Many Minds

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.

Guess what folks: we are celebrating a birthday this week. That’s right, Many Minds has reached the ripe age of one year old. Not sure how old that is in podcast years, exactly, but it’s definitely a landmark that we’re proud of. Please no gifts, but, as always, you’re encouraged to share the show with a friend, write a review, or give us a shout out on social. To help mark this milestone we’ve got a great episode for you. My guest is the writer, Brian Christian. Brian is a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley and the author of three widely acclaimed books: The Most Human Human, published in 2011; Algorithms To Live By, co-authored with Tom Griffiths and published in 2016; and most recently, The Alignment Problem. It was published this past fall and it’s the focus of our conversation in this episode. The alignment problem, put simply, is the problem of building artificial intelligences—machine learning systems, for instance—that do what we want them to do, that both reflect and further our values. This is harder to do than you might think, and it’s more important than ever. As Brian and I discuss, machine learning is becoming increasingly pervasive in everyday life—though it’s sometimes invisible. It’s working in the background every time we snap a photo or hop on Facebook. Companies are using it to sift resumes; courts are using it to make parole decisions. We are already trusting these systems with a bunch of important tasks, in other words. And as we rely on them in more and more domains, the alignment problem will only become that much more pressing. In the course of laying out this problem, Brian’s book also offers a captivating history of machine learning and AI. Since their very beginnings, these fields have been formed through interaction with philosophy, psychology, mathematics, and neuroscience. Brian traces these interactions in fascinating detail—and brings them right up to the present moment. As he describes, machine learning today is not only informed by the latest advances in the cognitive sciences, it’s also propelling those advances. This is a wide-ranging and illuminating conversation folks. And, if I may say so, it’s also an important one. Brian makes a compelling case, I think, that the alignment problem is one of the defining issues of our age. And he writes about it—and talks about it here—with such clarity and insight. I hope you enjoy this one. And, if you do, be sure to check out Brian’s book. Happy birthday to us—and on to my conversation with Brian Christian. Enjoy!   A transcript of this show is available here.   Notes and links 7:26 - Norbert Wiener’s article from 1960, ‘Some moral and technical consequences of automation’. 8:35 - ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ is an episode from the animated film, Fantasia (1940). Before that, it was a poem by Goethe. 13:00 - A well-known incident in which Google’s nascent auto-tagging function went terribly awry. 13:30 - The ‘Labeled Faces in the Wild’ database can be viewed here. 18:35 - A groundbreaking article in ProPublica on the biases inherent in the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) tool. 25:00 – The website of the Future of Humanity Institute, mentioned in several places, is here. 25:55 - For an account of the collaboration between Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch, see here. 29:35- An article about the racial biases built into photographic film technology in the 20th century. 31:45 - The much-investigated Tempe crash involving a driverless car and a pedestrian: 37:17 - The psychologist Edward Thorndike developed the “law of effect.” Here is one of his papers on the law. 44:40 - A highly influential 2015 paper in Nature in which a deep-Q network was able to surpass human performance on a number of classic Atari games, and yet not score a single point on ‘Montezuma’s Revenge.’ 47:38 - A chapter on the classic “preferential looking” paradigm in developmental psychology: 53:40 - A blog post discussing the relationship between dopamine in the brain and temporal difference learning. Here is the paper in Science in which this relationship was first articulated. 1:00:00 - A paper on the concept of “coherent extrapolated volition.” 1:01:40 - An article on the notion of “iterated distillation and amplification.” 1:10:15 - The fourth edition of a seminal textbook by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, AI a Modern approach, is available here: http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ 1:13:00 - An article on Warren McCulloch’s poetry. 1:17:45 - The concept of “reductions” is central in computer science and mathematics.   Brian Christian’s end-of-show reading recommendations: The Alignment Newsletter, written by Rohin Shah Invisible Women, by Caroline Criado Perez: The Gardener and the Carpenter, Alison Gopnik: You can keep up with Brian at his personal website or on Twitter.   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 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, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

In this episode, Dr. Michael Muthukrishna discusses the unique characteristics of humans, including the role of neural hardware and cultural software. They explore topics such as the impact of social groups on cultural skills, the power of collective brains in innovation, the double-edged nature of diversity, and the need for psychology to become a historical science. They also touch upon whale and dolphin brains, religious history, and the Flynn effect.

Today we’ve got another “behind the paper” episode for you. In it, we’re talking about some of the most alien-seeming yet charismatic creatures around. I chatted with Dr. Alex Schnell, a Comparative Psychologist and Research Fellow at Cambridge University. We discuss a paper she recently published with a few colleagues titled, ‘How intelligent is a cephalopod?’ I’ve been charmed by cephalopods for awhile now—octopuses specifically. Maybe you have too. You’ve probably seen those videos of octopuses carrying coconut shells for protection, or pretending to be a hermit grab or a flounder. Maybe you saw the recent documentary My Octopus Teacher where the main octopus character gathers a bunch of shells into a kind of makeshift armor to protect herself against an imminent shark attack. This is all jaw-droppingly, head-scratchingly cool stuff. But you may have also wondered, as I have, what’s really going on—cognitively— behind these behaviors. What’s happening in the minds of these creatures when they pull off these fancy feats? Could the mechanisms involved actually be simpler than you might at first guess? This really is the core issue in Alex’s paper and we circle around it for much of the conversation. But, in circling, we touch on a lot. We cover some Cephalopod 101 type stuff—when cephalopods split from vertebrates, what cephalopods brains are like, why octopuses tends to hog the limelight when squid and cuttlefish are pretty impressive, too. We talk about Alex’s studies of self-control in cuttlefish, styled on the classic marshmallow experiments. We talk about the cephalopod gift for disguise and whether this gift might suggest a form of bodily awareness or maybe even theory of mind. And we zoom out to talk about the evolution of cognitive sophistication generally and how cephalopods can help us understand the kinds of forces that drive it. I’ve been excited about cephalopods for awhile now, but having this conversation made me that much more so. It’s convinced me that we still have a ton to learn about—and probably from—these brainy, shape-shifting creatures. So let’s get to it. Here’s my conversation with Dr. Alex Schnell. Enjoy!   The paper we discuss is here. A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 14:35 – Watch a video of octopuses carrying coconuts here. See the original research study on this behavior here. 16:45 – A paper showing that Eurasian jays can think beyond their current state to consider future needs. 17:40 – The paper reporting the original pretzel experiments in human children. 29:10 – A video of an octopus purportedly changing colors while dreaming. 32:10 – Another recent paper published by Dr. Schnell, led by her colleague Piero Amodio, about the evolutionary drivers of cephalopod intelligence and animal intelligence generally. 38:20 – A recent discussion of animal sentience and the “precautionary principle.”   Dr. Schnell’s end-of-show reading recommendations: A recent paper by P. Billard and colleagues Recent work by Piero Amodio Research at the Cognitive Neuroethology of Cephalopods (NECC) lab You can follow Dr. Schnell at her website or on Twitter.   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 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, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.