Cognitive Revolution

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the 2021 recipient for the Rumelhart prize, the highest award in cognitive science. She has amassed an amazing body of research throughout her career. It centers on gesture, and how our bodies integrate into our linguistic communication. We touch on a lot of her greatest research hits in this episode. Something she said that stood out to me was about how she mentors her many students. She sets them on a research project to get them going, then listens to how they talk about it, really listens. In a sense, this kind of deep, empathic, multi-faceted listening is what Susan has been doing her entire career. She listens to things the rest of us seem not to hear -- from gestures in the deaf children to the proclivities of her students.

This is an excerpt from my new show, Notes from the Field. It's one of my favorite episodes from Season 1. It features a place that I previously knew nothing about before going there: the Mountain Kingdom of Lesotho. If you enjoy this episode, I encourage you to go back and listen to the rest of the first season.

More info: https://www.codykommers.com/notes-from-the-field

In this episode I talk to Richard Shweder, one of the founders of the field of cultural psychology. He has had a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary career. We talk about his roots, early education, biggest influences, his experience as a grad student at the Department of Social Relations, the origins of cultural psychology, and his recent work on pluralism. Ultimately the conversation reflects Rick's gift as a psychologist and anthropologist: observing the world for what it is. It's a long one, but we cover a lot of good stuff.

More info: codykommers.com/podcast

One thing that's immediately clear about Annie Duke is that her best self is pretty damn awesome. In this conversation, we get deep into the story of her career and the key moments that defined who that best self is. It gets really personal really quick. We start off with a discussion of her family, and in particular how she learned to separate work from identity. From there we talk about the big steps in her trajectory, from leaving her PhD program with one month left to go, to deciding on becoming a professional poker player. Then we get into her books: first, Thinking in Bets, as well as her new book, How to Decide. It's a wide ranging conversation, and we cover a lot of interesting ground. Ultimately it comes back to the role of mentors -- Annie has had some great ones in her life -- and how their job is to help you find the best version of yourself.

More info: codykommers.com/podcast

Don Norman is a cognitive scientist and designer. He is perhaps best known for his book "The Design of Everyday Things." This was a landmark work which detailed the fundamentals of human-centered design. It is a conception of design not just based on how things looks, but how people think. And while this book has been most influential among designers and other practitioners, its origin is in Don's work as a cognitive scientist. Throughout his career he has found himself in many of the most exciting times and places in the field's history, including the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard, led by George Miller and Jerome Bruner, and in the very first years of UC San Diego's department of cognitive science. In this episode we talk about Don's career, his process for finding and learning about big ideas, the difference between academics and practitioners, the cognitive science origins of Don's design work, how Don went about crafting his style of prose, and a host of other topics. It's a fun one.

More info: https://www.codykommers.com/post/34-don-norman

In this episode, I go in-depth with Mahzarin Banaji on her life story. Mahzarin started off just about as far away from life as a Harvard professor as you can imagine. And while she's a superstar of social psychology now, her introduction to the field was a chance encounter with a set of the five volume Handbook of Social Psychology, which she haggled down to a dollar per book at a random market in a train station. She's a truly fascinating human being, as well as a top-notch scientist.

More info: codykommers.com/podcast

This week's guest is neuroscientist, filmmaker, and inimitable personality Sade Abiodun. She is a first year PhD student the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and her latest film project was Godspeed. This short film has done well on the festival circuit, and Sade was a finalist for the highly selective Sundance fellowship. In this episode, we talk about the difficulties of starting grad school, especially while a world-wide pandemic is in progress. In particular, we talk about balancing grad school projects with non-grad school projects (e.g., filmmaking, podcasting), and the opportunity for reinvention of identity that beginning a new program offers. We also talk about the connection between neuroscience and film, in using experimental paradigms with naturalistic stimuli. We try our best to get #neurocinematics to become a cultural phenomenon. Finally, we talk about a paper Sade wrote a couple years back on academia and race, a conversation which has -- how should I put this? -- been brought up with renewed fervor over the past few months. She summarizes the perspective she gave in that paper and how it might be updated in response to current events.

You can find more about Sade's work at her website: https://www.sade.space/

More info on this show is available here: https://www.codykommers.com/podcast

The name "Nigel Shadbolt" is spoken in my corner of the world with hushed tones and much reverence. This is not only because he is a big deal generally, but because he is an especially around Jesus College, Oxford, where he currently serves as Principal. What exactly one does as Principal of an Oxford college, I'm not entirely sure, but like all of Sir Nigel's accolades, it seems pretty significant. Nigel has made contributions in a wide range of fields, including artificial intelligence and public policy. His work was key in developing the technology for the World Wide Web, alongside his long-time collaborator Tim Berners-Lee. Together they founded the Open Data Institute. Trust me on this one, Sir Nigel's list of accomplishments is long. I look forward to sharing this conversation with you.

More info: codykommers.com/podcast

This is the first podcast episode I've released in a couple months. The honest reason for that is that I've found it hard to cope with the pandemic. In this episode, I talk about what I've struggled with, the areas in which I've grown, and how I want to grow going forward.

Written version: https://www.codykommers.com/post/covid

Newsletter: https://www.codykommers.com/newsletter

Dan Everett is the closest thing we have to a real life Indiana Jones. He is an academic whose work has mostly taken place in the far reaches of the jungle, where few others dare to tread. His crowning achievement is learning the Pirahã language, which before Dan undertook it had never before been cracked by an outsider. Dan began his swashbuckling career as a missionary and Bible translator. After a while, his ideological alliances shifted and he remained in the Amazon as an anthropologist and linguist. In this interview we talk about how this shift impacted his relationship with his family (imagine having a crisis of faith while on a mission in the Amazon while your entire family is along with you; his ex-wife, by the way, is still there as a missionary). We also talk about how he brought back evidence that directly contradicted major claims that Chomsky had made, his experience between the subject of famous American writer Tom Wolfe's last book before he died (The Kingdom of Speech), and Everett's forthcoming project on the life of Charles Sanders Peirce. Dan's official title is Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley University.

A picture of Dan, fully immersed: https://daneverettbooks.com/about-dan/

More info available at codykommers.com/podcast