Many Minds

When we talk about AI, we usually fixate on the future. What's coming next? Where is the technology going? How will artificial intelligences reshape our lives and worlds? But it's also worth looking to the past. When did the prospect of manufactured minds first enter the human imagination? When did we start building robots, and what did those early robots do? What are the deeper origins, in other words, not only of artificial intelligences themselves, but of our ideas about those intelligences?

For this episode, we have two guests who've spent a lot of time delving into the deeper history of AI. One is Adrienne Mayor; Adrienne is a Research Scholar in the Department of Classics at Stanford University and the author of the 2018 book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology. Our second guest is Elly Truitt; Elly is Associate Professor in the History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the 2015 book, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art.

In this conversation, we draw on Adrienne's expertise in the classical era and Elly's expertise in the medieval period to dig into the surprisingly long and rich history of AI. We discuss some of the very first imaginings of artificial beings in Greek mythology, including Talos, the giant robot guarding the island of Crete. We talk about some of the very first historical examples of automata, or self-moving devices; these included statues that spoke, mechanical birds that flew, thrones that rose, and clocks that showed the movements of the heavens. We also discuss the long-standing and tangled relationships between AI and power, exoticism, slavery, prediction, and justice. And, finally, we consider some of the most prominent ideas we have about AI today and whether they had precedents in earlier times.

This is an episode we've been hoping to do for some time now, to try to step back and put AI in a much broader context. It turns out the debates we're having now, the anxieties and narratives that swirl around AI today, are not so new. In some cases, they're millennia old.

Alright friends, now to my conversation with Elly Truitt and Adrienne Mayor. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

4:00 – See Adrienne's TedEd lesson about Talos, the "first robot." See also Adrienne's 2019 talk for the Long Now Foundation.

7:15 – The Throne of Solomon does not survive, but it was often rendered in art, for example in this painting by Edward Poynter.

12:00 – For more on Adrienne's broader research program, see her website; for more on Elly's research program, see her website.

18:00 – For more on the etymology of 'robot,' see here.

23:00 – A recent piece about Aristotle's writings on slavery.

26:00 – An article about the fact that Greek and Roman statues were much more colorful than we think of them today.

30:00 – A recent research article about the Antikythera mechanism.

34:00 – See Adrienne's popular article about the robots that guarded the relics of the Buddha.

38:45 – See Elly's article about how automata figured prominently in tombs.

47:00 – See Elly's recent video lecture about mechanical clocks and the "invention of time." For more on the rise of mechanistic thinking—and clocks as important metaphors in that rise—see Jessica Riskin's book, The Restless Clock.

50:00 – An article about a "torture robot" of ancient Sparta.

58:00 – A painting of the "Iron Knight" in Spenser's The Faerie Queene.

Adrienne Mayor recommends:

The Greeks and the New, by Armand D'Angour

Classical Traditions in Science Fiction, edited by Brett Rogers and Benjamin Stevens

In Our Own Image, by George Zarkadakis

Ancient Inventions, by Peter James and Nick Thorpe

Elly Truitt recommends:

AI Narratives, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon

The Love Makers, by Aifric Campbell

The Mitchells vs the Machines

You can read more about Adrienne's work on her website and follow her on Twitter. You can read more about Elly's work on her website and follow her 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.

We're taking care of some housekeeping this week, so we're sharing a favorite from our archives. Look out for a new episode at the end of the month!

---

Preferences, decisions, goals. When you hear these words, you probably think of humans. Or, if not humans then maybe charismatic animals—you know, great apes, certain species of birds, maybe dogs. In any case, I bet you think of creatures that are more or less cognitively sophisticated. I know I do. But, according to some researchers, this is an outmoded and over-narrow way of thinking. They propose that decisions and goals—not to mention other fancy-seeming constructs like memory, problem-solving, and intelligence—can usefully be ascribed to an astonishingly large array of agents. Not just humans, not just animals, not even just organisms.

My guest on today's episode is Dr. Michael Levin. He's the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University; he directs the Allen Discovery Center and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. In recent years, Mike's been developing a radical reconsideration of the nature of mind and intelligence. He argues that it's not just humans and other smart creatures that traffic in all this classically cognitive stuff. It's also cells, tissues, organs, colonial organisms, and much more. He sometimes summarizes his view as "cognition all the way down."

Here we talk about how Mike came to this perspective. We discuss his empirical studies of bioelectricity, including some pretty astonishing experiments on planaria. We dig deep into two of the conceptual models he uses in talking about his "mind everywhere" framework: the "axis of persuadability" and the notion of the "cognitive light-cone". And we talk about why Mike rejects the criticism that this is all mere anthropomorphism. In fact, he makes a compelling case that it's time we retired that term altogether.

In the intro to Many Minds way back when, we talked about how the terrain of mind is vast. But as I've learned about the work of Mike and others, I've become convinced that the terrain of mind is actually vaster than I imagined then—maybe vastly vaster. I think you'll like this one, folks. And even if you're not convinced, there's little doubt you'll be provoked. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

4:10 – Dr. Levin mentions the caterpillar-to-butterfly transition in the introduction to a recent theoretical paper.

8:00 – Dr. Levin's work on bioelectricity and regeneration are the focus of a recent profile of his work in the New Yorker. A recent perspective piece on bioelectric signaling by Dr. Levin is here.

8:50 – The book The Body Electric was an early influence on Dr. Levin's interests.

10:30 – The term "basal cognition" refers to minimal cognitive agents like cells and slime molds. It is also the label for a newly formed subfield or researchers who work on such systems. Read the introduction to a recent special issue on the topic, written by Dr. Levin and colleagues.

13:45 – Much of Dr. Levin's early work (described, e.g., here) was on the generation of left-right asymmetry, a thorny issue in morphogenesis.

15:45 – Planaria are a popular model organism in biology. For a fun conversation about their curious properties, see this episode of the podcast Ologies.

20:30 – Dr. Levin and colleagues' experiments with two-headed planaria were first reported here.

25:30 – Here Dr. Levin mentions Shuffle Brain by Paul Pietsch.

26:40 – See Dr. Levin's recent discussions of "scale-free cognition" and "cognition all the way down" (the latter piece was written for a general audience and co-authored with the philosopher Daniel Dennett).

32:00 – Dr. Levin's notion of the "axis of persuadability" is discussed here.

42:00 – Dr. Levin's light-cone model of cognition is sketched here (see especially Figure 2).

­52:00 – Dr. Levin has applied his ideas to tumorigenesis (e.g., here).

52:45 – For an intro to Umwelt theory, see our earlier episode, 'Me, my Umwelt and I.'

58:00 – Dr. Levin discusses ideas about the anthropomorphism objection here.

Dr. Levin recommends books by:

Scott Turner

Denis Noble

You can find Dr. Levin on Twitter (@drmichaellevin) and keep up with his latest research on his lab's website.

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 creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Isabelle Laumer. 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.

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.

Some of us are a little shy; others are sociable. There are those that love to explore the new, and those happy to stick to the familiar. We're all a bit different, in other words—and when I say "we" I don't just mean humans. Over the last couple of decades there's been an explosion of research on personality differences in animals too—in birds, in dogs, in fish, all across the animal kingdom. This research is addressing questions like: What are the ways that individuals of the same species differ from each other? What drives these differences? And is this variation just randomness, some kind of inevitable biological noise, or could it have an evolved function?

My guest today is Dr. Kate Laskowski. Kate is an Assistant Professor of Evolution and Ecology at the University of California, Davis. Her lab focuses on fish. They use fish, and especially one species of fish—the Amazon molly—as a model system for understanding animal personality (or as she sometimes calls it "consistent individual behavioral variation").

In this episode, Kate and I discuss a paper she recently published with colleagues that reviews this booming subfield. We talk about how personality manifests in animals and how it may differ from human personality. We zoom in on what is perhaps the most puzzling question in this whole research area: Why do creatures have personality differences to begin with? Is there a point to all this individual variation, evolutionarily speaking? We discuss two leading frameworks that have tried to answer the question, and then consider some recent studies of Kate's that have added an unexpected twist. On the way, we touch on Darwinian demons, combative anemones, and a research method Kate calls "fish Big Brother."

Alright friends, I had fun with this one, and I think you'll enjoy it, too. On to my conversation with Kate Laskowski!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – A paper by Dr. Laskowski and a colleague on strong personalities in sticklebacks.

5:30 – The website for the lab that Dr. Laskowski directs at UC-Davis.

7:00 – The paper we focus on—'Consistent Individual Behavioral Variation: What do we know and where are we going?'—is available here.

11:00 – A brief encyclopedia entry on sticklebacks.

13:00 – A video of two sea anemones fighting. A research article about fighting (and personality) in sea anemones.

15:00 – A classic article reviewing the "Big 5" model in human personality research.

17:00 – The original article proposing five personality factors in animals.

22:30 – A recent special issue on the "Pace-of-Life syndromes" framework.

27:00 – A recent paper on evidence for the "fluctuating selection" idea in great tits.

29:00 – A 2017 paper by Dr. Laskowski and colleagues on "behavioral individuality" in clonal fish raised in near-identical environments.

32:10 – A just-released paper by Dr. Laskowski and colleagues extending their earlier findings on clonal fish.

39:30 – The Twitter account of the Many Birds project. The website for the project.

Dr. Laskowski recommends:

Innate, by Kevin Mitchell

Why Fish Don't Exist, by Lulu Miller

The Book of Why, by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie

You can read more about Dr. Laskowksi's work on her website and follow her 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.

There's an old view of the mind that goes something like this: The world is flooding in, and we're sitting back, just trying to process it all. Our minds are basically passive and reactive, always a step behind. Contrast that view with a new one that's quickly gaining ground. According to this alternative, we don't just react to the world, we anticipate it. We're not leaning back but trying to stay a step ahead—our minds are fundamentally active and predictive. And our predictions aren't just idle guesses, either—they're shaping how we experience the world. This new view is known as the "predictive processing framework", and it has implications, not just for how we perceive, but also for how we act and how we feel, for our happiness and our well-being.

My guest today is Dr. Mark Miller. Mark is a philosopher of cognition and senior research fellow at the Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies at Monash University. He's part of a new wave of intensely interdisciplinary scholars who are working at the intersections of philosophy, neuroscience, and psychiatry.

Here, Mark and I sketch the predictive processing framework and unpack some of its key pillars. We discuss how this approach can inform our understanding of depression, addiction, and PTSD. We sketch out notions of loops and slopes, stickiness and rigidity, wobble and volatility, edges and grip. And, on the way, we will have a bit to say about video games, play, horror, psychedelics, and meditation.

This was all pretty new terrain for me, but Mark proved an affable and capable guide. If you enjoy this episode and want to explore some of these topics further, definitely check out the Contemplative Science Podcast, which Mark co-hosts.

Alright friends, on to my chat with Mark Miller. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

4:15 – The website of the Hokkaido University Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience (CHAIN). The website of the Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies (M3CS).

6:00 – Dr. Miller co-hosts the Contemplative Science podcast, a project of M3CS.

7:30 – For one introduction to the predictive processing framework, see this article by Dr. Miller and colleagues.

11:00 – See Dr. Miller's essay in Aeon on social media, co-authored with Ben White, as well as this more detailed treatment for an academic audience.

12:00 – See a paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues on depression.

14:00 – An introduction to the subfield of "computational psychiatry."

17:00 – Andy Clark's "watershed" paper on the predictive processing framework.

18:00 – A recent book on "active inference" (which is largely synonymous with the predictive processing approach).

22:00 – A chapter on the idea of the "body as the first prior."

24:30 – A demo of the "hollow face" illusion.

29:00 – On the potential value of psychedelics in jarring people out of trenches and ruts, see also our earlier episode with Alison Gopnik.

31:00 – See our recent episode with Dimitris Xygalatas.

34:30 – A popular article on children wanting to hear the same stories over and over.

38:00 – A paper by Coltan Scrivner and colleagues on horror fans and psychological resilience during COVD-19.

42:30 – A recent article by Dr. Miller and colleagues about the "predictive dynamics of happiness and well-being," which covers much of the same terrain as this episode.

46:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues on the evocative notion of "grip."

50:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues about video games and predictive processing.

57:00 – A paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues in which they discuss meditation in the context of the prediction processing approach.

Dr. Miller recommends books by the philosopher Andy Clark, including:

Surfing Uncertainty

You can read more about Dr. Miller'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.

From one perspective, rituals are pure silliness. They might involve us waving our hands in a certain way and saying these exact words, in this exact order; we might put on a funny costume, or eat specific foods, or even subject ourselves to considerable amounts of pain. And we don't just perform these rituals once either—we tend to do them over and over again, year after year. Seen in this way, rituals are frivolous, expendable, and mind-numbingly repetitive. And yet they're also central. Rituals are found in abundance in all human cultures; they're a fixture of every historical period. So what's the story? How can we reconcile the apparent silliness of rituals with their centrality to our species?

My guest today is Dr. Dimitris Xygalatas. He is Associate Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut. He's also the author of the new book, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. In the book, Dimitris makes the case that rituals are far from extraneous sideshows: they're enormously valuable, both for individuals and for groups, and they form a core part of what it means to be human.

Here, Dimitris and I talk about some of the extreme rituals that he's studied, in particular, fire walking. We discuss the methods he uses to study these kind of traditions, especially unobtrusive physiological measures like heart rate monitoring. We also touch on: ritual-like behaviors in other species; what OCD behaviors have in common with certain ritual behaviors; why collective traditions often involve pain and synchronized movement; and how rituals serve to strengthen social bonds and enhance our well-being.

If you enjoy this convo, be sure to check out Dimitris's book—I can recommend it heartily. And if you're enjoying Many Minds, perhaps consider posting a review or leaving us a rating. Or maybe telling a friend, or three.

Alright folks, on to my chat with Dimitris Xygalatas. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:30 – Dr. Xygalatas wrote a previous book about firewalking in Greece. For his papers on various aspects of firewalking, see here, here, and here, among others.

14:00 – The website for the Experimental Anthropology lab at UConn.

20:00 – A paper in which Dr. Xygalatas and colleagues examined heart-rate synchrony in the context of a fire-walking ritual.

26:00 – A popular article about the concept of "over-imitation"—the idea that children will copy adults' actions with high fidelity, even if those actions have no clear causal effect.

27:00 – A research article discussing imitation and over-imitation in chimpanzees and human children.

28:00 – A research article about children's ritualistic behaviors and obsessive compulsive disorder.

31:00 – A popular article on the "waterfall display" originally described by Jane Goodall. A video about the display, put out by the Jane Goodall Institute.

34:00 – A recent study by Dr. Xygalatas and colleagues about pre-free-throw rituals in basketball players.

36:00 – A theoretical article on the "compensatory control model."

40:00 – See this paper by Dr. Xygalatas and colleagues about the Thaipusam festival and how it promotes prosociality.

45:00 – For a classic exploration of synchronized movement, see the book, Keeping Together in Time, by the historian William H. McNeill.

48:00 – A study in which Dr. Xygalatas and colleagues explored the phenomenon of "collective effervescence" in the context of fire-walking.

50:00 – A recent article by Dr. Xygalatas and colleagues about ritual and well-being.

51:50 – A recent popular article by Dr. Xygalatas about Burning Man as an example of modern collective ritual.

Dr. Xygalatas recommends:

The Sweet Spot, by Paul Bloom

Drunk, by Edward Slingerland (featured in an earlier episode!)

You can read more about Dr. Xygalatas'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.

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.

And we're back. We're rested, we're rejuvenated, and we're ready for Season 4 of Many Minds! We're also, frankly, a bit hot. As I am recording this there is a heat dome parked over California and there is sweat under my headphones.

But, more to the point, we've got a great episode to kick the new season off. My guest today is Dr. Irene Pepperberg. For more than forty years now, Irene has been doing groundbreaking research on parrots, with a focus on how they think and communicate. She is best known for her work with an African Grey parrot named Alex. Alex learned English words for numbers, shapes, colors, and more; he asked questions and talked to himself; he sometimes even invented words of his own. He was, in short, pretty remarkable.

In this conversation, Irene and I talk about Alex, as well as his successors in the lab, Griffin and Athena. We talk about these animals' histories and personalities and their most impressive feats. We discuss how parrots are like human children in some ways—and unlike them in others. And while we talk a lot about verbal abilities, we also discuss visual working memory, delayed gratification, and optical illusions. Finally, we touch on the power of symbols, parrot communication and cognition in the wild, and the future of animal communication research.

One quick production note: there are just couple of patches of fuzzy audio here. Please do stick with it though—things get smooth later on and this conversation is just too chock full of cool stuff, really wouldn't want you to miss it.

Alright friends, a very warm welcome back, and on to my chat with Dr. Irene Pepperberg. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:00 – For some reflections on the early days of "animal language studies," see Dr. Pepperberg's recent paper 'Nonhuman and nonhuman-human communication: Some issues and questions.'

5:00 ­– Dr. Pepperberg is the author of two influential books about her research with Alex. The first is The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots; the second Alex & Me, which was a New York Times bestseller.

6:15 – One of the original studies on parrot vocal abilities by Dietmar Todt. For more on the "modelling" technique that Dr. Pepperberg adapted, see her recent paper.

9:00 – Read an article that the New York Times published about Alex upon his death in 2007.

10:00 – Photos of Alex, Griffin, and Athena can be found on the Alex Foundation website.

17:00 – For an example of Dr. Pepperberg's classic work teaching the parrots to talk about shape and color, see here. For one of her more recent studies on shape learning, see here.

19:00 – For an example of Dr. Pepperberg's classic work teaching the parrots to talk about numbers, see here. For a review of numerical concepts in the parrots, see here.

24:00 – Alex originally learned "none" in the context of learning the concepts of same and different. For the original paper, see here.

28:30 – For Dr. Pepperberg's recent work on delayed gratification, see here and here. For a recent effort to "revisit" the classic Marshmallow Task in human children, see here.

33:00 – For a recent study by Dr. Pepperberg and colleagues on "inference by exclusion", see here.

35:30 – A popular article about recent research showing that baby parrots babble. For discussion of babbling in baby bats, see our earlier interview with Dr. Mirjam Knörnschild.

37:00 – An older article in Scientific American describing some of David Premack's work teaching apes to use symbols.

38:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Pepperberg and colleagues involving a "shell game on steroids" (to test "visual working memory manipulation").

41:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Pepperberg and colleagues looking at the parrots' ability to reason about probabilities.

43:30 – For the "transformative power of symbols" idea as it applies to humans, see here.

45:00 – See Dr. Pepperberg's recent article reviewing her research on visual perception in parrots, including work using optical illusions.

48:00 – A recent research article comparing birds' and primates' brains.

51:00 – For Dr. Pepperberg's recent reflections on the past and future of "animal language studies," see here.

54:00 – A short animated video explaining the "gavagai problem," which is associated with the issue of the "indeterminacy of translation."

You can read more about Dr. Pepperberg's work and collaborators—human and parrot!—at the Alex Foundation website.

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 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.

Friends, here's another favorite episode from our archives while we're still on summer break. Enjoy!

----

It's an old question: How does experience shape our minds and brains? Some people play the piano; others drive taxis; others grow up trilingual. For years now, scientists have examined how these and other kinds of life experiences can lead to subtle differences in our concepts and cortexes. But to really push on the question, to really explore the limits of how experience can rewire us, some researchers have turned to an especially dramatic case: blindness. What does a life without visual input do to the mind and brain? My guest today is Dr. Marina Bedny, an Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. For more than a decade now, Marina has been researching blindness and, in particular, what blindness can tell us much about where our concepts come from and about how our brains get organized.

Here, Marina and I discuss how people who have been blind since birth nonetheless develop rich, sophisticated understandings of the visual world. We talk about how the visual cortex in blind folks gets repurposed for other decidedly non-visual functions, like language. We consider the intriguing findings that blind people very often outperform sighted people in certain kinds of tasks. On the way, we also touch on John Locke and the British empiricists; the notion of cortical recycling; the possibility of re-opening the brain's critical periods; and a bunch else.

This was a super thought-provoking conversation—I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I think you will too. But, before we get to it, a final reminder about the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, or DISI. This year's DISI will be not only in-person but held in the charming seaside city of St Andrews, Scotland. More details at disi.org. The application window is only open for a little while longer, so better act fast.

Alright friends, on to my chat with Dr. Marina Bedny. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:30 ­– A popular article and video on the ideas of John Locke and other empiricists.

4:50 – One of the original articles by the philosopher Frank Jackson on Mary the color scientist.

7:35 – The 1985 book by Dr. Barbara Landau and Dr. Lila Gleitman on language acquisition in (a few) blind children.

11:00 – Dr. Bedny's first study involving blind subjects, in collaboration with Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone and Dr. Rebecca Saxe.

15:00 – A recent study in Dr. Bedny's lab, led by Dr. Judy Kim, comparing color knowledge in blind and sighted adults.

23:30 – A recent study by Dr. Bedny and collaborators on blind people's understanding of visual verbs like sparkle, glow, peek, and stare.

30:30 – A recent study in Dr. Bedny's lab, led by Dr. Judy Kim, comparing knowledge of animal appearance in blind and sighted adults.

34:00 – Tour an interactive model of the visual cortex—and the rest of the brain—here.

36:00 – A now-classic paper by Dr. Norihiro Sadato and colleagues on how reading Braille activates blind people's "visual" cortex.

37:30– The "metamodal" hypothesis and the "pluripotent" hypothesis are compared in Dr. Bedny's recent article in TiCs.

45:30 – A 2011 paper by Dr. Bedny and colleagues about how, in blind people, the "visual" cortex is involved in language processing.

49:00 – A paper showing that "visual" areas in blind people are highly synchronized when listening to stories. A more recent paper in a similar vein.

53:00 – A now-classic paper by Dehaene and Cohen on the "cultural recycling" of certain brain areas.

56:00 – A paper by Dr. Bedny and colleagues on sensitive periods and cortical specialization.

1:01:00 – A recent paper from Dr. Bedny's lab, led by Karen Arcos, showing superior verbal working memory in blind relative to sighted adults.

1:03:30 – Another study from Dr. Bedny's lab showing that blind people are less likely than sighted people to be led astray by garden-path sentences.

Dr. Bedny recommends:

Her TiCs article on the "pluripotent cortex"

Recent papers (e.g. here and here) from her lab led by Dr. Judy Kim

A now-classic paper on cortical recycling.

You can read more about Dr. Bedny's work at her lab's website.

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 Cecilia Padilla. Creative support is provided by 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.

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.

We're on break this month, but are sharing some favorite episodes from our archives to tide you over. Enjoy, friends!

I'm betting you've heard about the next generation of artificial intelligence, the one that's just around the corner. It's going to be pervasive, all-competent, maybe super-intelligent. We'll rely on it to drive cars, write novels, diagnose diseases, and make scientific breakthroughs. It will do all these things better, faster, more safely than we bumbling humans ever could. The thing is, we've been promised this for years. If this next level of AI is coming, it seems to be taking its time. Might it be that AI is simply harder than we thought?

My guest today is Dr. Melanie Mitchell. She is the Davis Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and the author of a number of books, including her latest, which is titled 'Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans.'

In this conversation we zoom in on Melanie's widely discussed recent essay, 'Why AI is harder than we think.' We talk about the repeating cycle of hype and disenchantment within AI, and how it stretches back to the first years of the field. We walk through four fallacies that Mitchell identifies that lead us to think that super smart AI is closer than it actually is. We talk about self-driving cars, brittleness, adversarial perturbations, Moravec's paradox, analogy, brains in vats, and embodied cognition, among other topics. And we discuss an all-important concept, one we can't easily define but we can all agree AI is sorely lacking: common sense.

Across her scholarly publications and public-facing essays, Melanie has recently emerged as one of our most cogent and thoughtful guides to AI research. I've been following her work for a while now and was really stoked to get to chat with her. Her essay is insightful, lucid, and just plain fun—if you enjoy this conversation, I definitely suggest you check it out for yourselves.

Alright folks, on to my conversation with Dr. Melanie Mitchell. And for those in the US—happy thanksgiving!

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

Notes and links

5:00 – A recent essay by Dr. Mitchell on self-driving cars and common sense.

14:00 – An influential paper from 2013 titled 'Intriguing properties of neural networks.'

16:50 – A video introduction to "deep learning."

19:00 – A paper on "first step fallacies" in AI by Hubert Dreyfus.

21:00 – For a discussion of Alpha Go's recent success with the game of Go, see our earlier interview with Dr. Marta Halina.

26:00 – An influential 1976 paper titled, 'Artificial intelligence meets natural stupidity.'

31:00 – A popular Twitter account that tags recent findings with "In mice."

38:00 – A paper by Lawrence Barsalou on "grounded cognition." For related ideas see Lakoff & Johnson's Metaphors We Live By.

41:00 – A recent book by Brian Cantwell Smith, The Promise of Artificial Intelligence.

43:00 – An article on the idea of "core knowledge."

47:00 – The CYC project.

49:30 – A recent article by Dr. Mitchell about analogies people have been using to understand COVID-19.

50:30 – An op-ed by Dr. Mitchell about why we should not worry os much about super-intelligence.

End-of-show recommendations:

Dr. Mitchell's 2019 book, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

Blake et al., 2017, 'Building Machines that Think and Learn Like People'

Chollet, 2019, 'On the Measure of Intelligence'

You can find Dr. Mitchell on Twitter (@MelMitchell1) and follow his research at her website.

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 Cecilia Padilla. Creative support is provided by 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.

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.

The world is bigger than you think. I don't mean geographically, though maybe that too. I mean in terms of its textures and sounds and smells; I mean in terms of its hues and vibrations. There are depths and layers to the world that we don't usually experience, that we might actually never be able to experience. Our senses just aren't wired to take it all in. We're simply not tuned to all the dimensions of reality's rich splendor. But there is a way we can appreciate these hidden dimensions: with a flex of the imagination, we can step into the worlds of other creatures; we can try out different eyes and noses; we can voyage into different perceptual universes. Or at least we can try.

My guest today is Ed Yong, author of the new book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Arounds Us. Ed is a science writer for The Atlantic and the author of an exceptional earlier book on the microbiome called I Contain Multitudes. This new book tours the wide diversity of animal senses. It asks what it's like to be a bat, sure, but also what it's like to be a star-nosed mole, a manatee, or a mantis shrimp. Informed by some truly extraordinary science, the book considers how it might feel to electrolocate around the ocean, to hear through the threads of a web, or to be tugged by the earth's magnetic field.

There's a lot of praise I could lavish on this book, but I'll just say this: it really makes you feel more alive. Reading it makes everything, in fact, seem more alive. It makes the world seem richer, more vivid, somehow more technicolor and finely textured. It makes you realize that every organism, all the creatures we share this planet with, possesses a kind of vibrant genius all their own.

After this episode we will be on a short holiday, and then we'll be gearing up for Season 4. If you have guests or topics you want us to cover, please send us a note. And, of course: if you've enjoyed the show so far, we would be most grateful if you would leave us a rating or a review. I know I say this all the time, and it's probably a bit annoying: but it really, truly helps, and I would personally, very much appreciate it!

Alright friends, now to my conversation with Ed Yong. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:30 – One of our earlier audio essays—'Me, my umwelt, and I'—profiled von Uexküll and his concept of an Umwelt.

6:00 – The classic Nagel article 'What is it like to be a bat?'; Mike Tomasello's recent variant, 'What is it like to be a chimpanzee?', which we discussed just last episode.

10:00 – One of many articles by Ed about COVID-19. He was awarded a Pulitzer prize for his coverage of the pandemic.

14:30 – A popular article on proprioception.

19:00 – A research article on the evolution of opsin proteins.

20:00 – A primer on echolocation.

25:00 – A brief article on heat-sensitive pits in snakes.

26:30 – An academic article about the "star" of the star-nosed mole. A video showing the star-nosed mole in action.

31:00 – A popular article about the eyes of starfish.

32:00 – A collection of research articles about the Ampullae of Lorenzini.

35:00 – A very recent article about spider webs as "outsourced" hearing.

38:00 – A research article about aspects of bird song that humans can't hear.

40:00 – A study by Lucy Bates and colleagues about how elephants operate with a spatial model of where their kin are.

You can read more about Ed's work at his website, catch up on his stories in The Atlantic, or 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 Cecilia Padilla. Creative support is provided by 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.