitive science at the University of Western Australia and the author of the 2021 book, Philosophy of Psychedelics. Here, Chris and I talk about the so-called classic psychedelics—LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, and others—and how interest in them has gone through three distinct waves. We discuss the effects that these substances seem to have, in particular their capacity to treat certain psychiatric conditions and their tendency to induce "mystical-like" experiences. We consider the idea that psychedelics might serve as agents of moral enhancement. And we dig into the psychological and neural mechanisms by which psychedelics seem to have their diverse—and often salutary—effects. Along the way, we talk about ontological shock, comforting delusions, brain plasticity, unselfing, microdosing, placebo effects and adverse effects, physicalism and idealism, the REBUS model, environmental virtues, plant consciousness, meditation, and much more. Maybe this is obvious but this episode is not just for the seasoned psychonauts out there. Whatever your personal experience with these substances, they offer a distinctive window into the mind—a new way of grappling with big questions. Perhaps this much is also obvious but we're not encouraging or endorsing the use of psychedelics here—just offering a little fuel for your intellectual fires! Alright friends, on to my conversation w/ Dr. Chris Letheby. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.    Notes and links 4:00 – For a brief historical overview of research into psychedelics, see this paper. 8:30 – For work by an early trailblazer in the philosophy of psychedelics, see Thomas Metzinger's Being No One. 12:30 – For our earlier episode on the psychology and philosophy of visual illusions, see here.  18:00 – For a history of the concept of "set and setting," see here. 19:00 – A 2024 review of "adverse events" in classic psychedelics. 26:00 – A blog post on the history of the term "psychedelic." 27:00 – A recent review and meta-analysis of the use of psychedelic therapy for depressive symptoms. 31:00 – On mystical experience see Walter Stace's classic work, Mysticism and Philosophy. On the measurement of mystical-type experiences, see, e.g., Walter Pahnke's paper here. 36:00 – On the idea of "psychoplastogens," see here. 39:00 – See our earlier audio essay on placebo effects. 41:00 – For the study using Ritalin as an active placebo, see here.  44:00 – Michael Pollan's book on psychedelics is here. 48:00 – On the idea of "idealism," see here. 50:30 – For the 2021 study on psychedelics' capacity to alter metaphysical beliefs, see here. 54:00 – For Dr. Letheby and collaborators' paper about the "mysticism wars," see here. 1:02:00 – For a popular article on the possibility that psychedelics reduce fear of death, see here. 1:03:00 – For Dr. Letheby's paper on psychedelics and the fear of death, see here. 1:11:00 – The phrase "comforting delusion" comes from an article by Michael Pollan. 1:15:00 – For the "REBUS model," see here. 1:20:00 – On the idea that psychedelics could serve as agents of moral enhancement, see the paper by Brian Earp here. 1:21:00 – For Dr. Letheby's paper on psychedelics and environmental virtues, see here. For his paper on psychedelics and forgiveness, see here. 1:23:00 – On the subfield of "virtue ethics," see here. On the virtue of "living in place," see the paper by Nin Kirkham here. 1:28:00 – For the New Yorker article, by Matthew Hutson, on how psychedelics led him to see trees as smart, see here. For the study, led by Sandeep Nayak, on psychedelics leading people to expand their attributions of consciousness, see here. 1:32:00 – For a first paper by Dr. Letheby on the comparison between meditation and psychedelics, see here.   Recommendations Psychedelic Experience, Aidan Lyon Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, Robert Masters & Jean Houston The Antipodes of the Mind, Benny Shanon   Tile image credit: Image by Jr Korpa via Unsplash     Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].  For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

No discipline, no sphere of intellectual life, has been untouched by the work of Charles Darwin. He died in 1882 but his ideas are very much alive; they're now central to how we understand the natural world, the human mind, non-human minds, plants, biogeography, morality and emotion, culture, language, and more. But where did his ideas come from? How did they grow out of his travels, his social circle, his hobbies, his particular cast of mind?  My guest today is Dr. Janet Browne. Janet is Professor Emerita at Harvard University in the department of the History of Science. She is perhaps best known for her widely acclaimed two-volume biography of Charles Darwin. And she has now published an updated and abridged single-volume version.   Here, Janet and I talk about Darwin's life and ideas. We pick up the story during his travels on the Beagle, a five-year voyage that laid the foundation for the rest of his career. We talk about what he was reading, what he was seeing, and how these experiences helped form his most influential work, On the Origin of Species. We discuss Darwin's style as a thinker, as a naturalist, as a writer, and as an experimentalist. We touch on his relationships with contemporaries like Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace. And we consider his long—and often overlooked—engagements with pigeons, barnacles, plants, and worms.  I greatly enjoyed Janet's two-volume biography of Darwin, and I enjoyed this new single-volume edition just as much. So if this episode sparks your interest, I heartily recommend that you check these books out. Alright friends, on to my conversation with Dr. Janet Browne. Enjoy!   Notes 3:30 – Darwin's autobiography is available here. All of Darwin's letters are readable (and searchable) at the Darwin Correspondence Project. 11:00 – Darwin's account of his five-year stint on the HMS Beagle can be found in his book, The Voyage of the Beagle.  17:00 – Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (Vol. 1). 27:00 – For a recently published history of Lamarck and his ideas, see here.  31:00 – For more on Darwin's interest in pigeons and pigeon breeding, see here.  34:00 – For more on Darwin's barnacle studies, see here. 40:00 – For a brief account of the relationship between Wallace and Darwin, see Dr. Browne's article here. 44:00 – Alfred Russel Wallace's The Malay Archipelago is here. Wallace's own essay on natural selection, sent to Darwin before the publication of On the Origin of Species, is here. The proceedings in which Darwin's and Wallace's first papers on natural selection appeared together. 53:00 – For a modern treatment of the concept of sexual selection, see here. For an online version of Darwin's The Descent of Man, see here. For a recent collection of essays on Darwin's Descent, including one by Dr. Browne, see here.  58:00 – Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.  1:03:00 – Darwin's short article, 'A biographical sketch of an infant.' 1:08:00 – Darwin's The Power of Movement in Plants. For more about Darwin's last book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, see here. For more about Darwin's "root-brain hypothesis," see our earlier episode. 1:14:00 – For more on Darwin's theory of gemmules and pangenesis, see here. 1:15:00 – For more on Darwin's substantial archive, see here.    Recommendations Darwin and the Barnacle, Rebecca Stott Natural Magic, Renée Bergland   Tile art credit: Painting by George Richmond (detail)   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

It's tempting to see bioluminescence as an oddity, one of those rare eccentricities of life on earth. And, on land, maybe that's true. But our planet is mostly water, and out in the open ocean bioluminescence is utterly commonplace. Creatures of all shapes and sorts sparkle and glow, glitter and pulse. But what are these displays for? Why did they evolve? How did light become the currency of the deep?   My guest today is Dr. Sönke Johnsen. Sönke is a Distinguished Professor of Biology at Duke University, where he and his research group study the visual ecology of the ocean. He's the author of a number of books: most recently Into the Great Wide Ocean, about life in the pelagic realm, and The Radiant Sea, a photographic tour of bioluminescence and color, written in collaboration with Dr. Steven Haddock.  Here, Sönke and I talk about the open ocean: the most common habitat on our planet, yet one that many people will never experience. We consider the curious distribution of bioluminescence— rare on land, exceptionally prevalent in the ocean, and all but absent in freshwater. We talk about how bioluminescence seems to have evolved—many, many times over in fact. We survey the functions of making light in the deep—from counter-illumination to courtship to revenge. Finally, we consider what Sönke takes to be the biggest remaining puzzle about bioluminescence at sea.  Alright friends, if you're enjoying Many Minds, we ask (humbly) if you would think about rating us, reviewing us, leaving us a comment, boosting us on social media, or perhaps haranguing your friends—relentlessly—until they give us a listen.  Without further ado, onto my conversation with Dr. Sönke Johnsen. Enjoy!    Notes 3:30 – The scientific report by Dr. Johnsen and colleagues describing the bioluminescent octopus, Stauroteuthis syrtensis.   12:00 – A popular article on the bristlemouth. The article reports a scientist's estimate of "as many as a dozen [bristlemouths] per square meter of ocean." 15:00 – A recent discussion of the "burglar alarm hypothesis."  18:00 – The website for the Johnsen Lab at Duke University.  24:00 – A chart and discussion of the depth zones of the ocean. 29:30 – A study by Séverine Martini and Steven Haddock quantifying the prevalence of bioluminescence at different depths. A popular write-up of the same study.  33:00 – A popular article on vertical migration in the ocean, also called "diel vertical migration." A recent scientific study of the phenomenon.  39:00 – A recent article on the evolution of bioluminescence.  45:00 – For detailed scientific discussion of the physical basis of bioluminescence, fluorescence, and other phenomena we discuss, see Dr. Johnson's book, The Optics of Life.   52:00 – For previous episodes on the use of sound in the animal kingdom, see here and here. For our previous episode on electroreception and electric ecology (including in marine organisms), see here.   57:00 – For more on the functions of bioluminescence, see here. For a report of a recently discovered function of bioluminescence, see here.  1:03:00 – An article by Dr. Johnsen about the different colors of bioluminescence present in the deep sea. 1:05:00 – A video of ostracod mating displays.   1:08:00 – For our recent episode on cave art, see here. 1:16:00 – For our earlier episode on firefly synchronization, see here.     Recommendations Website and review article by Steven Haddock The lab of Todd Oakley Below the edge of darkness, Edie Widder   Tile art credit: Image by Georgi Kalaydzhiev via Unsplash   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

There's a story about of our past that you know well. It goes like this: At some point earlier in human evolution, we started to hunt. Men in particular—perhaps channeling some deep-seated aggressive impulses—began to seek out big game. This new food source, this bonanza of calories, was what allowed our brains to expand. It changed our bodies and our societies and sent our species off on a whole new track. In short, Man the Hunter made us human. This story—told in different versions, with different points of emphasis—has circulated for decades. It's been debunked and revived, rejected and reimagined. What is the history behind the Man the Hunter idea? How does it square with our current understandings of evolution? Is it, in fact, pure fiction? My guest today is Dr. Vivek Venkataraman. Vivek is an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Calgary, and an editor-in-chief of the journal Hunter Gatherer Research. He and his collaborators recently published an article on the different layers and meanings of the Man the Hunter idea. Here, Vivek and I lay out those meanings. We talk about how the phrase refers, first, to that popular myth about our evolution, but also to a landmark scientific conference in the 1960s, and to a major finding of research on contemporary hunter-gatherer groups—namely, that men generally do do most of the hunting. We do a little crash-course on the field of hunter-gatherer research, including the kinds of questions it asks and frameworks it uses. We dig into some of the key ingredients of the Man the Hunter myth: the idea that we have aggressive tendencies, the idea that only men hunt, and the idea that hunting played a transformative role in our evolution. We walk through three recent, high-profile studies challenging Man the Hunter ideas in various ways. And we talk about the ever-present danger of projecting our current norms and ideals back in time. Along the way, Vivek and I touch on 2001: A Space Odyssey; reasons why contemporary hunter-gatherers may differ from the hunter-gatherers of long ago; giant sloths; extractive foraging; the case of the Agta, a society in which women do engage in big-game hunting; the forest people and the fierce people; risk and cooperation in sexual divisions of labor; persistence hunting and endurance activities; caregiving and cognition; and honey. Alright friends, I think you'll enjoy this one. On to my conversation with Dr. Vivek Venkataraman.   Notes 3:30 – The article by Dr. Venkataraman and colleagues, 'The Meaning and Dividends of Man the Hunter.' Commentaries on the article can be read here. A recent popular essay by Dr. Venkataraman on the same ideas. 5:00 – Raymond Dart's "killer ape" was originally laid out in a 1953 article 'The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man' (unavailable online) and then developed in Robert Ardrey's book, African Genesis.  8:30 – The "dawn of man" scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. 16:00 – The 1966 conference titled 'Man the Hunter' resulted in a 1968 volume of the same name. 27:00 – A philosophical discussion of the use of the "ethnographic analogy" in reconstructions of the past. The paper describing the "tyranny of the ethnographic record." 33:00 – The classic ethnography, The Forest People; the classic ethnography, Yanomamö: The Fierce People. 36:00 – The article by Chris Boehm on the concept of "reverse dominance hierarchy." See also his book Hierarchy in the Forest. 37:00 – Our earlier episode with Brian Hare.  38:00 – Steven Pinker's widely read and contested book, The Better Angels of our Nature.  44:00 – A study of the Agta, a society in which women hunt for big game.  48:00 – The paper by Judith Brown about childcare and subsistence. A paper by Haneul Jang and colleagues about how young girls help mothers during foraging.  55:00 – For a book-length treatment of hunting in evolution and history, see Matt Cartmill's A View to a Death in the Morning. 1:01:00 – For the 2023 paper by Anderson and colleagues on the prevalence of women's hunting across cultures, see here. For Dr. Venkataraman and colleagues' commentary on the paper, see here. For the related study by Dr. Venkataraman and colleagues about women's hunting, see here. 1:05:00 – For the 2020 paper by Haas and colleagues about female hunters of the Americas, see here. 1:13:00 – For the academic 'Woman the Hunter' papers by Lacy and Ocobock, see here (for the physiology paper) and here (for the archaeology paper). For their article in Scientific American, see here. For an interview on the podcast On Humans with Cara Ocobock, see here. 1:14:00 – For the recent study on persistence hunting in the ethnographic record, see here. 1:20:00 – The authors of the three critiques discussed here have all written commentaries on Dr. Venkataraman and colleagues' paper. These commentaries and others can be read here.  1:24:30 – For the commentary emphasizing the links between popularization and science, by Nadine Weidman, see here. 1:28:00 – For our earlier episode with Alison Gopnik, in which we discuss the overlooked cognitive capacities involved in caregiving, see here. 1:29:00 – For papers on the importance of honey in human evolution, see here and here. For one of Dr. Venkataraman's own honey-related studies, see here.   Recommendations Creatures of Cain, by Erika Lorraine Milam The Killer Instinct, by Nadine Weidman   Tile art credit: Image via Biodiversity Heritage Library   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

It's kind of astonishing, really, that kids ever learn words. Each one poses a little riddle. Does this sound string refer to a person? A category of things? Or maybe some other feature of the blooming, buzzing world? And yet word learning happens. In fact, we now know it begins earlier in infancy than we realized. And we now know, further, that dogs (or at least some dogs) understand words as well. So how does this happen? What do babies and dogs really know about words? And how might we go about figuring this all out? My guests today are Dr. Elika Bergelson and Dr. Claudia Fugazza. Elika is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, where her lab studies how infants learn language. Claudia is a Researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, where she and her collaborators study dogs who are especially gifted word learners.  In this conversation, Elika, Claudia, and I talk about the thorny question of what it means to understand a word—and whether there are different degrees or kinds of understanding. We consider the challenges posed by different types of words—by nouns, by names, by verbs, by function words, size terms, and more. We discuss why it is that some dogs are so good at learning words, and why infants of a certain age seem to get so much better at it. We talk about learning in different contexts and situations. And we circle the question of how different word learning really is in dogs and babies.  Alright friends, before we get to it, one tiny ask: If you've been enjoying Many Minds, you can help us grow by leaving a review or comment or a rating, or by sharing us with a friend or colleague. We would greatly appreciate the support! Without further ado, on to my interview with Claudia Fugazza and Elika Bergelson. Enjoy!   Notes 3:30 – A paper on infants' understanding of proper nouns like "Mommy." 6:00 – For our earlier audio essay on names across the animal kingdom, see here. 11:00 – For Dr. Bergelson's early study showing that 6-month-old infants already understand the meanings of some words, see here. 13:30 – For more on the "comprehension boost" in infants after age one, see Dr. Elika's paper here. 16:30 – For Dr. Fugazza and colleagues' first studies on gifted word-learning dogs, see here and here. 20:00 – See earlier studies on Rico and Chaser. 24:00 – For more on the qualitative changes that infants may undergo as they learn to learn words, see a paper by Dr. Bergelson and a colleague here. 30:00 – A study by Dr. Fugazza and colleagues comparing personality profiles and playfulness of gifted word learner dogs and typical dogs. 31:30 – A recent New York Times article consoling readers that having a "dumb" (i.e., non-gifted) dog is okay. 39:30 – A study by Dr. Fugazza and colleagues showing that dogs can extend labels of toys ("pull," "fetch") to new objects that are used in the same way. 43:00 – A study by Dr. Bergelson and a colleague on how broadly (or narrowly) infants apply labels like "foot" or "juice." A study by Dr. Bergelson and colleagues looking at how familiarity affects infants' understanding of words. 52:00 – For an example of a study on the so-called noun bias in early word learning, see here. For work on the (lack of) a noun bias in Tseltal infants, see here. For a sample discussion of the so-called shape bias, see here. 54:00 – For Dr. Fugazza and colleagues' work on dogs' biases toward shape or texture when generalizing about objects, see here. 57:00 – For the work by Asifa Majid (former guest!) on odor words in Jahai, see here. For the work on scent-tracking in humans, see here. 1:02:00 – On "dog-directed speech" and its consequences, see here and here. For comparisons of dog- and infant-directed speech, see here and here. 1:04:00 – For the study finding that Tseltal-speaking children learn honorific terms (which are never addressed to them), see here. 1:06:00 – For the study by Dr. Fugazza and colleagues, "examining exclusion-based choice" in dogs, see here. For the study by Dr. Fugazza and colleagues showing that gifted word learner dogs can learn by over-hearing labels, see here. 1:10:00 – For the study showing that children seem to request labels for objects by pointing to them, see here. 1:12:00 – For some of the first scientific studies on the use of soundboards for communication in dogs, see here and here. For our earlier episode with Dr. Federico Rossano discussing some of this research, see here.   Recommendations 'The Invention of Language by Children,' by Lila Gleitman and Elissa Newport 'Concept-based word learning in human infants,' by Jun Yin and Gergely Csibra 'Syntactic bootstrapping as a mechanism for language learning,' by Mireille Babineau et al. The Genius Dog Challenge YouTube channel   Tile art credit: Image by Picsea via Unsplash   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Newton saw in the human hand proof of the divine; Darwin saw a key to our species' success. Many others, too, have described the hand in hyperbolic terms, as a paragon of design, a cornerstone of human uniqueness, an engine of our achievements. But what makes the human hand so powerful? Is it the proportions of the fingers? Is it the opposability of the thumb? Or, could it be none of this? Could it be that the real power of our hands lies—not in the physical design—but elsewhere, out of sight?  My guest today is Dr. Matt Longo. Matt is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Birkbeck, University of London. He's the author of the recent book, The Invisible Hand, a wide-ranging tour of the human hand and how it's geared into the brain. Here, Matt and I talk about the difference between the "visible hand"—that is, its physical structure—and the "invisible hand"—its representation in the brain. We consider the evolution of the visible hand and whether there really is anything truly distinctive or impressive about it. We talk about the biology of touch. We tour the invisible hand, discussing how—through cortical magnification—the hand becomes over-represented in the brain's sensory maps. We catalogue a few ways that the hands can go awry. And we talk about whether we should feel any nostalgia for all the hand-based activities and crafts that we're losing. Along the way, we also touch on star-nosed moles and raccoons; tetrapods and the primitive archetype; hand dominance; the parallel between a horse's knee and a human's wrist; tool use, plasticity and abstraction; homunculi; the rubber-hand illusion; supernumerary fingers; the Third Thumb project; and the question of what it might unlock if dolphins had hands. Alright, friends, this is a fun one. On to my interview with Dr. Matt Longo!   Notes 3:00 – For discussion of the many traits and behaviors that have been proposed as uniquely human, see our earlier audio essay.  5:00 – For an example of the "if only dolphins had hands" thought experiment, see here. 8:00 – See The Principles of Anatomy as Seen in the Hand by Frederic Wood Jones. 10:30 – Dr. Longo's book, The Invisible Hand, is available open access here.  16:00 – For discussion of how—in horses and other species—the five digits have been reduced or otherwise tweaked over evolution, see here. For an image showing examples of homology between the human forelimb and the forelimbs of other creatures, see here. 19:00 – For a brief discussion of "thumb opposability," see here. For an influential discussion of hand morphology and human hand grips, see work by Mary Marzke here. 30:00 – For our earlier episode on the brain's many maps, see here. 34:00 – For a discussion of Penfield's work and the idea of a "homunculus" in the brain, see here.  42:00 – For an illustration of a "homunculus" with big lips and hands, see here.  44:30 – For more on the star-nosed mole and its distinctive appendage, see here. 49:00 – For the report that first coined the term "numbsense," see here. For recent work on "anarchic hand," see here. For more on phantom limbs, see here. For a classic study of the "rubber hand illusion," see  here.  59:30 – For a discussion of hand-dominance across primate species, see here. 1:03:00 – More on the "Third Thumb" project.  1:06:00 – A classic case of "motor equivalence" is seen in handwriting.   Recommendations Marco Catani, 'A little man of some importance' Tracy Kivell, 'Evidence in hand: Recent discoveries and the early evolution of human manual manipulation' Hands, by John Napier   Tile art credit: Image by Picsea via Unsplash   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Hi friends! We're skipping a beat to take care of some spring housekeeping tasks. We will be back in May! In the meanwhile, enjoy this listener favorite from our archives! ----- [originally aired April 30, 2025] We humans have a hard time becoming invisible. For better or worse, we're basically stuck with the skin and body we have; we're pretty fixed in our color, our shape, our overall appearance. And so we're fascinated by creatures that aren't—creatures that morph to meet the moment, that can functionally disappear, that can shape-shift on a dime. And no creatures are more skilled, more astonishing, more bedazzling in their abilities to do this kind of thing than the cephalopods. But how do they do this exactly? What's going on in their skin? What's going on under their skin? And what's going on in their brains that makes this all possible? My guest today is Dr. Tessa Montague. Tessa is a neuroscientist in the Axel Lab at Columbia University; she studies the brain and behavior of the dwarf cuttlefish, with a special focus on the biology of their dynamic skin behaviors. Here, Tessa and I talk about how cuttlefish and other cephalopods exhibit the most impressive camouflaging abilities on the planet. We discuss how they change their skin's appearance with remarkable speed and fidelity—and not just when trying to blend in, but also when hunting, courting, fighting, and more. We talk about whether these behaviors are flexible and whether they're voluntary. We linger on the cruel irony that cuttlefish seem to be colorblind. We talk about the idea that a cephalopod's skin is kind of a window into their brain. We lay out the cells and organs in the cephalopod skin the make these behaviors possible—especially the tiny pigment-bearing structures called "chromatophores." And of course we also dive deep into the cephalopod brain and its sometimes bizarre and poorly understood structures. Excited to share it with you friends—I think you'll enjoy it. Without further ado, here's my chat with Dr. Tessa Montague.   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 3:00 – For more on Dr. Montague's recent expeditions to the Philippines, including photos, see here. 7:30 – Dr. Montague has published two recent reviews of dynamic skin behaviors in cephalopods—see here and here. We previously discussed cephalopod intelligence in a 2021 episode with Dr. Alex Schnell and a 2023 episode with the novelist Ray Nayler. 18:30 – For discussion of a recent "renaissance" in new model organisms, see here. 20:30 – For more on how chameleons change color, see this video. 25:00 – A video primer on cuttlefish camouflage, featuring the researcher Dr. Robert Hanlon. 30:30 – A recent paper on the details of pattern matching in cuttlefish camouflage. 31:00 – For more on the mimicking plant Boquila trifoliolata, see this popular article. See also our earlier episode with Dr. Paco Calvo and Dr. Natalie Lawrence. 35:00 – A video about the so-called mimic octopus.  40:00 – For the hypothesis about color discrimination via chromatic aberration and pupil shape, see here. 44:00 – For more on the "split body" skin behaviors observed in some cuttlefish, see here. 51:00 – For the David Attenborough clip about a cuttlefish hypnotizing a crab, see here. For the recent New York Times article on cuttlefish hunting behavior, including videos, see here. For the academic article that inspired the New York Times piece, see here. 58:00 – A recent scientific study on the possibility of octopus skin activity during dreaming. A video that helped popularize the idea of cephalopod skin activity as evidence of dreaming. Our earlier episode on why we—and other creatures—dream. 1:06:00 – For a study on chromatophore development from the lab of Dr. Gilles Laurent, see here. 1:11:00 – For more on papillae, including videos, see here.  1:17:00 – To explore an animated model of the cuttlefish brain, see this page of Dr. Montague's website, Cuttlebase.   Recommendations Monarchs of the Sea, Danna Staaf Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith Cephalopod Behavior, Roger Hanlon & John B. Messenger   Tile image credit: Noel Guevara   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].    For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).