In this fascinating discussion, Dr. Hugo Spiers, a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, dives into the intricacies of how our brains navigate space. He reveals the pivotal roles of grid and place cells in remembering routes and forming cognitive maps. Hear about the extraordinary navigational skills of London taxi drivers and how their training impacts their brains. The conversation also explores how the mobile game Sea Hero Quest is shedding light on early signs of Alzheimer's through navigation tasks, offering insights into our cognitive abilities.

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

In this engaging conversation, Dr. Jamie Kreiner, a historian at the University of Georgia, unravels the fascinating world of medieval monks and their profound insights on distraction. She explores their advanced mnemonic techniques, such as the memory palace, and reveals their unique meditation practices focused on associative thinking. Jamie highlights the diversity within monastic life, including overlooked female and genderqueer monks. With ties to contemporary cognitive practices, she showcases how these monks battled distractions while striving for spiritual clarity and community support.

Neil Cohn, an Associate Professor at Tilburg University and director of the Visual Language Lab, challenges the traditional views of language focused solely on speech. He argues for a multimodal understanding that encompasses visual forms like comics, gestures, and written text. Cohn shares insights from his journey as a comic artist turned linguist, critiques established linguistic theories, and highlights the evolution of graphic expressions as valid forms of communication. His work pushes for reevaluating how we perceive and study language in its many forms.

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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.    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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.   For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Tim Bayne, a Professor of Philosophy at Monash University specializing in consciousness, delves into the intriguing question of measuring consciousness. He discusses boundary cases like brain organoids and neonates, illustrating the complexities of assessing conscious experience. Bayne introduces various tests, including the command-following and sniff tests, aiming to create a universal measure for consciousness. Ethical implications of these assessments spark a profound conversation on what it means to be conscious across humans, animals, and even AI.

Welcome back friends! Today we've got a first for you: our very first audio essay by... not me. I would call it a guest essay, but it's by our longtime Assistant Producer, Urte Laukaityte. If you're a regular listener of the show, you've been indirectly hearing her work across dozens and dozens of episodes, but this is the first time you will be actually hearing her voice.  Urte is a philosopher. She works primarily in the philosophy of psychiatry, but also in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of biology, the history of medicine, and neighboring fields. She's particularly interested in a colorful constellation of psychiatric phenomena—phenomena like hypnosis, mass hysteria, psychogenic conditions, and (the topic of today's essay) the placebo effect.   There's almost certainly more to placebo than you realize—it's a surprisingly many-layered phenomenon. Here, Urte pulls apart those layers. She talks about what placebo can and cannot do, the mechanisms by which it operates, the ethical dimensions of its use, its evil twin nocebo, how it is woven through the history of medicine, and a lot more. She argues that, though we've learned a lot about the placebo in recent decades, we have not yet harnessed its full potential.  As always, we eagerly welcome your comments about the show. Feel free to find us on social media, or send us a note at manymindspodcast@gmail.com. We would love to hear your suggestions for future episodes, your constructive criticisms, really your feedback of whatever kind. Alright friends, now on to our audio essay—'Rehabilitating placebo’—written and read by Urte Laukaityte. Enjoy! A text version of this episode will be available soon.   Notes and links  3:30 – A research paper describing the FIDELITY trial. 8:00 – For a neuroscientific overview of placebo research, see this review article. The landmark 1978 study is here. 9:00 – The study using naloxone in rats. 10:30 – A review of placebo effects in Parkinson’s disease. 13:00 – The study showing placebo effects in allergy sufferers. For more on placebo and conditioning in the immune system, see here.  13:30 – An overview of the results on whether placebo “can replace oxygen.”  16:00 – For the “milkshake” study, see here.  20:00 – A perspective piece on open-label placebos. A review of the efficacy of open-label placebos.  22:00 – A review of nocebo-induced side effects within the placebo groups of trials.  24:00 – On the idea of “good placebo responders,” see here. 27:30 – The book Medical Nihilism, by Jacob Stegenga. 28:00 – A review and meta-analysis of the use of placebo by clinicians.  29:30 ­– A paper on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and placebo.  30:30 – A review of factors modulating placebo effects. 34:00 – For the “signaling theory of symptoms,” see 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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.   For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

 They tend to move under the cover of darkness. As night descends, they come for your gardens and compost piles, for your trash cans and attic spaces. They are raccoons, skunks, and coyotes. And if you live in urban North America, they are a growing presence. Whether you consider them menacing, cute, fascinating, or all of the above, you have to grant that they are quite a clever crew. After all, they've figured out how to adapt to human-dominated spaces. But how have they done this? What traits and talents have allowed them to evolve into this brave new niche? And are they still evolving into it? My guest today is Dr. Sarah Benson-Amram. Sarah is Assistant Professor of Forest and Conservation Sciences and Zoology at the University of British Columbia; she also directs the Animal Behavior & Cognition Lab at UBC. Sarah's research group focuses on the behavioral and cognitive ecology of urban wildlife. They ask what urban wildlife can teach us about animal cognition more generally and try to understand ways to smooth human-wildlife interactions.  Here, Sarah and I talk about her work on that trio I mentioned before: raccoons, skunks, and coyotes. These three species are all members of the mammalian order of carnivora, a clade of animals that Sarah has focused on throughout her career and one that has been underrepresented in studies of animal cognition. We discuss the traits that have allowed these species—and certain members of these species—to thrive in dynamic, daunting urban spaces. We also talk about the big picture of the evolution of intelligence—and how urban adapter species might shed light on what is known as the cognitive buffer hypothesis. Along the way, we touch on: the neophilia of raccoons and the neophobia of coyotes, puzzle boxes, the Aesop's fable task, hyenas and elephants, brain size, individual differences, human-wildlife conflict, comparative gastronomy, and the cognitive arms race that might be unfolding in our cities.    If you have any feedback for us, we would love to hear from you. Guest suggestions? Topics or formats you'd like to see? Blistering critiques? Effusive compliments? We're open to all of it. You can email us at manymindspodcast at gmail dot com. That's manymindspodcast at gmail. Though, honestly, if it's really an effusive compliment, feel free to just post that publicly somewhere.  Alright friends, on to my conversation with Sarah Benson-Amram. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 8:50 – A study of manual dexterity in raccoons.  11:30 – A video featuring raccoon chittering, among other vocalizations. 12:00 ­– A recent academic paper on the categorization of wildlife responses to urbanization—avoider, adapter, exploiter—with some critical discussion.  14:00 – A study of how animals are becoming more nocturnal in response to humans. 18:00 – An encyclopedia article on the Social Intelligence Hypothesis, by one of its originators, Richard Byrne. A recent appraisal of how the hypothesis has fared across different taxa.  18:30 – A recent review article by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues surveying carnivore cognition. 25:00 ­– On the question of urban vs rural animals, see the popular article, ‘Are cities making animals smarter?’ 28:00 – A study by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues using puzzle boxes to study behavioral flexibility in captive raccoons. See also her follow-up study, conducted with a large team of neuroscience collaborators, examining the brains of raccoons who successfully solved the puzzle boxes.  34:30 – An earlier study by Dr. Benson-Amram on innovative problem solving in hyenas. 36:30 – Our earlier episode on animal personality with Dr. Kate Laskowski. 39:00 – A study by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues exploring raccoons’ ability to solve the Aesop’s Fable task. She has also used this task with elephants.  44:00 – A study by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues examining reversal learning in raccoons, skunks, and coyotes.  49:00 – An article articulating the “cognitive buffer hypothesis.” 51:00 – A paper discussing—and “reviving”—the so-called ecological intelligence hypothesis.  53:00 – A study by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues comparing brain size and problem-solving ability in mammalian carnivores. 56:00 – A paper by Dr. Benson-Amram and colleagues on cognition in so-called nuisance species, in which they discuss the idea of a "cognitive arms race."  57:30 – A paper on bin-opening in cockatoos and how it might be leading to an “innovation arms race.”   Recommendations How Monkeys See the World, Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans De Waal An Immense World, by Ed Yong (featured in a previous episode!) Urban Carnivores, by Stanley D. Gehrt, Seth P. D. Riley, and Brian L. Cypher   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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.  For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Hi friends, we're busy with some spring cleaning this week. We'll have a new episode for you in two weeks. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! _____ [originally aired Nov 30, 2022] 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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.