Cognitive Science and joint speech with Fred Cummins

This week I was delighted to welcome my first honest-to-God Cognitive Scientist onto the programme - Professor Fred Cummins.

Fred is an associate professor at the school of computer science and informatics at University College Dublin  where he co-directs the postgraduate cognitive science programme. I encountered Fred through his excellent introduction to cognitive science series on Youtube. As you’ll see in the episode he’s a vivid and enthusiastic communicator of cognitive science. 

Fred conducts interdisciplinary research into joint speaking which is where two or more people say the same thing at the same time, as found in practices of protest and prayer. Joint speech raises theoretical issues that go to the heart of human experience which we go into in the episode. Fred is also drawn to the study of ritual.

I’m not going to lie I was very much in annoying student mode throughout this episode, and whilst I tried to bring the conversation back to teams, there were extended periods where I was just thrilled to be having a conversation about Cognitive Science with a real-life cognitive scientist. Fred insights, questions, metaphors and observations are mind bending and deeply human and it was a great privilege to share this conversation with him. I present this episode of Agile On The Mind with Professor Fred Cummins.

Among the topics we covered were:

An introduction to cognitive science

Definitions of intelligence

Intuitions

Knowing and doing

‘Neuro’

Is your brain a computer?

Embodied and ecological approaches to vision

Coordination vs control

Joint Speech

The power of metaphor and symbolism

I hope you enjoy this episode even a fraction as much as I did, I would love to hear your feedback about this post (and this substack), so either leave it a comment or share some feedback with me at your leisure. See you next time

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