Cognitations

We usually think of childhood as an extended preparatory period for adulthood, a time when kids just passively absorb the complex cultural knowledge, skills, and languages that we adults pass down to them. But what if we have the story completely backward? What if children aren’t just acquirers of culture, but active, independent producers of it?

Today’s guest, associate professor Sheina Lew-Levy, has spent an immense amount of time investigating human childhood cross-culturally. As a co-author of a recent paper titled “Children as agents of cultural adaptation”, she provides a fresh perspective that casts children as one of the central drivers that shape human culture. 

Credits:

Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson

Editing: Jay Richardson

Communication: Tanay Katiyar

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Artwork: Ella Bergru

We all know the feeling. The urge to be respected, to be someone in the eyes of our peers. All of this arising from a human desire for social status. It is easy to think that this hunger for status is a modern obsession, a consequence and amplifier of inequities in various societies. If we buy into the idea that our ancestors in the deep past were egalitarian, we might think that they were not that interested in status-seeking. Is this really the case? If not, what are the different ways in which people seek status across diverse, seemingly egalitarian, societies? Counterintuitively, can these status pursuits actually lead to higher equality?Today’s guest, Chris von Rueden, Professor at the University of Richmond, has looked across several non-industrialised populations in the quest to answer these questions.Media Recommendations1. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior by Christopher Boehm2. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin3. Parasite (Film)4. Dr. Strangelove (Film)

Credits:

• Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson
• Editing: Tanay Katiyar
• Communication: Tanay Katiyar
• Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
• Artwork: Ella Bergru

This episode is sponsored by The European Behaviour and Evolution Association (EHBEA)

Religion is a puzzling phenomenon. On the one hand, it has been a major historical motor, shaping civilizations and guiding billions of lives. On the other hand, the core of religion centers around beings and realms that we simply cannot see, touch, or measure. One might then wonder, how can religious beliefs be both more important to us than ordinary beliefs, and more removed from what we can know to be the case? In his recent book, Religion as Make-Believe, Neil Van Leeuwen offers a provocative answer: religious beliefs have this puzzling aspect because they are, in reality, a kind of imagining, not so different from that which guides child’s play. Media Recommendations1. Movie: Conclave

Credits:

• Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson
• Editing: Tanay Katiyar
• Communication: Tanay Katiyar
• Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
• Artwork: Ella Bergru

This episode is sponsored by The European Behaviour and Evolution Association (EHBEA)

There is a specific anxiety that grips almost all of us in the age of generative AI. Whether you are an artist, a coder, or a writer, you are asking yourself: As these AI agents get smarter, are we entering a Golden Age of hyper-creativity? Or are we entering an age of homogenized culture where we all just recycle the same AI-generated ideas?Today’s guest, Bret Beheim, suggests that a surprising place to find a potential answer to this lies in a board game, Go. By analyzing over 100,000 Go Games, Bret has tried to illustrate how human innovation is affected by changes in our surrounding technologies. Media Recommendations:1. Manga series: Hikaru no GoCredits:Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay RichardsonEditing: Jay RichardsonCommunication: Tanay KatiyarMusic: Thelma Samuel and Robin BaradelArtwork: Ella Bergru

Our appearance is very important to us. This is evident when we look at advertisements, online trends such as what the youth call “looksmaxxing”, or simply reflect on the amount of time we spend looking at a mirror in the morning. For decades, theories in evolutionary psychology state that humans are attracted to specific physical features: think of symmetrical faces. The story goes, that humans everywhere should share these appearance/attractiveness preferences as they are signals of health and fertility? Is this really the case? Are these universal preferences? Our guest today, Lynda Boothroyd, has long questioned the universality of these preferences by studying them in communities in Nicaragua.Lynda Boothroyd is a Professor of Psychology at Durham University. Her research focuses on Evolutionary and Cross-Cultural understandings of interpersonal attraction and sexual selection. She has recently focused on body ideals in rural Nicaragua alongside experimental work both in the laboratory and in the field on the impacts of visual experience on body size preferences. She has a multidisciplinary approach to her research, incorporating perspectives from Evolutionary Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Social Psychology and Biological Anthropology, and has incorporated a mixed-methods component in her current work.

Media Recommendations:1. Heartstopper (TV Show)Credits:Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay RichardsonEditing: Jay RichardsonCommunication: Tanay KatiyarMusic: Thelma Samuel and Robin BaradelArtwork: Ella Bergru

For ages, we've pictured our ancestors as living in small, equal societies, sharing everything around campfires without bosses. Think of popular ideas like the "noble savage" or "primitive communism." But what if that picture is wrong? New research in this century challenges these old ideas, suggesting our deep past was far more diverse than we ever imagined. So, what was social life really like for our ancestors? How does this new understanding reshape what we know about human cognition and culture? Are there any true human universals? Today’s guest is the person to answer these questions, or at least some of them..

He is Manvir Singh. Manvir is an assistant professor at the department of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. His research program investigates human behavior, focusing on the origins and nature of widespread sociocultural traditions like shamanism, witchcraft, storytelling, and music. He achieves this by integrating evolutionary, cognitive, and sociocultural methods and theories within his research group. Previously, he pursued a PhD in Human Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University, post-which he was a research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Toulouse. He's also a contributor to The New Yorker and has just had a book come out: Shamanism - The Timeless Religion.

Media Recommendations:

1. Shamanism: The Timeless Religion
2. Boiling Energy: Community Healing Among the Kalahari !Kung
3. The Falling Sky
4. The Catalpa Bow
5. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum

Credits:

Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson

Editing: Tanay Katiyar

Communication: Tanay Katiyar

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Artwork: Ella Bergru

This episode is sponsored by the ⁠The European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association (EHBEA)

Conversations shape nearly every aspect of our lives. We joke, argue, persuade, gossip, and comfort—all through spoken and unspoken signals we barely even notice. Yet behind every casual chat, awkward silence, or global debate is an invisible force that guides our words and meanings, silently helping us figure out exactly what to say next. How do we instinctively know what matters in a conversation? How do we effortlessly connect, even with strangers? And why do certain symbols or stories captivate us across cultures?

Dan Sperber is a renowned French cognitive anthropologist, social scientist, and philosopher whose groundbreaking work has transformed fields from linguistics and cognitive science to anthropology and philosophy. Alongside linguist Deirdre Wilson, he developed relevance theory, an influential approach to communication and cognition that has impacted linguistics, artificial intelligence, and psychology. His work on cultural evolution, notably the epidemiology of representations, introduced innovative methods for studying how ideas spread and evolve across societies.

Credits:

Interview: Thomas Beuchot and Jay Richardson

Editing: Jay Richardson

Communication: Tanay Katiyar

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Artwork: Ella Bergru

This episode is sponsored by the The European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association (EHBEA)

We often talk about the modern challenge of work-life balance. However, long before the existence of offices, commutes, and calendars, our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers. Did they actually enjoy more leisure time than we do? And did the shift to farming mark the beginning of longer workdays and less free time? Today’s guest is the person to answer these questions, or at least some of them…

Mark Dyble is an Assistant Professor in evolutionary anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has broad interests in understanding variation in behaviour and biology across human populations. Previously, he gained his BA in Archaeology and Anthropology from Cambridge (2008-2011) and an MSc in Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology from Oxford (2011-12). Subsequently, he pursued a PhD in Anthropology at University College London (2013-16), supervised by Prof Andrea Migliano and Prof Ruth Mace, conducting empirical fieldwork with Agta foragers in the northern Philippines. After several post-doc stints, he was also a lecturer in Quantitative Anthropology at UCL for four years (2019-2023).

Credits:

Interview: Tanay Katiyar

Editing: Jay Richardson

Communication: Tanay Katiyar

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Artwork: Ella Bergru

We rarely stop to think about how we make sense of the sounds around us — how we find voices in a noisy room, or why two people can hear completely different things in the same audio clip. Today’s guest explores the hidden mechanisms behind these experiences: how the brain turns raw sound into meaning, how we learn the regularities of the soundscape around us, and why people sometimes hear the world so differently. Today’s guest is the person to answer these questions, or at least some of them…

Daniel Pressnitzer. Originally trained in engineering, he went on to complete a Master's degree in acoustics, signal processing, and computer science in Paris. He earned his PhD at Ircam, where he studied auditory perception, focusing on musical consonance and dissonance. He then spent several years in the UK conducting postdoctoral research at the Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing in Cambridge. In 2000, he returned to France to join the CNRS as a researcher. Now a Director of Research at CNRS, he is also a founding member and the current head of the Audition team at the École normale supérieure. His research bridges acoustics, perception, and cognition, using carefully crafted illusions and experiments to probe the mid-level processes of hearing — the ones that shape how we interpret the world without us even realizing it. His lab has also developed various tools to probe the functioning of the auditory system.

Credits:

Interview: Cindy Zhang & Marius Mercier

Editing: Jay Richardson

Communication: Tanay Katiyar

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Artwork: Ella Bergru

In our episode with Amy Orben, we discussed a big problem in the research on how social media potentially affects mental health. That is, a lot of studies ask really vague, broad questions. For instance, asking 'What is social media doing to our mental health?' is like asking 'How does food affect young people’s health?' To really answer the latter question, we need to get more specific—are we talking about junk food or vegetables? And what about the kid’s health history, like if they have diabetes? Some researchers think that using well-established theories from cognitive science can solve this problem by helping us ask better, more precise questions about social media. They also think it could lead to new ways of studying it (beyond self-reported screen time) and potentially offer novel policy insights. So, what are these ideas from cognitive science? What new methods can we use? And how could they change things at the policy level? Our guests today are here to help answer those questions—or at least some of them...

Georgia Turner is a third-year PhD student in the Digital Mental Health Group, supervised by Amy Orben at the University of Cambridge. In her PhD, she aims to understand why we feel we lose control of our technology use. To do so, she uses methods from computational neuroscience on real-world datasets such as Twitter and smartphone recordings. As an undergraduate at Cambridge, Georgia studied Philosophy for two years before switching to Natural Sciences. She then completed a masters in neuroscience in London (UCL) and Paris (Sorbonne and ENS).

Lukas Gunschera is a second-year PhD student in the Digital Mental Health Group, supervised by Amy Orben at the University of Cambridge. He is interested in the cognitive mechanisms linking social media use and mental health. In his research, he uses a combination of computational, longitudinal, and experimental approaches to examine the processes driving the effects of social media use. Before starting his PhD, Lukas completed an MSc in Psychological Research at the University of Amsterdam, and a BSc in Psychology at the Radboud University.

Credits:

Interview: Tanay Katiyar

Artwork: Ella Bergru

Editing: Jay Richardson

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Communication: Tanay Katiyar