If you wanted a petri dish for understanding metaphors—how they emerge and evolve and jostle with each other—it would be hard to do better than the world of AI. We talk about AI systems variously as coaches or co-pilots, little genies or alien intelligences. Some researchers claim that AIs "grow," that they're entering their phase of "adolescence." Critics deride AI products as slop and dismiss LLMs as a kind of autocomplete on steroids. What's behind these different characterizations? Which ones are accurate and which are unfair? And are our metaphors mostly colorful rhetoric or do they matter? Are they shaping how we understand, adopt, and ultimately regulate these new technologies?

My guest today is Dr. Melanie Mitchell. Melanie is a computer scientist and Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of the book, AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans, and she writes a Substack by the same name.

This episode is a bit of a companion to our recent episode with Steve Flusberg. In that episode, Steve and I attempted a kind of crash course on metaphor and the human mind. Here, Melanie and I sit down for more of an extended case study: how metaphors are guiding, galvanizing, and maybe deceiving us in the contested realm of AI discourse. We unpack seven of the most widely used metaphors in this space. We consider how these metaphors are shaping not only our everyday understandings of AI, but also law and policy. We also talk about the metaphor and analogy capabilities of AI itself. Can these systems reason abstractly in the way that humans can? Along the way, Melanie and I touch on: AI-generated poetry, anthropomorphism, the original sin of AI research, the myth of Narcissus, psychometric testing and its pitfalls, metaphors for AI that are a bit hard to spot, and the question of whether an AI has ever come up with a decent analogy for itself.

Longtime fans of the show will know that we've had Melanie on the show once before. We invited her back, not only because she's thought about metaphor and analogy in AI discourse for decades, but because she's a voice of calm insight in an area that's increasingly awash in hype and polemic. Longtime fans of the show may also note that we are now celebrating our 6th birthday at Many Minds. That's right, the show launched in February 2020. If you'd like to support us as we recognize this milestone, you can leave us a rating or a review, recommend us to a friend, or give us a shout out on social media. Your support is always appreciated.

Without further ado, on to my conversation with Dr. Melanie Mitchell. Enjoy!

Notes

3:30 – For an overview of Douglas Hofstadter's work on analogy, see here.

8:00 – Much of our discussion in this interview draws on Dr. Mitchell's piece on the metaphors for AI in Science magazine.

13:30 – For earlier discussions of anthropomorphism on the show, see our earlier episodes here and here.

16:00 – See here for the original discussion of LLMs as "stochastic parrots."

17:00 – See here for the original discussion of ChatGPT as a "blurry jpeg."

18:30 – See here for the original discussion of LLMs as role players.

22:00 – See here for one use of the "LLMs as crowds" metaphor. See also a discussion of this metaphor (and other metaphors for AI) here.

25:00 – For one discussion of AI as a "cultural technology" by Alison Gopnik and colleagues, see here. For a more recent discussion of the same metaphor by Henry Farrell, Alison Gopnik and others, see here.

27:00 – For the podcast series on intelligence that Dr. Mitchell co-hosted for the Santa Fe Institute, see here.

28:00 – See here for an influential formulation of the idea that AI is an "alien intelligence."

29:00 – For philosopher Shannon Vallor's book about AI as "mirror," see here.

31:00 – For the recent study on users' metaphors for AI systems, see here.

33:00 – For more on the rise of social AI, see our earlier episode here.

38:00 – For more on what AI researchers might learn from developmental and comparative psychologists, see Dr. Mitchell's recent post (summarizing her keynote at NeurIPs).

42:00 – For more on the ARC (Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus) and the research that Dr. Mitchell and colleagues have been doing with it, see here and here.

48:30 – For the study on humans' preference for AI-generated poetry, see here.

50:30 – For Brigitte Nerlich's documentation and discussion of various metaphors for AI (including AI's metaphors for itself), see here.

Recommendations

The AI Mirror, by Shannon Vallor

'Role play with large language models,' by Murray Shanahan (former guest!) et al.

'Large AI models are cultural and social technologies,' by Henry Farrell et al.

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).

Humans do some pretty weird things. Some of us will sit in searingly hot rooms or jump into icy ponds. Others risk their lives trying to climb to new heights or dive to new depths. And every once in a while, two otherwise normal-seeming humans will lean in close to each other, open mouths, lock lips, and swap a hearty helping of microbes. You may even know people who've done this. But why? Are we the only animals who kiss? What could be the deeper origins of this truly bizarre behavior?

My guest today is Dr. Matilda Brindle. Matilda is an Evolutionary Biologist at the University of Oxford. She's interested in understanding the origins of behaviors and traits across the animal kingdom. But it's not just any traits she's interested in—she tends to favor those that are a bit risque.

Here, Matilda and I talk about the puzzle at the heart of human kissing behavior. We discuss the possible adaptive functions of kissing—and of romantic kissing in particular. We walk through her recent paper in which—drawing on observations across primates species—she and her colleagues reconstructed the phylogeny of kissing behavior. They found that kissing is present in almost all the Great Apes—and also in several species of monkeys—and that it may go back around 20 million years. We sketch different proposals for how kissing may have evolved, such as the idea that it originally grew out of "premastication"—the practice of chewing up food for infants and transferring that food by mouth. And, of course, we consider the cultural side of kissing—and how to make sense of the fact that, despite these ancient roots in the primate lineage, romantic kissing is by no means universal to all human groups.

Hope you enjoy this one, friends—offered in spirit of Valentine's Day, of course. Kissing may seem like a light-hearted or frivolous topic, but—as I hope you'll appreciate—it opens up some big, thorny, compelling questions. And, in fact, it's finally attracting serious attention from scholars of all kinds interested in the different dimensions of social behavior.

Without further ado, here's my interview with Dr. Matilda Brindle.

Notes

3:00 – Dr. Brindle's paper, 'A comparative approach to the phylogeny of kissing,' coauthored with Dr. Catherine Talbot and Dr. Stuart West.

10:00 – An academic review of "postcopulatory sexual selection."

15:45 – The study examining the convergence of oral microbiota in kissing couples. The same study quantified the amount of microbial transfer during kissing.

18:00 – For more on the "grass-in-ear" phenomenon among chimpanzees and other such arbitrary-seeming animal behaviors, see our earlier episode about animal cultures. For the more recent "grass-in-bum" phenomenon, see here.

21:30 – For Dr. Brindle's work on the adaptive functions of masturbation in primates, see here.

32:00 – For popular coverage of Dr. Brindle's work, highlighting the likelihood that humans and Neanderthals kissed, see here.

39:00 – The book, Biological Exuberance, by Bruce Bagemihl.

43:00 – For the study on the presence of romantic kissing across cultures, see here.

47:00 – For indirect (linguistic) evidence for the prevalence of "smell-kissing" across Southeast Asia, see here. For more on this style of greeting, see Kensy's post here.

50:00 – For the proposal that kissing is rooted in "oral grooming," see here.

58:00 – For the larger special issue on the origins of kissing, of which Dr. Brindle's paper is part, see here.

1:00:30 – For Dr. Brindle's work on "bacula" (aka "penis bones"), see here.

Recommendations

The Handshake, by Ella Al-Shamahi

Eve, by Cat Bohannon

Primate Sexuality, by Alan Dixson

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).

Metaphors matter. They enliven our speech and our prose; they animate our arguments and stir our passions. Some metaphors power political movements; others propel scientific revolutions. These little figures of speech delight, provoke, captivate, shock, amuse, and galvanize us. In one way or another, metaphors just seem to help us make sense of a messy world. But how do they do all this? Whence their peculiar powers? What does it say about the human mind that we just can't escape our metaphors—and frankly don't want to?

My guest today is Dr. Stephen Flusberg. Steve is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Vassar College, where he directs the Framing, Reasoning, And Metaphor (FRAME) Lab.

Here, Steve and I talk about what metaphors are and why we're so drawn to them. We discuss some of the misleading ideas about metaphor you may remember from middle school literature class. We consider why some metaphors work and others flop. We talk about the metaphors we use for climate change and prevalence and potency of war metaphors across different realms of public discourse. We consider how metaphor operates in science and in scientific theorizing. Finally, we talk about the question of whether there are some ideas that we simply can't grasp literally, concepts we can only approach through metaphor.

Along the way, Steve and I talk about: "aura farming"; nautical metaphors and textile metaphors; the outmoded idea that metaphors are mere adornments; metaphor versus analogy; dead metaphors and how to resuscitate them; shadows and footprints; Dan Dennett's technique of metaphorical triangulation; and the brain-as-computer metaphor—and whether it is actually a metaphor.

Alright, friends this is a fun one. Steve has spent his entire career exploring this fascinating terrain—and, as you'll see, he's a lively and affable guide. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Steve Flusberg.

Notes

3:00 – For more on "beige flags," see here. For more on "aura farming," see here.

8:00 – For an overview of metaphor in communication and thought, see here for an article by Dr. Flusberg and co-authors.

18:00 – The "life is a journey" (or "career is a journey") metaphor—as well as other examples we discuss—are treated at length in the classic book, Metaphors We Live By.

24:00 – For a detailed academic treatment of the relationship between metaphor and analogy, see here.

32:00 – Some of the best-studied "orientational metaphors" are those found in the domain of time. See here and here.

37:00 – For more on metaphors used in discussions of environmental issues, see a paper by Dr. Flusberg and a colleague here.

42:00 – For more on the idea of the "climate shadow," see here.

46:00 – The study by Dr. Flusberg and colleagues comparing the effects of race and war metaphors for climate change.

55:00 – The article by Dr. Flusberg and colleagues on the role of war metaphors across different areas of public discourse.

1:04:00 – For an influential discussion of the role of metaphors and analogies in science, see here. For Kensy's take on Darwin's metaphors for natural selection, see here. For discussion of whether the "brain-as-computer" metaphor is actually a metaphor, see here and here.

1:12:00 – For more on the history of metaphors in the English language—including analyses of which source domains have historically been the most fruitful—see here.

1:14:00 – For discussion of the (disputed) idea of "dead metaphors," see here and here.

1:17:00 – The idea of "theory-constitutive metaphors" in science is discussed in a chapter by Richard Boyd in this book.

1:19:00 – For a preview of Dr. Flusberg's in-progress paper on the philosopher Daniel Dennett and his technique of "metaphorical triangulation," see here.

1:33:00 – For the (extremely short) Borges' story on maps that are too accurate to be useful, see here.

Recommendations

Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson

Consciousness Explained, by Daniel Dennett

Three Sheets to the Wind, by Cynthia Barrett

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).

Hello friends, and happy new year! We're gearing up for a new run of episodes starting later in January. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives.

------

[originally aired October 16, 2024]

IQ is, to say the least, a fraught concept. Psychologists have studied IQ—or g for "general cognitive ability"—maybe more than any other psychological construct. And they've learned some interesting things about it. That it's remarkably stable over the lifespan. That it really is general: people who ace one test of intellectual ability tend to ace others. And that IQs have risen markedly over the last century. At the same time, IQ seems to be met with increasing squeamishness, if not outright disdain, in many circles. It's often seen as crude, misguided, reductive—maybe a whole lot worse. There's no question, after all, that IQ has been misused—that it still gets misused—for all kinds of racist, classist, colonialist purposes. As if this wasn't all thorny enough, the study of IQ is also intimately bound up with the study of genetics. It's right there in the roiling center of debates about how genes and environment make us who we are. So, yeah, what to make of all this? How should we be thinking about IQ?

My guest today is Dr. Eric Turkheimer. Eric is Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He has studied intelligence and many other complex human traits for decades, and he's a major figure in the field of "behavior genetics." Eric also has a new book out this fall—which I highly recommend—titled Understanding the Nature-Nurture Debate. In a field that has sometimes been accused of rampant optimism, Eric is—as you'll hear—a bit more measured.

In this conversation, Eric and I focus on intelligence and its putatively genetic basis. We talk about why Eric doubts that we are anywhere close to an account of the biology of IQ. We discuss what makes intelligence such a formidable construct in psychology and why essentialist understandings of it are so intuitive. We talk about Francis Galton and the long shadow he's cast on the study of human behavior. We discuss the classic era of Twin Studies—an era in which researchers started to derive quantitative estimates of the heritability of complex traits. We talk about how the main takeaway from that era was that genes are quite important indeed, and about how more recent genetic techniques suggest that takeaway may have been a bit simplistic. Along the way, Eric and I touch on spelling ability, child prodigies, the chemical composition of money, the shared quirks of twins reared apart, the Flynn Effect, the Reverse Flynn Effect, birth order, the genetics of height, the problem of missing heritability, whether we should still be using IQ scores, and the role of behavior genetics in the broader social sciences.

Alright folks, lots in here—let's just get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Eric Turkheimer. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:30 – The 1994 book The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein a Charles Murray, dealt largely with the putative social implications of IQ research. It was extremely controversial and widely discussed. For an overview of the book and controversy, see the Wikipedia article here.

6:00 – For discussion of the "all parents are environmentalists…" quip, see here.

12:00 – The notion of "multiple intelligences" was popularized by the psychologist Howard Gardner—see here for an overview. See here for an attempt to test the claims of the "multiple intelligences" framework using some of the methods of traditional IQ research. For work on EQ (or Emotional Intelligence) see here.

19:00 – Dr. Turkheimer has also laid out his spelling test analogy in a Substack post.

22:30 – Dr. Turkheimer's 1998 paper, "Heritability and Biological Explanation."

24:30 – For an in-passing treatment of the processing efficiency idea, see p. 195 of Daniel Nettle's book Personality. See also Richard Haier's book, The Neuroscience of Intelligence.

26:00 – The original study on the relationship between pupil size and intelligence. A more recent study that fails to replicate those findings.

31:00 – For an argument that child prodigies constitute an argument for "nature," see here. For a memorable narrative account of one child prodigy, see here.

32:00 – A meta-analysis of the Flynn effect. We have previously discussed the Flynn Effect in an episode with Michael Muthukrishna.

37:00 – James Flynn's book, What is Intelligence? On the reversal of the Flynn Effect, see here.

40:00 – The phrase "nature-nurture" originally comes from Shakespeare and was picked up by Francis Galton. In The Tempest, Prospero describes Caliban as "a born devil on whose nature/ Nurture can never stick."

41:00 – For a biography of Galton, see here. For an article-length account of Galton's role in the birth of eugenics, see here.

50:00 – For an account of R.A. Fisher's 1918 paper and its continuing influence, see here.

55:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer's paper on the "nonshared environment"—E in the ACE model.

57:00 – A study coming out of the Minnesota Study of Twins reared apart. A New York Times article recounting some of the interesting anecdata in the Minnesota Study.

1:00:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer's 2000 paper on the "three laws of behavior genetics." Note that this is not, in fact, Dr. Turkheimer's most cited paper (though it is very well cited).

1:03:00 – For another view of the state of behavior genetics in the postgenomic era, see here.

1:11:00 – For Dr. Turkheimer's work on poverty, heritability, and IQ, see here.

1:13:00 – A recent large-scale analysis of birth order effects on personality.

1:16:00 – For Dr. Turkheimer's take on the missing heritability problem, see here and here.

1:19:00 – A recent study on the missing heritability problem in the case of height.

1:30:00 – On the dark side of IQ, see Chapter 9 of Dr. Turkheimer's book. See also Radiolab's series on g.

1:31:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer's Substack, The Gloomy Prospect.

Recommendations

The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden

Intelligence, Stuart Ritchie

Intelligence and How to Get It, Richard Nisbett

"Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents'' (Ted talk), James Flynn

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).

Hello there, friends! We hope you're having a restful holiday, or a lively holiday, or whatever mix of those you prefer. As the year draws to a close, we at Many Minds are taking a much needed pause ourselves. But we wanted to share with you an episode from a podcast that we've been following for some time called On Humans. It's hosted by Ilari Mäkelä. It looks at humanity from all angles to understand where we come from and where we're going. The episode we're sharing features an interview with biologist and historian of science, Matthew Cobb; he's also the author of the book, The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience. In it, Ilari and Matthew take a zoomed-out view of the human brain and of our quest to understand it. This episode is actually part of a 5-part mini-series that On Humans did all about the human brain. So if you enjoy it, you may want to check out that broader series. Alright friends, have a great close of 2025 and a great start to 2026. We'll see you in January with our first episode of the new year. In the meanwhile, enjoy this offering from our friends at On Humans. The original show notes for this On Humans episode can be viewed here. You can follow the On Humans podcast through their newsletter or on Bluesky.

Alright, friends—we've come to the end of the 2025 run of Many Minds!

Our final episode of the year is an audio essay by yours truly. This is a classic format for the show, one that we only do every so often. Today's essay is about names. It's about the question of whether animals have something like names for each other. And it's also about a deeper question: What even is a name? How do humans use names? How does the historical and ethnographic record kind of complicate our everyday understanding of what names are. I had a lot of fun putting this together, and I do hope you enjoy it.

Now, the holiday season is a time when people might be shopping around for new podcasts to listen to. That makes it a great time to recommend us to your friends and family and colleagues. You can think of it as an especially thoughtful gift, one that's absolutely free, and that keeps on giving throughout the year.

Speaking of gifts, as an addendum to this episode you'll find a little stocking stuffer after the credits. It's a reading of a poem that figures prominently in today's essay.

Without further ado, here is my essay—'In search of names.' Enjoy!

A text version of this essay is available here.

Notes

2:00 – The text of 'The Naming of Cats' by T.S. Eliot is here. See also the full collection, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. The lines about cats' taste preferences and cats having different kinds of minds comes from another poem in the collection, 'The Ad-Dressing of Cats.'

3:00 – The 2019 study finding that cats know their names, and the 2022 study showing that cats know the names of their friends.

4:00 – For an overview of research on dolphin "signature whistles," see here.

5:00 – For the 2024 study reporting name-like rumbles in elephants, see here.

6:00 – For the 2024 study reporting vocal labels for individuals in marmosets, see here. A critical response to the study is here; the authors' response to the criticism is here.

12:00 – For overviews of cross-cultural variation in names and naming practices, see here, here, here, and here. Richard Alford's 1988 study, published in book form, is here.

13:30 – The study reporting name signs in Kata Kolok is here.

15:00 – For research on expectations based on the sounds of people's names, see here and here.

16:00 – For recent work on the "face-name matching effect," see here. For the study on "nominative determinism" in the medical profession, see here. (Note that, while this latter study does report empirical data, its rigor is questionable. And, yet, at least one other study has reported similar findings.)

17:30 – For the example of over-used names in Scotland, see here.

19:30 – For discussion of names in New Guinea, see here. For examples of research on "teknonymy," see here and here. For discussion of Penan "necronyms," see here.

20:30 – For an overview of name taboos, see here. For more on "alexinomia," see here.

22:30 – For an example of recent work on "name uniqueness," see here.

23:00 – William Safire's column on dog names is here. The study of gravestones in the world's oldest pet cemetery is here.

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).

Not long ago culture was considered rare in nature, maybe even uniquely human. But that's changed. We now know that the tree of life is buzzing with culture—and not just on a few lonely branches. Creatures great and small learn songs, migration routes, and feeding techniques from each other. Many species build up reservoirs of knowledge over generations. This has profound implications, not just for our understanding of the natural world, but also for our efforts to protect it.

My guest today is Dr. Philippa Brakes. Philippa is an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Exeter, with one foot in science and another in conservation. She's both a behavioral ecologist, focusing on whales and dolphins, and a leading voice—for more than a decade now—urging conservationists to take animal cultures seriously.

Here, Philippa and I talk about how researchers define culture and social learning in animals. We tour the mounting evidence for culture across species—in birds, in apes, in fish, possibly even in insects. We discuss the methods that scientists use to infer that behaviors are socially learned. We consider how animal culture complicates the conservation enterprise. We also discuss the idea that animal cultures have intrinsic value—not value for us humans, not value that can be easily quantified, but value for the animals themselves. Along the way Philippa and I talk about the notion of "cultural rescue"; indigenous understandings of animal culture; cases where social learning is maladaptive; human-animal mutualism; fashion trends; the idea of conserving "cultural capacity"; elephant matriarchs and other "keystone individuals"; golden lion tamarins, herring, and regent honey-eaters; and the question of why some orcas wear salmon as hats.

Alright friends, this topic has been on our wish list for a while now. Hope you enjoy it!

Notes

2:30 – For academic articles by Dr. Brakes and colleagues on the importance of animal culture for conservation, see here, here, and here. The last of these is the introduction to a recent special issue on the topic. Many of the topics discussed in this episode are also covered in this issue.

3:30 – The case of the golden lion tamarins is discussed here.

5:00 – For more about the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species (or CMS) of Wild Animals, see here.

9:00 – For a classic paper on social learning in animals, see here. For a relatively recent, detailed overview of animal culture, see here. For a short primer on animal culture, see here.

10:00 – For discussion of the riskiness of long-line depredation, see here.

12:00 – For a study by Dr. Sonja Wild and colleagues on bottlenose dolphin declines following a heat wave—and how these declines may have been buffered by tool-using traditions—see here.

15:00 – For the review of cetacean foraging tactics by Dr. Taylor Hersh and colleagues, see here.

17:00 – For a primer on honeyguides (and their mutualism with honey hunters), see here.

20:00 – For a recent review of culture and social learning in birds, see here. For a review of conservation of avian song culture, see here.

25:00 – For a review of (the conservation of) chimpanzee culture, see here.

28:00 – For the initial report of chimpanzees putting grass in their ears, see here. For more on the phenomenon of orcas wearing salmon hats, see here.

33:00 – For a recent review of culture and social learning in fish, see here.

35:00 – For the recent study on "collective memory loss" in herring, see here.

39:00 ­– For more on the possibility of social learning in insects, see here. For a video of the puzzle box experiment in bees, see here.

44:00 – For a recent review of the "methodological toolkit" used by researchers in the study of social learning in animals, see here.

47:00 – For the study using network-based diffusion analysis to understand the spread of feeding strategies in humpback whales, see here.

49:00 – For the original 2000 study on the spread of humpback whale song, see here. For a more recent study of "revolutions" in whale song, see here.

53:00 – For an example of work looking at changes in whale song as a result of human noise, see here.

55:00 – For more on the idea of "keystone individuals" in the case of elephants, see here. For more on menopause and the so-called grandmother hypothesis, see our earlier episode with Alison Gopnik.

1:05:00 – A recent editorial calling for the protection of animal cultural heritage under UNESCO.

Recommendations

The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell

Animal Social Complexity, edited by Frans de Waal and Peter Tyack

The Evolution of Cetacean Societies, by Darren P. Croft et al.

The Edge of Sentience, by Jonathan Birch (featured on an earlier episode)

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).

Everyone loves a good evolutionary puzzle. Why do we have appendices? Why do we dream? Why do we blush? At first glance, memory would not seem to be in this category. It's clearly useful to remember stuff, after all—to know where to find food, to remember your mistakes so you don't repeat them, to recall who's friendly and who's fierce. In fact, though, certain aspects of memory—when you hold them up to the light—turn out to be quite puzzling indeed.

My guests today are Dr. Ali Boyle and Dr. Johannes Mahr. Ali is a philosopher at the London School of Economics (LSE); Johannes is a philosopher at York University, in Toronto. Both have written extensively about the functions of memory, and, in particular, about the functions of episodic memory—that capacity for calling up specific events and experiences from our own lives.

Here, Ali, Johannes and I lay out the textbook taxonomy of memory, and discuss how episodic memory has drawn the lion's share of philosophical interest. We pick apart the relationship between episodic memory and another major type of long-term memory, semantic memory. We sketch a range of different accounts of the evolved functions of episodic memory, including Johannes's proposal that episodic memory serves communication and Ali's proposal that it fuels semantic memory. And, finally, we consider what this all means for our understanding of memory in children and in animals. Along the way, we touch on Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, infantile amnesia, evidential systems in language, imagination, "simulationist" theories of episodic memory, what it feels like to remember, collective memory, the hippocampus, cryptomnesia, and the cow's digestive system as a metaphor for memory.

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Notes

4:30 – For a broad orientation to memory research in the cognitive sciences, see here. For a broad orientation to the philosophy of memory, see here.

13:00 – See here for Dr. Boyle's paper on the "impure phenomenology" of episodic memory.

16:30 – For more on the idea of "WEIRD"-ness and the "WEIRD problem" in psychology, see our previous audio essay and our recent episode on childhood across cultures.

20:00 – For more on metaphors for memory in the cognitive sciences, see here (in which an apparently different "cow stomach" metaphor for memory is discussed). Note that cows do not, in fact, have four stomachs, but rather a single stomach with four distinct chambers.

24:00 – For an overview of the cognitive neuroscience of episodic memory, see here.

31:30 – For a discussion of the commonsense "mnemonic view" of episodic memory, see Dr. Boyle's recent article.

37:00 – For one influential articulation of a "simulationist" account of episodic memory, see here.

40:00 – For the proposal by Dr. Mahr and his colleague that episodic memory is for communication, see here and here.

45:00 – For more on evidential systems in language, see here and here.

48:00 – For the study by Dr. Mahr and colleagues on source memory in children, see here.

51:30 ­– For Dr. Boyle's proposal that episodic memory is for semantic memory, see here. For another of Dr. Boyle's discussions of the functions of episodic memory, see here.

1:02:00 – For more of Dr. Mahr's ideas about the cultural evolution of the "epistemic tag" that distinguishes episodic memory, see here.

1:03:00 – Partially digested stomach contents are sometimes known as "chyme."

1:07:00 – A news story about recent findings on infantile amnesia.

1:08:00 – A recent review article about Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory.

1:12:00 – An empirical study on the phenomenology of "cryptomnesia."

1:15:00 – For a recent discussion of episodic memory in animals, see this paper by Dr. Boyle and a colleague. Examples of Dr. Boyle's other work on memory in animals are here and here.

Recommendations

The Memory Palace (blog)

The Invention of Tomorrow, by Thomas Suddendorf, Jonathan Redshaw, & Adam Bulley (see also our episode featuring this book)

Searching for Memory, by Daniel Schacter

The Enigma of Reason, by Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber

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 hard to say exactly when, but some tens of thousands of years ago, our best friends were born. I'm referring, of course, to dogs. This didn't happen overnight—it was a long process. And it not only changed how those canids behaved and what they looked like, it also changed their brains. As wolves gave way to proto-dogs, and proto-dogs gave way to dingoes and dalmatians and Dobermanns and all the rest, their brains have continued to change. What can we learn from this singular saga? What does it tell us about dogs, about domestication, and about brains?

My guest today is Dr. Erin Hecht. Erin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, where she directs the Canine Brains Project.

Here Erin and I talk about how dogs are the most anatomically diverse species on the planet—and how their brains are no exception. We sketch the different waves in the dog domestication saga and discuss scenarios for how that saga got underway. We talk about how brains change as they get bigger and about how they change during domestication. We discuss a recent study by Erin and colleagues comparing the brains of modern dogs with the brains of pre-modern dogs like village dogs and New Guinea singing dogs. We also talk about a new study from Erin's lab finding that domestic dogs share with humans a key language-related structure. Along the way we talk about the Russian Farm Fox experiment, the stereotype of the gentle giant, the left lateralization of language, the respiratory condition known as BOAS, the dog personality inventory known as C-BARQ, the limitations of the idea of a "domestication syndrome," and the puppy kidnapping hypothesis.

Longtime listeners will recall that we had Erin on the show to talk about her work on fermentation and brain evolution. Given how much fun we had with that one, it was only a matter of time before we had her back to talk about her main line of research on dog brains. So here you go friends—hope you enjoy it!

Notes

4:30 – For one recent study of the early domestication of dogs, see here. For a review of leading hypotheses about what drove the wolf-to-dog transition, see here.

13:00 – For Dr. Hecht's initial 2019 study of brain variation across domestic dog breeds, see here.

20:00 – For a classic paper on the neurodevelopmental scaling by Dr. Barbara Finlay and colleagues, see here.

23:00 – For more of Dr. Hecht's work on neurodevelopmental scaling laws as they apply to dogs, see here. For a study reporting correlations between body size and personality in dogs, see here.

29:00 – See Dr. Hecht and colleagues' recent paper on the evolutionary neuroscience of domestication.

31:00 – See Dr. Hecht and colleagues' recent paper on brain changes seen in the Russian farm-fox experiment.

37:00 – For more on the idea of "domestication syndrome," see our recent episode with Dr. Kevin Lala and this critical discussion. For a classic treatment of the idea that domestication involves reduction in brain size, see here.

41:00 – For the recent study by Dr. Hecht and colleagues comparing the brains of modern and pre-modern dog breeds, see here.

43:00 – For video of a New Guinea Singing Dog singing, see here.

47:00 – For more about the dog personality inventory known as the C-BARQ, see here.

51:00 – For Dr. Hecht and colleagues' recent study on an analog to the "arcuate fasciculus" in dogs, see here.

58:00 – For Dr. Hecht and colleagues' study on arcuate fasciculus in chimpanzees (and its relationship to communicative behavior), see here. For more discussion of the hemispheric lateralization of language, see our recent interview with Dr. Ev Federenko.

1:04:00 – The website of the Functional Dog Collaborative.

Recommendations

Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution, Raymond & Lorna Coppinger

Evolving Brains, John Allman

It seems we've always had monsters among us. We've long been enthralled by dragons and giants, by the likes of Frankenstein and Godzilla and Dracula, by witches and werewolves and countless others. They roam our maps and creation myths; they crop up in our dreams, in our children's books, in our political rhetoric. Where do these beings spring from? What do they do for us? How have they changed over time? And, ultimately, what do our monsters say about their makers?

My guests today are Dr. Natalie Lawrence and Dr. Surekha Davies. Both are historians of science and authors of recent books on monsters: Natalie's book is Enchanted creatures: Our monsters and their meanings. Surekha's book is Humans: A monstrous history.

Here, Surekha, Natalie, and I talk about monsters as category breakers and boundary walkers—and about how monstrosity is in the eye of the beholder. We walk through a menagerie of monsters—from the apocryphal blemmyes of old travelogues, to a hairy-faced girl in 16th century France, to the figure of Caliban in The Tempest. We discuss the psychological and cultural forces that generate monsters. And we talk about whether anyone would want to live in a world without them.

Along the way, we touch on the "monstrification" of social groups; psychoanalysis; our primal fear of snakes; curiosity cabinets; therianthropes and the Cave of the Three Brothers; the relationship between monstrosity and geography; our long fascination with so-called monstrous births; the Muppet Show; dinosaurs and sea creatures; and the question of what monsters might do for children in particular.

Alright friends, it's the monstrous season and this is a fun one to help you celebrate. Enjoy!

Notes

3:00 – Grendel's mother has often been a subject of critical discussion and adaptation. See, for instance, the 2018 novel, The Mere Wife.

12:30 – For a classic history-of-science treatment of "wonders" (including monsters) and our conceptions of nature, see here.

18:30 – For those unfamiliar with muppets, an episode of the Muppet Show, which premiered in 1976.

24:00 – The blemmyes were often the subjects of illustration—for examples, see here.

26:00 – For more on Sir Walter Raleigh and the blemmyes, see Dr. Davies' recent newsletter post.

29:00 – One example of monsters at the margins of maps can be seen in the Psalter World Map.

32:00 – For more on Cave of the Trois-Frères and the Sorcerer, see here.

34:00 – For more on shamanism, see our recent episode with Manvir Singh.

37:00 – Therianthropes are relatively rare in cave art, but have nonetheless been widely discussed. For an example, see here.

39:00 – For more on Antonietta Gonsalvus and her family, including examples of how she was represented in paintings of the era, see here.

45:00 – The trope of monsters in creation stories is often called "chaoskampf."

47:00 – The meanings of Medusa have been widely discussed and debated. See here for an example.

52:00 – For more about Caliban, and the racial and colonial dimensions of the Tempest, see here.

57:00 – The Steinbeck quote comes from his book, The Log from 'The Sea of Cortez.'

Recommendations

The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Asa Simon Mittman & Peter J. Dendle

Spectacle of Deformity, by Nadja Durbach

The Modern Myths, by Philip Ball

The Monsters and the Critics (and other essays), by J.R.R. Tolkien

No Go the Bogeyman, by Marina Warner

Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak

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).