Many Minds

Dr. Stephen Vaisey, Professor of Sociology and Political Science at Duke University and co-director of the Worldview Lab, discusses beliefs and cultural change. Their research shows that people's beliefs tend to be pretty settled. They explore the concept of personal culture, models of belief updating, and the factors that influence belief changes over time. The importance of being open-minded and societal structures in shaping opinions are highlighted. Recommended readings on cultural change are also discussed.

You’ve no doubt heard that—as humans—our sense of smell is, well, kind of pathetic. The idea goes all the way back to Aristotle, that we have advanced senses—especially sight and hearing—and then lowly, underdeveloped ones—taste and smell. It’s an idea that has been repeated and elaborated over and over, throughout Western intellectual history. Along with it comes a related notion: that smells are nearly impossible to talk about, that odors simply can’t be captured in words. These ideas may be old, but are they actually true? A number of researchers would say they're ripe for reconsideration. And my guest is one such researcher, Asifa Majid. She’s Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of York in the UK. For a decade now, Asifa’s been pioneering a new wave of research on human olfaction, especially how it interfaces with language, thought, and culture. In this conversation we talk about the general notion that some kinds of experience are harder to put into words than others. We discuss Asifa’s fieldwork with hunter-gatherer groups in the Malay peninsula, as well as her studies with wine experts in the west. We talk about whether learning special smell terms seems to sharpen one’s ability to discriminate odors. And we venture beyond Asifa’s own work, to touch on a bunch of recent highlights from the broader science of olfaction. This was such a fun conversation, folks! I’ve admired Asifa’s work on this topic since her very first paper. She’s a truly interdisciplinary thinker and, as you’ll hear, she’s got a nose for fun examples and deep questions. Without further ado, on to my conversation with Dr. Asifa Majid! Enjoy.   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 3:40 – A paper on the 19th century rise of the myth that humans are poor smellers. 6:00 – A paper estimating that humans can discriminate possibly a trillion different odors. 7:30 – A theoretical paper by Dr. Majid and a collaborator on “differential ineffability” and the senses. 9:20 – Dr. Majid’s collaborator in her work on Jahai, a Malaysian language, was Niclas Burenhult. 11:00 – A classic book on the idea of “basic terms” in the domain of color, which provide an analogy for basic terms in the domain of smell. 12:30 – A first paper by Dr. Majid and Niclas Burenhult describing the language of olfaction in Jahai. 14:45 – Dr. Majid’s first experiment comparing odor naming (and color naming) in Jahai and English. 20:00 – Dr. Majid has also examined smell lexicons in several other languages, including Seri, Thai, Maniq, and Cha’palaa. 25:40 – A follow-up study by Dr. Majid and a collaborator on two groups within Malaysia who contrast in subsistence mode. 29:30 – A paper detailing cultural practices surrounding smell among the Jahai. 31:00 – Dr. Majid discusses the factors shaping cultural variation in olfaction (as well as a number of other interesting issues) in her most recent review paper. 39:00 – The “deodorization” hypothesis was discussed in a classic book on the cultural history of aroma. 39:40 – In a recent study, Dr. Majid and collaborators failed to find evidence that the frequency of smell language has fallen off since industrialization. 45:50 – Dr. Majid led a study comparing 20 languages across the world in terms of how expressible their speakers found different sensory experiences. 53:00 – Some possible reasons for the general trend toward the ineffability of smell are considered in Dr. Majid’s recent review paper. 57:00 – Along with her collaborators, Dr. Majid has examined the smell-naming abilities of wine experts. See one paper here. 1:02:45 – A recent paper by Dr. Majid and colleagues showing that wine experts’ smell-naming abilities are not dependent on “thinking in” language. 1:05:35 –Some evidence from “verbal interference” tasks suggests that, when carrying out color discrimination tasks, people rely on language in the moment. 1:09:00 – The Odeuropa project. 1:10:20 – The website of Noam Sobel’s lab.   Dr. Majid’s end of show recommendations: What the Nose Knows, by Avery Gilbert The Philosophy of Olfactory Perception, by Andreas Keller Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, by Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synott Neuroenology, by Gordon Shepard Cork Dork, by Bianca Bosker You can keep up with Dr. Majid on Twitter (@asifa_majid).   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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Let’s say you’re out on the open sea, having a leisurely sail, when you suddenly encounter not one but two sinking boats. One is a boat with two dogs in it; the other is a boat with a single human in it. You can only save one of the boats, so which one do you pick? The answer may seem obvious—you save the boat with the human, right? For many adults—even those who have a special love for animals—there’s little question that a human life is simply worth more, perhaps way more, than an animal life. But where does this pro-human bias come from? Is it in our nature? Is it drilled into us by culture, maybe by Western culture in particular? Would young children also place more value on human lives than on animal lives? This is the question at the core of a recent paper by Matti Wilks, Lucius Caviola, Guy Kahane, and Paul Bloom. The team found—rather strikingly I have to say—that children simply don’t show the same pronounced pro-human biases that adults do, or at least not as pronounced. On today’s episode I have Matti Wilks on to go behind this paper with us. She’s a postdoc at Yale University, studying moral cognition and how we judge the moral worth of others. Matti and I discuss children’s moral development; we touch on the psychology and philosophy of speciesism; we talk about why tragic trade-off dilemmas—like the one involving the boats—are just so engaging. We also talk about a number of questions this paper raises but can’t yet answer, questions for future work. Really stoked to discuss this research on the show, folks. We talk about some themes we’ve touched on before—for instance, speciesism and child development—and some we haven’t—like the origins of morality. This is also just one of those super-cool and generative studies, one you know is going to inspire a bunch of follow-up work. Alright folks, hope you enjoy this chat as much as I did. On to my conversation with Dr. Matti Wilks. The paper we discuss is here. A transcript of this show is available here.   Notes and links 4:40 – The term “speciesism” was first broadly popularized by Peter Singer’s 1975 book Animal Liberation. 5:40 – A prior study by Dr. Wilks’ co-author, Lucius Caviola, on the psychology of speciesism. 6:30 – A prior study led by Karrie Neldner, with Dr. Wilks as a co-author, on the “moral circle” of children. 7:15 – Some of the first experimental work on the construct of the “moral circle” was done by Charlie Crimston and colleagues. 12:00 – A paper on the emergence of in-group biases in children. 13:00 – There was a lively discussion on Reddit of this paper—and the tragic trade-off dilemmas it used as stimuli. 13:40 – A paper by Peter Blake and colleagues showing that children at a certain age know they should share but still do not. 20:15 – Dr. Wilks has also done work on children’s moral concern for robots. 27:40 ­– Our previous episode with Melanie Challenger, in which we discuss “dementalization.”   Dr. Wilks’ end-of-show recommendation: The Moral Standing of Animals: Towards a Psychology of Speciesism, a paper by Lucius Caviola and colleagues

Welcome back folks! We’ve got an audio essay for you this week. It touches on art, music, the skin, the spine, individual differences, vestigial responses, tiny muscles. There’s even some Darwin thrown in there. It’s a fun one. Hope you enjoy it! A text version of this essay is available on Medium.   Notes and links 1:30 – The novel that very recently gave me goosebumps. 2:00 – A brief discussion of Nabokov and his ideas about the tell-tale tingle.   2:45 – Some terms for goosebumps in other languages. 3:00 – A primer on skin anatomy. 4:00 – A paper on the thermoregulatory function of piloerection in primates and other animals. 4:25 – Read Darwin’s Expression here. 5:00 – A paper about “nails on chalkboard chills.” A paper that discusses claims that piloerection attends awe (but which fails to find evidence for this association in a lab setting). A paper on goosebumps in religious experiences. A paper that references mathematicians getting goosebumps when seeing proofs. 5:30 – The 1980 paper by Goldstein on “thrills.” 6:45 – The Darwin passage is quoted in McCrae 2007. 7:00 – A 1995 paper by Panskepp, as well as his 2002 study with a co-author. 7:40 – A recent paper on chills in response to films; another on poetry. 9:15 – The paper by McCrae reporting the association between “openness to experience” and chills. 10:00 – A paper by Fiske and colleagues on kama muta, the “sudden devotion emotion.” 11:10 – Panskepp’s “separation call” hypothesis is perhaps best described in his 2002 study.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). 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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Whales and dolphins are, without a doubt, some of the most charismatic, enigmatic creatures around. Part of what draws us to them is that­—different as our worlds are from theirs, different as our bodies are—we sense a certain kinship. We know they’ve got big brains, much like we do. We know that some cetacean species live long lives, sing songs, and form close bonds. If you’re like me, you may have also wondered about other parallels. For example, do whales and dolphins have something we might want to call culture? If so, what do those cultures look like? What sorts of traditions might these animals be innovating and circulating down in the depths? On this week’s episode I chatted with Dr. Luke Rendell, a Reader in the School of Biology and a member of the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He’s been studying cetaceans for more than two decades. He’s the author, with Hal Whitehead, of the 2014 book The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. (You can probably guess by the book’s title where Luke comes down on the question of cetacean culture.) Luke’s work is, to my mind, an impressive blend of naturalistic observation, cutting edge methods, and big-picture theorizing. In this conversation, Luke and I do a bit of “Cetaceans 101.” We talk about what culture is and why whale song is a good example of it. We discuss lob-tail feeding in humpback whales and tail-walking in bottlenose dolphins. We talk about Luke’s very recent work on how sperm whales in the 19th century may have learned from each other how to evade whalers. And we discuss why an understanding of culture may be crucial for ongoing cetacean conservation efforts. We didn’t plumb all the depths of this rich topic—nor did we exhaust all the maritime puns—but we did have a far-reaching chat about some of the most fascinating beings on our planet and their distinctive cultures. As always, thanks a bunch for listening folks. On to my conversation with Dr. Luke Rendell. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.    Notes and links 2:30 – My favorite edition of Moby Dick (for what it’s worth). 6:45 – A primer on cetaceans. 9:30 – A paper on the ins and outs of the whale nose. 10:45 – A general audience article about echolocation in cetaceans, drawing on this recent academic article. 12:30 ­– A discussion of Roger Payne’s storied whale song album. 19:00 – A paper on cetacean brain and body size. 19:45 – Dr. Rendell’s 2001 article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, co-authored with Hal Whitehead. The paper made a splash. 24:50 – A paper by Dr. Rendell and colleagues describing some of his work on whale song. 26:40 – The 2000 paper by Michael Noad and colleagues, presenting some of compelling early evidence for whale song as a culturally transmitted phenomenon. 28:30 – A subsequent paper by Ellen Garland, Michael Noad, and colleagues showing further evidence for the socially transmitted nature of song. 31:45 – Dr. Rendell has also done important theoretical work on social learning strategies. See, for instance, here and here. 33:24 – An article offering evidence of imitation in killer whales. 36:10 – The paper by Dr. Rendell and colleagues on lob-tail feeding in humpback whales. 36:35 – A video illustrating “bubble net feeding.” 47:45 – The paper by Dr. Rendell and colleagues on tail-walking in dolphins. 55:30 – The paper by Dr. Rendell and colleagues on 19th century sperm whales' evasion tactics, as well as a popular piece on the same. 57:00 – A website documenting various aspects of whaling history. 1:05:00 – A recent discussion of gene-culture co-evolution across animal species. 1:10:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Rendell and (many) colleagues about how an appreciation of animal culture offers important lessons for conservation.   Dr. Rendell’s end of show recommendations: Dolphin Politics in Shark Bay, by Richard Connor Deep Thinkers, edited by Janet Mann The Wayfinders, by Wade Davis You can keep up with Dr. Rendell on Twitter (@_lrendell).   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 Hilda Loury. 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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Have you ever seen what seemed to be a spirit? Or heard a voice from an unseen source? Or maybe just sensed a presence and found yourself with goosebumps all over? These kinds of experiences can be incredibly powerful— life-altering, in fact—but they don’t happen often, and they don’t happen to everyone. So what drives this individual variation? Why do some of us have these extraordinary experiences while others never do? Could it be something about our personalities? Or our cultures? Could it have to do with the way we understand our minds? My guests on today’s show are Tanya Luhrmann, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, and Kara Weisman, a postdoc at UC-Riverside (formerly in the Psychology department at Stanford). Along with nine collaborators from across institutions, Tanya and Kara recently published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) titled ‘Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths.’ This episode is nominally in our “behind the paper” series, but really it tells the story of not just this one paper but a much larger project: The Mind and Spirit project. The project was an unusual effort in scope: it included anthropologists and psychologists; it involved fieldwork in Ghana, Thailand, China, Vanuatu, and the US and practitioners of different faith traditions; it used both in-depth interviews and large-scale survey testing with thousands of participants. The particular paper we’re discussing today probed the basic idea that so-called “spiritual presence events”—those tingly, jarring, extraordinary experiences that some of us have—could be due to two main factors, factors that vary across individuals and cultures. The first proposed factor is how people understand the mind-world boundary. People who conceive of the mind as fundamentally leaky or “porous” might be more likely to have these kinds of experiences. The second proposed factor is how likely people are to get absorbed in their sensory experiences, to lose themselves in music, art, nature, movies, and so on. In our conversation, Tanya, Kara, and I talk about the deeper history behind this work; we break down what the constructs of porosity and absorption mean exactly and how they chose to measure them; we discuss the challenges and rewards of cross-disciplinary collaboration; and we talk about why I really need to read more William James. I wanted to feature this paper the moment I learned about it—it’s such an impressive piece of research on several levels. It’s also just certifiably cool. It’s dealing with cultural differences. It’s dealing with individual differences. And it’s dealing with variability in, to use the authors’ words “something as basic as what feels real to the senses.” So let’s get to it. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Dr. Tanya Luhrmann and Dr. Kara Weisman. Enjoy! The paper we discuss is here. A transcript of this show is available here.   Notes and links 4:00 – Dr. Luhrmann’s first book was based on work with British practitioners of magic and witchcraft. 5:30 – Another of Dr. Luhrmann’s books looked at American Evangelicals and their relationship to God. 6:30 – A paper by Marcia Johnson and Carol Raye on “reality monitoring.” 12:45 – In earlier work, Dr. Weisman examined people’s conceptions of mind and mental life. 16:37 – One of the other collaborators on the Mind and Spirit project is Felicity Aulino. 19:30 – More info about Tellegen’s absorption scale can be found here and here. 28:05 – Another member of the project is Rachel E. Smith. 33:24 – Another member of the project is Cristine Legare, former guest on Many Minds (!). 36:00 – Another member of the project is John Dulin. 42:00 – Another member of the project is Emily Ng. 42:30 – Another member of the project is Joshua D. Brahinsky. 43:00 – Another member of the project is Vivian Dzokoto. 58:00 – Dr. Luhrmann discusses the “citadel” model of the mind in her more recent book, How God Becomes Real. 59:20 – Dr. Weisman is currently part of a new large-scale project, the Developing Belief Network.   Dr. Luhrmann’s end-of-show recommendation: Religious Experience Reconsidered, by Ann Taves Dr. Weisman’s end-of-show recommendation: The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James   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 Hilda Loury. 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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our NEW website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Greetings, all! It’s been a minute, but we’re back, we’re refreshed, and we’re buzzing with excitement about the next few months of Many Minds. This episode we’re talking about one of humanity’s most powerful cognitive tools: numerals. Numerals are those unassuming symbols we use whenever we read clocks, check calendars, dial phone numbers, or do arithmetic. My guest on today’s show is Stephen Chrisomalis. Steve is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wayne State University in Michigan, where he specializes in the anthropology of numbers, mathematics, and literacy. He’s the author of the recent book Reckonings: Numerals, Cognition, and History, which is the focus of our conversation today. Humans have developed more than a hundred different systems for representing numbers over the last 5000 years or so. Steve and I discuss how these systems differ from each other. We talk about how they build on the ancient tally systems used in the Upper Paleolithic and how the develop hand-in-hand with writing. We consider the popular idea that the Roman numerals fell from favor because they’re no for good calculation. (Not so much, says Steve.) We also talk about some lesser-known numerical notation systems. Like the one the Cherokee polymath Sequoyah developed alongside his much-celebrated syllabary. And, of course, we cast a glance to the future. What kinds of systems might humans be using centuries or even millennia from now?  Numerals are—in and of themselves—pretty cool. But they become all the more so when we see them in broader context. As Steve’s book makes clear, numerals offer a compelling case study in how of our cognitive technologies are shaped by the vagaries of history, the dynamics of culture, and, of course, the constraints of the human mind.  Learned a lot from this one, folks—I think you’ll enjoy it. Without further ado, here’s my chat with Steve Chrisomalis.   A transcript of this episode is now available here.   Notes and links 3:20 – Dr. Chrisomalis’s doctoral advisor was the prominent archaeologist, Bruce Trigger. 4:30 – A paper by Dr. Chrisomalis and colleagues on the “cultural challenge” in the study of mathematical cognition. 9:50 – One of several papers by Alexander Marshack on Upper Paleolithic tally systems. 19:00 – Dr. Chrisomalis’s earlier book on numeral systems—written for a more specialist audience and encyclopedic in scope—can be found here. 20:10 – The Armenian and Georgian numeral systems. 23:00 – The term “subitizing,” from the Latin for 'sudden,' was introduced in this article by Kaufman et al. in 1949. 24:20 – Conventions for making tally marks vary across cultures, a fact which recently went viral. 33:50 – The ancient Roman abacus was different from abacuses used in Asia. 35:00 – A recent paper on the benefits of abacus training in India. 42:20 – A paper on frequency-dependent selection. 49:00 ­– An article about the Cherokee syllabary, which was invented by Sequoyah. 1:00:20 ­­– A numerical notation developed in the 20th century based on color, used for labeling electrical resistors. 1:09:00 ­­– Dr. Chrisomalis maintains two websites about different kinds of language: Glossographia & The Phrontistery. His personal website is here. Dr. Chrisomalis’s end of show recommendations: Where Mathematics Comes From, by George Lakoff & Rafael Núñez Cultural Development of Mathematical Ideas, by Geoffrey Saxe Numbers and the Making of Us, by Caleb Everett   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 Hilda Loury. 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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

We're doing some spring cleaning this week, but please enjoy this pick from our archives. It's a conversation with Dr. Alex Taylor that aired originally in September 2020.  We've got a terrific spring lined up for the show. See you in two weeks! --- There’s a viral video clip from 2014—maybe you’ve seen it. It features a subject in a pretty remarkable psychology experiment. He’s put in room full of different apparatuses, one of which contains reward. After sizing up the room, the subject gets started. The first thing he does is tug on a string until he can reach a short stick that’s tied to the end of it. He then uses that stick to retrieve a stone that was just out of his reach, behind some bars; then he retrieves another stone in the same way; then a third. One at a time, he picks up the stones, takes them across the way, and plunks them down a tube. Nothing happens at first but, after the third stone, the combined weight lowers a trap door, releasing a long stick. The subject then uses that long stick to carefully pry out his reward from a deep hole. It’s an impressive display of problem solving. But what’s most remarkable is that the subject in question is not a Psych 101 student but a bird—a New Caledonian crow, to be exact—and his name is 007. My guest on today’s show is Alex Taylor, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Auckland. He’s the one who devised this challenge for 007—it brings together a number of tasks he’s used with New Caledonian crows over the years to try to understand their striking capacities for tool use, for planning, and for reasoning of different kinds. We talk about how Alex got interested in crows and how he studies them; we talk about what seems to be going on in their minds when they solve multi-step puzzles; we talk about the kinds of tools that crows make and use in the wild and the emerging evidence that using those tools puts them in a good mood. We then zoom out to discuss some of the leading ideas about what drives the evolution of intelligence behavior, whether in crows or chimps or children. We also touch on some of Alex’s new work with another species—the kea, an alpine parrot native to the south Island of New Zealand. We talk about how the kea are in some ways a foil to the New Caledonian crow—a bit more curious, a bit more fun-loving—but also super sharp in their own ways. This conversation was a real treat. Like many folks, it seems, during the lockdown this spring I found myself with a newfound interest in birds. So I was especially excited to get to tour the world of avian cognition with Alex—a leading researcher in the area and an affable guide at that. I think you’ll get a kick out of this one folks—and I’m happy to bet it’ll have you looking at your neighborhood corvids in a whole new light. Without further preamble, here’s my conversation with Dr. Alex Taylor. Enjoy.   A transcript of this interview is available here.   Notes and links 4:00 ­– A popular article about the famed feats of Betty, a New Caledonian crow. An early publication establishing these crows’ impressive tool-making abilities. 8:00 – The corvid family is large and diverse. Accessible introductions to corvids and corvid cognition can be found here and here. 13:30 – Dr. Taylor’s first study with crows dealt with meta-tool use—the use of one tool on another. An image depicting the set-up of the study can be found here. 17:30 – An article about how New Caledonian crows craft and use tools in the wild. 19:34 – A study suggesting that the pandanus tools made by New Caledonian crows may exhibit cumulative cultural evolution. (We discussed the importance of cumulative culture in humans in an earlier episode.) 22:20 – A 2019 study by Dr. Taylor and colleagues investigating the types of mental representations crows seem to be using during multi-stage problem solving tasks. 24:10 – A 2019 study by Dr. Taylor and colleagues suggesting crows might enjoy using tools. The procedure involved a cognitive bias task first developed in this 2004 study. 30:50 – A classic study in psychology analyzing individual differences in how much people like thinking—that is, their “need for cognition.” 35:00 – Aesop’s fable about the crow and the pitcher. The fable was first adapted into an experimental task in this study. Dr. Taylor and colleagues have since used variations of the task to probe crows’ causal understanding. Here is one overview of this work. 41:20 – A study by Dr. Taylor and colleagues examining how human children do on the Aesop’s fable task. 42:35 – Dr. Taylor’s “signature testing” proposal is discussed here. 53:50 – A 2017 study showing that monkeys can be trained to pass the mirror test by using laser pointers. (We discussed the mirror test in a previous episode.) 56:34 – A paper by Dr. Taylor and a colleague discussing the equivocal evidence for the “technical intelligence hypothesis”—the idea that selection for tool use leads to selection for general intelligence. 58:17– An article about “encephalization” as a proxy for animal intelligence. 1:02: 35 – A paper by the philosopher Kim Sterelny about the origins of human intelligence. 1:04:33 – Read about the charismatic kea here. 1:09:45 – A 2017 study showing that a distinctive vocalization produced by kea may be involved in positive emotional contagion, much like human laughter. In a new project, in collaboration with Ximena Nelson and other colleagues, Dr. Taylor is trying to further understand this behavior. 1:10:48 – A recent study by Dr. Taylor and colleagues about the kea’s ability to integrate different kinds of information. Watch a video about this study here.   Alex Taylor’s end-of-show recommendations: The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman The Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerman Bird Brain by Nathan Emery   The best way to keep up with Dr. Taylor’s work is to follow his lab on Twitter (@AnimalMindsUoA) or Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/AnimalMindsUoA/). You can also check out his lab website: http://www.animalmindslab.com.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. 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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Welcome back folks! Don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, but rumor is that in certain parts of the Northern Hemisphere, the signs of spring are starting to emerge—little buds and shocks of color. We’ll be monitoring the situation closely over the coming weeks. My guest today is Melanie Challenger. Melanie is a writer and researcher whose work explores the relationship between humans and the natural world. The subject of our conversation is her latest book, How to be Animal: A New History of What it Means to Be Human. In it, she confronts our species’ epic struggle with our animal nature. We have this tendency to see ourselves as above and beyond the natural order, as possessing something special, something extraordinary that sets us apart. And yet it’s no secret that we are also biological organisms, made from the same stuff as the rest of the animal kingdom and bound by the same laws and limits. You can sense the struggle; you can probably feel the tension. Through the lens of this struggle, Melanie’s book takes in a huge sweep of terrain. It considers our tendency to dehumanize other humans and “dementalize” animals; it discusses our alienation from our own bodies; it takes up our desire to colonize space and upload our minds so they survive our death. That’s not all. It also zooms in on paleolithic cave art, neuro-essentialism, the notions of personhood and dignity, not to mention mass extinction and machine intelligence and a whole lot else. It’s a provocative book and a brave book, and chatting with Melanie about it was a real treat. An announcement, or re-announcement, I suppose: Applications for the 2021 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute are now open. Check out our amazing faculty (including some former guests of the show) and find further details at disi.org. I’ll just mention here that Melanie and I first met at the 2020 institute—she was one of our Storytellers. So, you know, more evidence that cool people who think about cool things are to be found at DISI. Alright folks—hope you enjoy this one. And, if you do, definitely pick up Melanie’s book. It’ll be out Tuesday, March 23 in the US.   A transcript of this show is available here.   Notes and links 9:24 – “Substance dualism” is one of several forms of dualism. See here. 12:30 – A primer on elephant cognition. 18:00 – One of the works on dehumanization that Challenger discusses in her book is Less than Human by David Livingstone Smith. The topic is also discussed at length in a book we featured in December, Survival of the Friendliest, by Brian Hare & Vanessa Woods. 21:30 – A recent review of the wide literature on “terror management theory.” 25:50 – An article reviewing work on “mental time travel,” which Challenger views as one of our key capacities as humans. 30:46 – A study by Amy Fitzgerald and colleagues on crime rates in the proximity of slaughterhouses. 33:50 – The Cave of Altamira in Spain. 38:30 – Here we discuss the work of researcher Kim Hill. 45:50 – John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690, can be read here. 53:57 – See Challenger’s previous book about extinction. 55:45 – Read about the 2009 Copenhagen accord here.   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 Hilda Loury. 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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our NEW website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Do you remember the first time you made a good joke? Most likely not. Turns out the first forms of humor emerge super early in infancy, before the first birthday even. We’re not talking about stand-up routines here. We’re talking about a more basic but no less interesting behavior: teasing. In what’s known as “playful teasing,” one individual intentionally violates another’s expectations for the sake of amusement. In this week’s episode, we’re going behind a recent paper that ask whether apes also tease each other playfully—whether they share our early-emerging impulse to prank and razz each other. My guests are Johanna Eckert, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and Erica Cartmill, Associate Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. (For those who may not know, Erica is one of the founders and directors of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, the organization behind Many Minds.) In their paper, Johanna, Erica, and their co-author Sasha Winkler review a wealth of observations made over the years that together suggest that apes do indeed have the pranking impulse. They seem to tease each other in many of the ways infants do, in fact. Here, we talk about some of these fascinating observations and why they deserve a fresh interpretation. We consider what makes teasing such a cognitively rich behavior. We discuss the different functions teasing may serve and talk about how research on primate teasing is part of a bigger zeitgeist of work on positive emotions in non-human animals. I’m an inveterate teaser myself; I come from a family of teasers. And I’m someone who tends to show affection for people by teasing them. So I was super excited to dive into this topic. Teasing is fascinating on its own, no question. But it becomes that much more so when we realize that it may shed light on the evolutionarty roots of humor and joking. Understanding teasing can, in other words, help us understand the phylogeny of funniness. But, before we get going, two bits of exciting news. The first is that we have a new website at disi.org. You’ll find Many Minds there under the ‘Podcast’ tab. Check it out. The second bit is that applications for the 2021 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute are now open! You’ll find the link and bunch more info on the new website, under the ‘Apply’ tab. There are two application tracks, an academic track and a storytelling track. If you like this show—and the kinds of topics we cover—there’s a pretty good chance you’d be interested in DISI. So definitely consider applying yourself and please do share with anyone who may be interested. Alright, friends—now on to my conversation about playful teasing with Dr. Johanna Eckert and Dr. Erica Cartmill! Hope you enjoy this one!   The paper we discuss is here. A transcript of this show is available here.   Notes and links 5:20 – A paper stemming from Dr. Cartmill’s dissertation work on gesture in orangutans. 9:45 – Learn more about the work of Professor Vasudevi Reddy here. 12:10 – For more about Koko the Gorilla, who died in 2018, see here and here. 14:15 – Meet the orangutans at the Leipzig Zoo, including Bimbo, here. 16:00 – A recent review article about “theory of mind” in non-human animals. 19:15 – A classic article on tactical deception in primates. 24:00 – Many animals seem to enjoy jumping on the backs of capybaras. 27:20 – A paper on play fighting and its possible functions.       30:00 – A recent review of gesture in non-human primates by Dr. Cartmill and another former guest, Dr. Cat Hobaiter. 41:00 – One example of a recent study using thermal imaging in chimpanzees. 46:45 – The Latke-Hamantash Debate is a (humorous) yearly ritual at the University of Chicago.   Dr. Eckert’s end-of-show reading recommendations: The Psychology of Humor, by Rod Martin and Thomas Ford Important early work by Otto Adang on teasing in chimpanzees, including here and here   Dr. Cartmill’s end-of-show reading recommendations: Teasing and clowning in infancy, by Vasudevi Reddy and Gina Mireault Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, by Ted Cohen   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 Hilda Loury. 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: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our NEW website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.