Many Minds

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 will be available soon.

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!)

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).

The idea of a "maternal instinct"—the notion that mothers are wired for nurturing and care—is a familiar one in our culture. And it has a flipside, a corollary—what you might call “paternal aloofness.” It's the idea that men just aren't meant to care for babies, that we have more, you know, manly things to do. But when you actually look at the biology of caretaking, the truth is more complicated and much more interesting.

My guest today is Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. She is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis and the author of the new book,  Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies. In it, she examines paternal care, the biology that supports it, and the norms and practices that sometimes suppress it.

In this conversation, Sarah and I set her new book, Father Time, in the context of her four previous books. We discuss the surprising prevalence of male care in fish and amphibians. We talk about how Charles Darwin noted the plasticity of caretaking in animals, only to ignore that plasticity when talking about humans. We consider how time in intimate proximity with babies activates capacities for nurturing—not just in fathers, but in caretakers of all kinds. Along the way, we touch on langurs and owl monkeys; emus and cassowaries; cichlid fish and fairy shrimp; prolactin and oxytocin; patriarchy and patriarchal notions. We talk about what seems to be distinctive about the human capacity for care; and about what happens when males spend too much time competing for status, and not enough time snuggling babies.

You'll probably get a sense for this from our conversation, but there are very few researchers who take both biology and culture as seriously as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy does. She does not shy away from digging deep into either domain. And she does not shy away from trying to trace the tangled links between the two.

Alright friends, I hope you enjoy this one. On to my conversation with Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – A classic paper on male parental care in fishes.  

7:00 – Dr. Hrdy’s previous books include The Langurs of Abu, The Woman that Never Evolved, Mother Nature, and Mothers and Others.

13:00 – A academic article  on “cooperative breeding” in birds.

16:30 – The full text of Charles Darwin’s book, The Descent of Man.

21:00 – Read about Caroline Kennard and her correspondence with Darwin here.

23:30 – A review of a recent book on Nancy Hopkins and her (quantitative) efforts to expose sexism at MIT.

26:00 – The 2014 paper on the brains of fathers in different caretaking roles.

37:00 – A paper by Larry Young and a colleague on the role of ancient peptides (like oxytocin) in sociality.

40:00 – The lab of Dr. Lauren O’Connell, who studies physiology and social behavior in poison dart frogs.

42:00 – A review of paternal care in primates.

47:00 – For more on Michael Tomasello’s “mutualism hypothesis”—and a lot else—see our earlier episode with Dr. Tomasello.

49:00 – For more on the costliness of the human brain, see our earlier episodes here and here.

58:00 – The 2007 study by Esther Herrmann, Michael Tomasello, and colleagues on the human specialization for social cognition.

59:00 – A study of children’s early “ostensive gestures” of showing and offering.

1:02:00 – An obituary for the ethnographer Lorna Marshall.

1:09:00 – An overview of ostracods and the traces they leave in the fossil record.

Recommendations

The Parental Brain, Michael Numan

Silas Marner, George Eliot

Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Sean Carroll

Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin

Brave Genius, Sean Carroll

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).

We may not know what it's like to be a bat, but we're pretty confident that it's like something—that bats (and other mammals) are sentient creatures. They feel pleasure and pain, cold and warmth, agitation and comfort. But when it comes to other creatures, the case is less clear. Is a crab sentient? What about a termite, or a tree? The honest answer is we just don't know—and yet, despite that uncertainty, practical questions arise. How should we treat these beings? What do we owe them?

My guest today is Dr. Jonathan Birch. Jonathan is a Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics and the author of the new book The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI. In it, he presents a framework for thinking about which beings might be sentient and about how our policies should account for this.

Here, we talk about Jonathan's work at the nexus of philosophy, science, and policy—in particular, his role in advising the UK government on the welfare of cephalopods and decapods. We discuss what it means to be sentient and what the brain basis of sentience might be. We sketch his precautionary framework for dealing with the wide-ranging debates and rampant uncertainty around these issues. We talk about several prominent edge cases in the natural world. And, finally, we consider whether AI might become sentient and, if so, by what route. Along the way, Jonathan and I touch on: plants, crayfish, bees, larvae, and LLMs. We talk about "sentience candidates" and the "zone of reasonable disagreement"; about Jonathan's stances on octopus farming and live-boiling of crabs; about the “run-ahead principle” and the “gaming problem”; and about the question of whether all conscious experience has a valence.

Jonathan's book is a remarkably clear and compelling read—if you find yourself intrigued by our conversation, I definitely recommend that you check out The Edge of Sentience as well. Alright friends, without further ado, on to our sixth season of Many Minds and on to my conversation with Dr. Jonathan Birch. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – The full report prepared by Dr. Birch and colleagues for the UK government is available here.

4:30 – Listen to our earlier episode with Dr. Alex Schnell here.

7:00 – Dr. Birch’s 2017 book, from an earlier chapter of his career during which he focused on kin selection and social behavior.

11:00 – A paper by Dr. Birch on the UK government’s response to the pandemic.

16:00 – A classic 1958 paper on sentience by the philosopher Herbert Feigl.

20:30 – Read Dr. Birch’s general audience essay on the case of live-boiling crabs.

28:30 – Advocates of the idea that regions of the midbrain support sentience include Antonio Damasio, Jaak Panskepp (whose work we discussed in this earlier episode), and Bjorn Merker (whose work we discussed in this earlier episode). 

31:30 – A discussion of the possibility of sentience in plants, with former guest Paco Calvo.

34:30 – Peter Godfrey Smith’s recent book, Metazoa.

35:30 – A paper by Dr. Birch and colleagues titled ‘Dimensions of animal consciousness.’

39:30 – A study reporting conditioned place avoidance in octopuses.

40:30 – A study reporting anxiety-like states in crayfish.

42:00 – A primer on "nociception" (which Kensy mispronounces in this segment).

44:00 – A popular article by Dr. Birch and colleagues arguing against octopus farming.

47:00 – A paper about welfare concerns in farmed insects.

49:00 – A paper showing that bees will selectively groom an antenna that was touched with a heat probe.

51:00 – The OpenWorm project.

1:02:00 – A recent piece by Dr. Birch and former guest Kristin Andrews about developing better markers for understanding AI sentience. The question of defining “markers” of conscious experience was also a central topic of our recent episode with Tim Bayne.

Recommendations

Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith

The Mind of a Bee, Lars Chittka

Justice for Animals, Martha Nussbaum

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 still on a brief summer break. We'll have a new episode for you later in August. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives!

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[originally aired September 21, 2022]

If your podcast listening habits are anything like mine, you might be out for a walk right now. Maybe you’re wandering the neighborhood, just blocks from home, or maybe you’re further afield. In either case, I’m guessing you’re finding your way without too much trouble—you’re letting some intuitive sense steer you, track how far you’ve gone, tell you where to go next. This inner navigator of yours is doing all in the background, as your mind wanders elsewhere, and magically it gets it all right. Most of the time, anyway. But how is it doing it? What allows us to pull this off?

My guest today is Dr. Hugo Spiers, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. His lab studies how our brains "remember the past, navigate the present, and imagine the future.” In recent years Hugo and his group have used a wide variety of methods—and some astonishingly large datasets—to shed light on central questions about human spatial abilities. 

Here, Hugo and I do a quick tour of the neuroscience of navigation—including the main brain structures involved and how they were discovered. We talk about research on a very peculiar population, the London taxi driver. We discuss the game Sea Hero Quest and what it's teaching us about navigation abilities around the world. We also touch on what GPS might be doing to us; whether the hippocampus actually resembles a seahorse; the ingenious layout of our brain's inner grids; navigation ability as an early sign of Alzheimer's; how “place cells” actually map more than just place; and how the monarch butterfly finds its way.

Super excited to share this one folks—this is an episode that's been on our wish list for some time. For mobile organisms like us, navigation is life or death—it’s as basic as eating or breathing. So when we dig into the foundations of these spatial abilities, we’re really digging into some of the most basic foundations of mind. 

So let’s get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Hugo Spiers. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

4:00 – A brief documentary about a person with developmental topographical disorder.

8:00 – There have been a slew of popular articles about the question of whether GPS is undermining our navigation abilities—see here and here.

12:00 – A classic academic article about path integration in mammals.

14:00 – The classic academic article by Edward Tolman on the idea of “cognitive maps.”

16:00 – A side-by-side comparison of a human hippocampus and seahorse. The resemblance is indeed striking.

18:00 – A classic academic article reporting “place cells” in rats.

21:00 ­– A research article on seasonal changes in hippocampus size across different species.

22:00 – A recent academic article on interactions between the hippocampus and the striatum in navigation.

23:30 – An article reviewing the first decade of research on “grid cells.” A video showing the activity of grid cells in a rat.

26:00 – The long struggle to calculate longitude is subject of a much-beloved book by Dava Sobel.

27:00 – The press release announcing the Nobel prize for the discovery of grid cells and place cells.

31:00 – A popular article about ‘The Knowledge’—a famed test for London taxi drivers.

33:30 – The celebrated original study by Eleanor Maquire and colleagues on structural changes in the brains of London taxi drivers. The (also-celebrated) follow-up study that Dr. Spiers was part of, comparing London taxi and bus drivers.

37:00 – More about the Taxi Brains project can be found here.

41:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Spiers’ team, led by Eva-Maria Griesbauer, reviews the cognitive neuroscience studies on London taxi drivers and dives deep into the learning techniques the drivers use.

44:30 – A paper by Dr. Spiers and team providing an overview of Sea Hero Quest and the studies it has been used for to date. A video demo of the game, and a popular article describing its motivation. Dr. Spiers developed the idea for the game in collaboration with Michael Hornberger.

50:00 – A recent research article looking at the value of Sea Hero Quest in detecting those at risk for Alzheimers.

53:00 – One of the first studies by Dr. Spiers and colleagues using Sea Hero Quest to test a vast sample and examine effects of variables like age, gender, and nationality.

54:30 – A more recent paper by Dr. Spiers and colleagues examining the effect of growing up in cities that are more or less “griddy.”

57:00 – A study by Dr. Spiers and colleagues showing a relationship between real-world navigation ability and navigation performance in Sea Hero Quest.

1:04:00 – The website of the International Orienteering Foundation. A video showing the sport.

1:06:00 – A review paper by Dr. Spiers and colleagues about the potential roles of cognitive maps in navigation and beyond.

1:07:00 – A review of “concept cells”, aka “Halle Berre cells.”

1:08:00 – A recent opinion piece by Dr. Spiers on the question of how many maps—and of what kind—the hippocampus implements.

1:10:30 – A recent research article on “time cells” in the hippocampus.

1:14:30 – A recent review article about monarch butterfly navigation.

Dr. Spiers recommends:

Human Spatial Navigation, by Ekstrom, Spiers, Bohbot, and Rosenbaum

‘The Cognitive Map in Humans: Spatial Navigation and Beyond,’ by Epstein, Patai, Julian, and Spiers

You can read more about Dr. Spiers work on his website and follow him on Twitter.  

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It 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 (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).

You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

**You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!**

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Hi friends, we're on a brief summer break at the moment. We'll have a new episode for you in August. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives!

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[originally aired January 25, 2023]

By now you’ve probably heard about the new chatbot called ChatGPT. There’s no question it’s something of a marvel. It distills complex information into clear prose; it offers instructions and suggestions; it reasons its way through problems. With the right prompting, it can even mimic famous writers. And it does all this with an air of cool competence, of intelligence. But, if you're like me, you’ve probably also been wondering: What’s really going on here? What are ChatGPT—and other large language models like it—actually doing? How much of their apparent competence is just smoke and mirrors? In what sense, if any, do they have human-like capacities?

My guest today is Dr. Murray Shanahan. Murray is Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London and Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind. He's the author of numerous articles and several books at the lively intersections of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and philosophy. Very recently, Murray put out a paper titled 'Talking about Large Language Models’, and it’s the focus of our conversation today. In the paper, Murray argues that—tempting as may be—it's not appropriate to talk about large language models in anthropomorphic terms. Not yet, anyway.

Here, we chat about the rapid rise of large language models and the basics of how they work. We discuss how a model that—at its base—simply does “next-word prediction" can be engineered into a savvy chatbot like ChatGPT. We talk about why ChatGPT lacks genuine “knowledge” and “understanding”—at least as we currently use those terms. And we discuss what it might take for these models to eventually possess richer, more human-like capacities. Along the way, we touch on: emergence, prompt engineering, embodiment and grounding, image generation models, Wittgenstein, the intentional stance, soft robots, and "exotic mind-like entities."

Before we get to it, just a friendly reminder: applications are now open for the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (or DISI). DISI will be held this June/July in St Andrews Scotland—the program consists of three weeks of intense interdisciplinary engagement with exactly the kinds of ideas and questions we like to wrestle with here on this show. If you're intrigued—and I hope you are!—check out disi.org for more info.

Alright friends, on to my decidedly human chat, with Dr. Murray Shanahan. Enjoy!

The paper we discuss is here. A transcript of this episode is here.

Notes and links

6:30 – The 2017 “breakthrough” article by Vaswani and colleagues.

8:00 – A popular article about GPT-3.

10:00 – A popular article about some of the impressive—and not so impressive—behaviors of ChatGPT. For more discussion of ChatGPT and other large language models, see another interview with Dr. Shanahan, as well as interviews with Emily Bender and Margaret Mitchell, with Gary Marcus, and with Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT).

14:00 – A widely discussed paper by Emily Bender and colleagues on the “dangers of stochastic parrots.”

19:00 – A blog post about “prompt engineering”. Another blog post about the concept of Reinforcement Learning through Human Feedback, in the context of ChatGPT.

30:00 – One of Dr. Shanahan’s books is titled, Embodiment and the Inner Life.

39:00 – An example of a robotic agent, SayCan, which is connected to a language model.

40:30 – On the notion of embodiment in the cognitive sciences, see the classic book by Francisco Varela and colleagues, The Embodied Mind.

44:00 – For a detailed primer on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, see here.

45:00 – See Dr. Shanahan’s general audience essay on “conscious exotica" and the space of possible minds.

49:00 – See Dennett’s book, The Intentional Stance.

Dr. Shanahan recommends:

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, by Melanie Mitchell

(see also our earlier episode with Dr. Mitchell)

‘Abstraction for Deep Reinforcement Learning’, by M. Shanahan and M. Mitchell

You can read more about Murray’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It 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 (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).

You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

**You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!**

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Hi friends, we're on a brief summer break at the moment. We'll have a new episode for you in August. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives!

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[originally aired May 17, 2023]

You know the feeling. You're trying to read or write or think through a project, maybe even just respond to an email, when your attention starts to drift. You may not even notice it until you've already picked up your phone or jumped tabs, until your mind has already wandered way off-piste. This problem of distraction has become a bit of a modern-day obsession. We now fret about how to stay focused, how to avoid time-sucks, how to use our attention wisely. But it turns out this fixation of ours—contemporary as it may seem—is really not so new. 

My guest today is Dr. Jamie Kreiner, Professor of History at the University of Georgia. Jamie is the author of a new book titled The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell us about Distraction. In the book, Jamie shows that Christian monks in late antiquity and the early middle ages were—like us—a bit obsessed with attention. And their understanding of attention fit within a broad and often remarkably detailed understanding of the mind.

In this conversation, Jamie and I talk about why monks in this era cared so much about distraction. We discuss how they understood the relationship between mind and body; how they conceptualized memory, meditation, and mind-wandering. We discuss some of the mnemonic techniques they used, some of the graphical and textual devices that helped keep them focused, and some of the metaphors and visualization techniques they innovated. Along the way we also touch on fasting, sleep, demons and angels, the problem of discernment, the state of pure prayer, the Six Wings mnemonic device, metacognitive maneuvering, and much more. 

I’ll just say I really enjoyed The Wandering Mind. As Jamie and I chat about here, the book illuminates an earlier understanding of human psychology that feels deeply familiar in some ways, and delightfully strange in others. I think you definitely get a sense of that in this conversation.

Alright friends, on to my chat with Dr. Jamie Kreiner. Enjoy!

 A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

4:00 – A webpage devoted to the Ark of Hugh of Saint Victor.

 6:30 – For a detailed (and positive) review essay about The Wandering Mind, see here.

 11:30 ­– The Redwall books, by Brian Jacques, are well known for featuring elaborate feasts. An article about some of the best of these.

18:30 – For more on how the body was understood in the early Christian world, see The Burden of the Flesh.

26:30 – Text written continuously is known as scripta continua.

27:30 – Articles that celebrate medieval marginalia can be found here, here, and here. 

40:00 – An article about the Six Wings mnemonic. For more on mnemonic techniques in the medieval world, see Mary Carruthers’ book.

53:00 – On the idea of “pure prayer,” see the book, The Ladder of Prayer and the Ship of Stirrings.

57:30 – Dr. Kreiner’s next book, which comes out in January 2024, is a translation of some of John Cassian’s work on distraction.

Dr. Kreiner’s book recommendations can be found in a recent article here.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It 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.

 If you've taken Linguistics 101, you know what language is. It's a system for conveying meaning through speech. We build words out of sounds, and then complex ideas out of those words. Remarkably, the relationship between the sounds and the meanings they convey is purely arbitrary. Human language consists, in other words, of abstract symbols. Now, of course, there are also sign languages, but these operate in the same way, just in a different medium. This, anyway, is the view of language that has dominated and defined linguistics for many decades. But some think it gets some pretty fundamental things pretty wrong. Some think we need a new picture of language altogether. 

My guest today is Dr. Neil Cohn. Neil is Associate Professor at the Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication, in the Netherlands; he is also the director of the Visual Language Lab at Tilburg. For about two decades, Neil has been studying the rich properties of graphic systems—especially comics—and has built an argument that some constitute full-blown languages. His latest book, co-authored with, Joost Schilperoord, is titled A Multimodal Language Faculty. It challenges that longstanding, deeply held view of what language is. Instead, the book argues that the human language capacity combines three different modalities—the vocal modality (as in speech), the bodily modality (as in gesture), and the graphic modality (as in comics and other visual narratives). And each of these modalities is naturally able to support full-blown languages.

Here, Neil and I talk about the basic assumptions of modern linguistics and where those assumptions come from. We discuss the idea that there are three expressive modalities that come naturally to humans, with each modality optimized for certain kinds of meaning. We talk about Neil's career, not only as an academic, but as an illustrator. We discuss cross-cultural differences and similarities in comics, and how comics have changed over the last century. And, finally, we consider how Neil's framework challenges current theorizing about the evolution of language. Along the way, Neil and I touch on sign languages and homesign systems, visual style vs visual language, Peircean semiotics, animal tracks, cave art, emoji, upfixes, sand drawing, Manga, the refrain "I can't draw," and the idea that the graphic modality is the only one that's truly unique to our species. 

After this episode we'll be taking a bit of a summer break, but we'll be posting some old favorites to tide you over. Alright friends, hope you enjoy this one. On to my conversation with Neil Cohn. Enjoy!

 A transcript of this episode is available here. 

Notes and links

3:30 – An earlier paper by Dr. Cohn on the well-worn refrain “I can’t draw.” His more recent Twitter thread covering the topic. 

9:00 – An overview of research on homesign systems. For a broader discussion of differences between gesture, homesign systems, and established sign languages, see here. 

15:00 – A comic, ‘Chinese Room,’ commissioned by the philosopher Dan Dennett and drawn by Dr. Cohn.

19:30 – The webpage of Dr. Cohn’s graduate mentor, Ray Jackendoff.

25:00 – A brief overview paper by Dr. Cohn and Dr. Schilperoord on the need to “reimagine language.”

25:30 – The classic book, based on lecture notes, by Ferdinand de Saussure, ‘Course in General Linguistics.' 

44:00 – For an overview of “bimodal bilingualism,” see here. 

50:00 – A study by Dr. Cohn and colleagues on the processing of emoji substituted for words.

56:00 – A recent study by Dr. Cohn and colleagues on anaphora in visual narratives. 

58:30 – For our previous audio essay on animal (and human) tracks, see here. 

1:01:30 – For examples of scholarship on non-Western methods of visual storytelling, including Aboriginal Australian sand drawing, see Dr. Cohn’s earlier edited volume here. For a deeper dive into sand drawing, see the monograph by Jenny Green here. 

1:03:00 – Dr. Cohn also recently published a book on cross-cultural aspects of comics, The Patterns of Comics. The book is the fruit of his lab’s TINTIN project. 

1:11:00 – For a video of Aboriginal Australian sand drawing, see here.

1:13:00 – See Dr. Cohn’s earlier book, Who Understands Comics?

1:15:00 – A study on “upfixes” by Dr. Cohn and a colleague.

1:22:00 – A popular article by Dr. Cohn on the linguistic status of emoji.

1:31:00 – For a deep dive into Peircean semiotics, see here.

1:36:00 – For my own general-audience treatment of “gesture first” theories of language evolution and the “modality transition” problem, see here.

1:37:00 – A paper by Dr. Jackendoff and Eva Wittenberg outlining their “complexity hierarchy.” 

­­­­1:50:00 – For the Getty museum exhibit associated with Dr. Cohn’s lecture, see here.

Recommendations

The Texture of the Lexicon, by Jenny Audring and Ray Jackendoff

Battle in the Mind Fields, by John Goldsmith and Bernard Laks

History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, hosted by James McElvenny

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It 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.

It's an enduring puzzle. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors were nomadic, ranging over large territories, hunting and gathering for sustenance. Then, beginning roughly 12,000 years ago, we pivoted. Within a short timeframe—in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas—humans suddenly decided to settle down. We started to store our food. We domesticated plants. We set off, in other words, down a path that would reshape our cultures, our technologies, our social structures, even our minds. Yet no one has yet been able to account for this shift. No one has been able to fully explain why agriculture happened when it happened and where it happened. Unless, that is, someone just did. 

My guest today is Dr. Andrea Matranga. Andrea is an economist at the University of Torino, in Italy, with a focus on economic history. In a new paper, he puts forward an ambitious, unifying theory of the rise of agriculture in our species. He argues that the key trigger was a spike in seasonality—with certain parts of the world, particularly parts of the northern hemisphere, suddenly experiencing warmer summers and colder winters. This led risk-averse humans in these places to start to store food and, eventually, to experiment with farming.   

 In this conversation, Andrea and I talk about how he developed his theory, in steps, over the course of almost 20 years. We consider the weaknesses of earlier explanations of agriculture, including explanations that focused on climate. We discuss how he wrangled vast historical datasets to test his theory. And we talk about some of the downstream effects that agriculture seems to have had. Along the way we touch on: salmon, wheat, taro, and milk; agriculture as a franchise model; Milankovitch Cycles; risk-aversion and consumption-smoothing; interloping in the debates of other disciplines; the possibility of a fig-based civilization; and how we inevitably project our own concerns onto the past.

Alright friends, I hope you enjoy this one. As I said at the top, the origins of agriculture is just one of those irresistible, perennial puzzles—one that cuts across the human sciences. And, I have to say, I find Andrea's solution to this puzzle quite compelling. I'll be curious to hear if you agree. Without further ado, on to my conversation with Andrea Matranga. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

 8:00 – Various versions of the fable ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ are compiled here.

13:00 – One of the last remaining ziggurat complexes is Chogha Zanbil.

16:00 – The classic paper by anthropologist Alain Testart on food storage among hunter-gatherers.

19:30 – An influential study emphasizing that agriculture occurred after the Ice Age due to warming conditions. Other studies have posited that other features of climate may have led to the rise in agriculture (e.g., here).

21:00 – An (illustrated) explanation of Milankovitch Cycles.  

27:00 – For Marshall Sahlins’ discussion of ‘The Original Affluent Society,’ see here.

32:00 – Jared Diamond’s popular article, ‘The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.’

33:00 – A paper criticizing the particularistic focus of many archaeological treatments of the origins of agriculture.  

36:30 – Dr. Matranga used a variety of data sources to test his theory, including a dataset compiling dates of agricultural adoption.

42:00 – A report detailing evidence of agriculture in Kuk Swamp in New Guinea.

43:00 – The book Cuisine and Empire, by Rachel Laudan.

44:00 – A paper by Luigi Pascali and collaborators on the rise of states and the “appropriability” of cereals. 

1:01:00 – A paper about the Natufian culture, which is considered to occupy an intermediate step on the road to agriculture. 

Recommendations

What We Did to Father (republished as The Evolution Man), by Roy Lewis

The Living Fields, by Jack Harlan

Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers, by Richard Lee and Irven Devore

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It 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.

Maybe your idea of spiders is a bit like mine was. You probably know that they have eight legs, that some are hairy. Perhaps you imagine them spending most of their time sitting in their webs—those classic-looking ones, of course—waiting for snacks to arrive. Maybe you consider them vaguely menacing, or even dangerous. Now this is not all completely inaccurate—spiders do have eight legs, after all—but it's a woefully incomplete and drab caricature. Your idea of spiders, in other words, may be due for a refresh. 

My guest today is Dr. Ximena Nelson, Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand. Ximena is the author of the new book, The Lives of Spiders. It’s an accessible and stunningly illustrated survey of spider behavior, ecology, and cognition. 

In this conversation, Ximena and I do a bit of ‘Spiders 101’. We talk about spider senses—especially how spiders use hairs to detect the minutest of vibrations and how they see, usually, with four pairs of eyes. We talk about web-making—which, by the way, the majority of spiders don't do—and silk-making—which all do, but for more reasons than you may realize. We talk about how spiders hunt, jump, dance, pounce, plan, decorate, cache, balloon, and possibly count. We talk about why so many spiders mimic ants. We take up the puzzle of “stabilimenta”. We talk about whether webs constitute an extended sensory apparatus—like a gigantic ear—and why spiders are an under-appreciated group of animals for thinking about the evolution of mind, brain, and behavior.

Alright friends, this one is an absolute feast. So let's get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Ximena Nelson. Enjoy!

 A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – A general audience article about our “collective arachnid aversion” to spiders. 

8:00 – An academic article by Dr. Nelson about jumping spider behavior. 

8:30 – In addition to spiders, Dr. Nelson also studies kea parrots (e.g., here). 

12:00 – A popular article about the thousands of spider species known to science—and the thousands that remain unknown.

16:30 – A popular article about a mostly vegetarian spider, Bagheera kiplingi.

18:00 – For the mating dance of the peacock spider, see this video.

20:00 – A recent study on spider “hearing” via their webs.

24:00 – The iNaturalist profile of the tiger bromeliad spider. 

29:30 – A recent study of extended sensing in humans during tool use. 

33:00 – A popular discussion of vision (and other senses) in jumping spiders. 

40:00 – An earlier popular discussion of spider webs and silk. 

45:00 – For a primer on bird’s nests, see here. 

48:00 – An article describing the original work on how various drugs alter spiders’ webs. 

49:00 – A recent salvo in the long-standing stabilimenta debate.

54:00 – A video about “ballooning” in spiders.

57:00 ­– An article by Dr. Nelson and a colleague about jumping spiders as an important group for studies in comparative cognition.

1:01:00 – A study of reversal learning in jumping spiders, which found large individual differences.

1:07:00 – A study of larder monitoring in orb weaver spiders.

1:10:00 – A study by Dr. Nelson and a colleague on numerical competence in Portia spiders.

1:16:00 – An academic essay on the so-called insect apocalypse.

Recommendations

Spider Behaviour: Flexibility and Versatility, by M. Herberstein

‘Spider senses – Technical perfection and biology,’ by F. Barth

‘Extended spider cognition’, by H. Japyassú and K. Lala

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It 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.

A cluster of brain cells in a dish, pulsing with electrical activity. A bee buzzing its way through a garden in bloom. A newborn baby staring up into his mother's eyes. What all these entities have in common is that we don't quite know what it’s like to be them—or, really, whether it's like anything at all. We don't really know, in other words, whether they’re conscious. But maybe we could know—if only we developed the right test. 

My guest today is Dr. Tim Bayne. Tim is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He’s a philosopher of mind and cognitive science, with a particular interest in the nature of consciousness. Along with a large team of co-authors, Tim recently published an article titled 'Tests for consciousness in humans and beyond.' In it, they review the current landscape of consciousness tests—or “C-tests”, as they call them—and outline strategies for building more and better tests down the road. 

Here, Tim and I discuss what consciousness is and why theories of it seem to be proliferating. We consider several of the boundary cases that are most hotly debated right now in the field—cases like brain organoids, neonates, and split-brain patients. We sketch a few of the most prominent current consciousness tests: the command following test, the sniff test, the unlimited associative learning test, and the test for AI consciousness. We talk about how we might be able to inch our way, slowly, toward something like a thermometer for consciousness: a universal test that tells us whether an entity is conscious, or to what degree, or even what kind of conscious it is. Along the way, Tim and I talk about zombies, chatbots, brains in vats, and islands of awareness. And we muse about how, in certain respects, consciousness is like temperature, or perhaps more like happiness or wealth or intelligence, and maybe even a bit like fire. 

I think you'll enjoy this one, friends—it's a thought-provoking conversation on a foundational topic, and one that takes us far and wide. So without further ado, here's my interview with Dr. Tim Bayne. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

4:45 – The philosopher Dan Dennett, who passed away in April, was known for his writings on consciousness—among them his 1991 book, Consciousness Explained.

7:00 – The classic paper on the neural correlates of consciousness, by Francis Crick and Christof Koch.  

9:00 – A recent review of theories of consciousness by Anil Seth and Dr. Bayne.

10:00 – David Chalmers’ classic paper on the “hard problem” of consciousness. 

13:00 – Thomas Nagel’s classic paper on what it’s like to be a bat.

20:00 – A recent paper by James Croxford and Dr. Bayne arguing against consciousness in brain organoids.

23:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Bayne and colleagues about the emergence of consciousness in infants. 

27:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Bayne and colleagues about consciousness in split-brain patients. An earlier paper by Dr. Bayne on the same topic.

30:00 – A paper by Dr. Bayne, Dr. Seth, and Marcello Massimini on the notion of “islands of awareness.”

35:00 – The classic paper using the “(covert) command following test” in a patient in a so-called vegetative state. 

38:00 – A 2020 paper introducing the “sniff test.” 

40:00 – A recent primer on the “unlimited associative learning” test. 

43:00 – An essay (preview only), by the philosopher Susan Schneider, proposing the AI consciousness test.

50:00 – The history of the scientific understanding of temperature is detailed in Hasok Chang’s book, Inventing Temperature.

53:30 – Different markers of consciousness in infants are reviewed in Dr. Bayne and colleagues’ recent paper.

1:03:00 – The ‘New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness’ was announced in April. Read about it here.

Recommendations

Being You, Anil Seth

Into the Gray Zone, Adrian Owen

Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It 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.