Many Minds

We’ve got a little something different for you today­—a new format we’ll be experimenting with over the next few months. You can think of it as a kind of “behind the paper” series. The idea is to take notable articles from the last year or so and talk to their authors. We’ll delve into each paper’s backstory, sketch its broader context, and dig up some of that fun stuff that just doesn’t get mentioned in a formal scientific write-up. We’ll still be doing our longform interviews as well, but we’ll be mixing in shorter ones in this style. For this first installment we’re discussing a paper published in March of this year titled ‘Baboon thanatology’. It describes a truly startling behavior: when an infant baboon dies, it’s mother may carry its corpse around for days, sometimes a week or longer. She might continue to groom it or care for it in other ways. The paper is one of a raft of recent articles on how animals respond to death and dying. This new research area of “comparative thanatology” asks whether animals truly understand this basic bodily process, whether they grieve, whether they get that death is final and irreversible. To talk about this deep stuff, I’m joined in this episode by not one but two of the study’s authors—Dr. Alecia Carter, who is a Lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology at University College London and Dr. Elise Huchard, a CNRS Research Scientist at the Institute of Evolutionary Sciences, at the University of Montpellier. Hope you enjoy this format. As always, let us know what you think. On to my conversation with Alecia and Elise. Enjoy!   The paper we discuss—by Alecia Carter, Alice Baniel, Guy Cowlishaw, and Elise Huchard—is here. A transcript of this interview is available here.   Notes and links  2:25 – More info about the Tsaobis Baboon Project in Namibia. Dr. Carter and Dr. Huchard co-direct the project with Dr. Guy Cowlishaw. 7:35 – A 2018 special issue on ‘Evolutionary thanatology’ that helped crystallize the field and another one from 2020. 8:40 ­– See the famous 2009 photo of chimpanzees appearing to grieve. It may have helped kick-start the field of comparative thanatology. 26:35 – Dr. Carter is now directing a project—‘Thanatobase’—to collect further records of primate responses to death and dying.   End-of-show recommendations: How Animals Grieve by Barbara King Comparative Thanatology by James R. Anderson Mama's Last Hug by Frans de Waal   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.

Welcome back everyone! Hope you all had a great August. And hope you’re all—like me—jazzed about the start of Season 2 of Many Minds. 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.

If you’re listening to this podcast, it’s a safe bet that you’re interested in minds. You probably have been for awhile. But what sparked it in you? What’s kept it going? For some folks it may have been something they learned in school. Perhaps it was a stray factoid. It could have been a museum visit, or a scientific finding they heard about on the radio. But very often it seems that what sparks or stokes our interest in minds comes from elsewhere—from outside the classroom, from outside non-fiction writing, from outside science altogether. In this episode, we asked a group of creative folks to reflect on what got them thinking about minds. All our contributors are past participants in the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (or DISI)—and specifically in the storyteller program. This is a residency for creative folks working in any medium. So here’s the exact question we asked them: “What is one work of fiction—movie, novel, short story, etc—that has kindled your interest in mind, cognition, and intelligence? This could be from childhood or college or just last week.” Here are their answers. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Contributor / work referenced: MOsley WOtta / The Point (film) Ada Brunstein / The Neapolitan Novels (book series) Abeer Hoque / The Bluest Eye (book) Angel Teng / 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) Amey Zhang / Maniac (TV show) Richa Rudola / Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (film) Mallessa (Les) James / The Dictionary Taylor Beck / The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (poem) Boris Oicherman / The Weather Project (art installation) Laura Sydell / When Things Fall Apart (book)   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 all! Today’s episode is a conversation with Dr. Manvir Singh. Manvir recently finished his PhD in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and will soon begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. Manvir studies human culture. In particular, he focuses on certain cultural practices and products that spring up over and over again across the world’s societies—often in strikingly similar form. To explain these similarities, Manvir appeals to the human mind. He argues that our universal mental machinery plays a powerful role in molding our cultural traditions and products. We start by diving deep into the topic of shamanism. We talk about why humans around the world have long put their trust in shamans—and why they still do today. We discuss why it is that, to secure that trust, shamans everywhere enter trance states, deny themselves worldly comforts, and undergo harrowing initiation rituals. We then move beyond shamanism. We talk about why we believe in witches and why we like stories about orphans and other sympathetic characters. We consider why people the world over know a lullaby when they hear one. Part of what I admire about Manvir’s work is his balanced interest in both universal cultural patterns and fine-grained particulars. He’s interested in the forest, definitely, but also in the trees. And, trust me, there are a lot of fascinating trees here. Hope you enjoy this one as much as I did. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Dr. Manvir Singh.   A transcript of this interview is available here.   Notes and links 3:00 – An 1896 article by Frans Boaz titled, ‘The limitations of the comparative method in anthropology.’ 6:15 – Read Dr. Singh’s article, ‘The cultural evolution of shamanism.’ 20:45 – A popular article by Dr. Singh on money managers as modern shamans. 24:30 – On the question of whether magicians believe in their own powers, see Nicholas Humphrey’s essay ‘Behold the Man: Human Nature and Supernatural Belief’ in his book, The Mind Made Flesh. 27:45 – See James Scott’s book, Against the Grain. 30:10 – See Dr. Singh’s recently published study of costly prohibitions among Mentawai shamans. 34:45 – See here for Franz Boas’s account of a Kwakiutl shaman. 37:15 – For the etymology of the word “shaman,” see here and here. 38:00 – See Dr. Singh’s in-press paper on witches here. 44:30 – E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s book, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande. 49:45 – A popular article by Dr. Singh about the ongoing persecution of people perceived as witches. 52:50 – Read a Dr. Singh’s essay in Aeon on the sympathetic plot. See also his pre-print on the same topic. 59:40 – A study of the appeal of minimally counter-intuitive ideas. 1:04:10 – An article by Dr. Singh and colleagues on how songs serving similar functions (e.g., lullabies) tend to take similar forms around the world. Read a popular article write-up of the work here.   Manvir Singh’s end-of-show recommendations: Explaining Culture by Dan Sperber The Social Order of the Underworld by David Skarbek The best way to keep up with Dr. Singh is on Twitter: @mnvrsngh. You can also learn more about his work at his personal website: https://www.manvir.org/   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 to our 10th episode! Today’s show is another in our ‘mini minds’ series. We’ve been experimenting with different formats for our minis, as you may have noticed, but today we’ve got another in the classic blogpost style. The topic is the acronym WEIRD—maybe you’ve heard it used. It stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It’s become a shorthand for the idea that people in WEIRD societies are a bit unusual relative to the rest our species. The term was first introduced 10 years ago. On this episode I talk about its origins and the far-reaching influence it’s had since. As with all episodes, be sure to check out the show notes for a smorgasbord of links and tidbits. There was a lot I had to leave on the cutting room floor with this one. But I swept some of it up and put it in the notes for anyone who’s interested. Enjoy!   A text version of this "mini" is readable here.    Notes and links 2:00 – The birthplace of the acronym: ‘The weirdest people in the world?’ 2:44 – A 2008 paper by Jeffrey Arnett that provided key support for the first part of Henrich et al.’s two-part argument. 3:35 – The visual illusion in question is the Müller-Lyer Illusion. 3:52 – These cultural differences in spatial conceptualization were first widely reported by Stephen Levinson and colleagues. See his book for the full story (or see a popular article of mine for a much shorter version). 4:33 – See the commentary by Meadon and Spurrett titled ‘It’s not just the subjects – there are too many WEIRD researchers.’ 4:45 – See the commentary by Rozin titled ‘The weirdest people in the world are a harbinger of the future of the world.’ For an expansion of Rozin’s argument, with more examples, see my article on “global WEIRDing”. 5:45 – See David F. Lancy, The Anthropology of Childhood. (Note that only the second edition came out after the WEIRD article was published.) One part of child development that proves unexpectedly variable across cultures is learning to walk and other motor milestones. 6:30 – The intersection of smell and WEIRD-ness is discussed in a recent special issue—see the editorial introduction here. Long-standing ideas about the impoverished nature of human olfaction are discussed here. 6:48 – A study comparing olfactory sensitivity in Tsimane people and Germans. 6:55 – For discussion of the idea that odors are ineffable, see this article. The same article was also among the first to characterize the elaborated and consistently applied odor lexicon of a hunter-gatherer group. Other papers have since built on this work. 7:23 – See the paper titled ‘WEIRD bodies: Mismatch, medicine, and missing diversity.’ Foot flatness and flexibility in “conventionally shod” populations are discussed in this paper. 8:10 – The researchers behind the original WEIRD paper—and their students—have kept busy themselves, exploring and expanding many related themes. See papers on theodiversity, the possible influence of the Catholic Church on WEIRD psychology, and the use of a new tool for mapping degrees of cultural distance. 8:22 – For a variety of articles raising issues of sample diversity, see: the 2014 opinion piece on the exclusion of left-handers from studies in cognitive neuroscience; another piece on diversity issues in cognitive neuroscience, focusing on issues of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic homogeneity; an article on “anglocentrism” in linguistics; and a commentary on “missing diversity” in genetics. 9:11 – For the idea that our understanding of primates may be skewed by a focus on captive primates, see ‘The Mismeasure of Ape Social Cognition.’ For the STRANGE framework, see here. 10:00 – For recent critiques, see here and here. The quote about the “homogeneous West” comes from the Broesch et al. (2020) paper; the quote about treating humans as “endangered butterflies” comes from Barrett (2020). Conducting research on sensitive populations is a major theme of Broesch et al. (2020). 11:15 – The analysis of persistent sampling problems in developmental psychology is here. The analysis of the journal Psychological Science is here. Patricia Bauer’s editorial is here.   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 everyone! My guest on today’s show is Dr. Cat Hobaiter. Cat is a Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, where she’s part of research unit called the Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution. Cat spends a good chunk of her time, not in Scotland, however, but in Africa, where she conducts fieldwork on great apes. Her primary research site is in the Budongo Forest Reserve in Uganda. Along with her team there, she studies the social behavior of wild chimpanzees—in particular, how they communicate with each other. Much of our conversation centers on how chimps communicate through gesture—through bodily theatrics like stomping, drumming, clapping, somersaulting, and pirouetting. We discuss when chimps use these gestures, how they acquire them, and the thorny issue of what they mean. We also talk about how the gestures of chimpanzees compare to the gestures of other primates—including those bonobos, gorillas, and human toddlers. Cat and I do make our way over to other topics, too—we touch on some work she and her colleagues have done on the so-called “cooperative eye” hypothesis. We talk about the day-to-day of what it’s like to do fieldwork on great apes. And we talk about how the chimps at Budongo are faring in these pandemic times. Not many of us get the opportunity to observe our closest primate cousins in the wild. I’ve certainly never been so lucky. But maybe the next best thing is to hear from someone who has—particularly someone like Cat who has spent more than a decade watching chimps closely, puzzling out their propensities, and generally just figuring out what they’re up to. I learned a lot from this conversation—and had fun to boot. I think you will do. So without any more preamble, here is my conversation with Dr. Cat Hobaiter!   A transcript of this interview is available here.   Notes and links  2:45 – Learn more about the Budongo Forest Reserve here. 7:45 – Chimpanzees are “neophobic”—afraid of new things, like humans. As a result, primatologists spend a lot of time habituating chimps to their presence. 14:15 – An article about Jane Goodall’s classic work on chimpanzees. 17:00 – An influential paper by Dr. Hobaiter and a colleague on the gestural repertoire of wild chimpanzees. 19:25 – Examples of many of the gestures we discuss are viewable at: http://greatapedictionary.ac.uk/video-resources/gesture-videos/ 20:55 – A study in which Dr. Hobaiter and a colleague examine how many of the anatomically possible gestures chimpanzees actually make use of. (A small percentage, it turns out.) 25:15 – An important early paper on the intentional use of gesture in orangutans. 32:00 – A paper by Dr. Hobaiter and a colleague reviewing the debate on where chimp gestures come from. An influential earlier book in these debates. 44:25 – An article by Kirsty Graham and colleagues on the bonobo gestural repertoire. See also a more recent article featuring a direct comparison between bonobos and chimpanzees. 48:05 – Comparing a chimpanzee pant hoot and a human impersonation of a chimpanzee pant hoot. 52:40 – A recent article in Aeon about the controversy surrounding chimpanzee pointing. 58:45 – A paper by Dr. Hobaiter and colleagues on possible cases of pointing in the wild by chimpanzees. 1:01:45 – A recent study by Dr. Hobaiter and colleagues comparing the gestures of apes with those of human toddlers. For a popular write-up of this article, see here. 1:13:10 – A 2007 study comparing the flexibility of gestures and vocalizations in apes. 1:16:20 – A 2019 paper by Dr. Hobaiter and colleagues investigating sclera and the “cooperative eye” hypothesis in chimps, bonobos, and humans. The original article proposing the hypothesis. 1:25:00 – A recent report on how primatologists are trying to keep primates safe during the pandemic. For news about the chimps at Budongo during the pandemic, see here.   Cat Hobaiter’s end-of-show recommendation: A special issue of Animal Cognition devoted to the study of primate gesture, edited by Erica Cartmill and Cat Hobaiter. The best way to keep up with Dr. Hobaiter is on Twitter: @NakedPrimate. You can learn more about her research at: http://greatapedictionary.ac.uk/about/   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.

A warm welcome back! On this “mini minds” installment, we tried something a little different. We reached out to former participants in the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI)—including grad students, post docs, and faculty—to ask them a couple questions. What we’ve done for this episode put together a selection of their answers. Here were the questions: 1. What is a book you’ve read over the last couple months and would recommend—perhaps because it offered insight, comfort, context, or escape? 2. As we start to look beyond the pandemic, what are some changes you think—or hope—may be in store for academic research?These could be changes to your own practices or priorities as a researcher; to your subfield; to academic culture or practices generally; or to the role of science in society.   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Contributors Anna Corwin, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Saint Mary’s College of California Nadya Vasilyeva, Postdoctoral Researcher, Princeton University/ UC Berkeley/ UCLA Brian Bruya, Professor of Philosophy, Eastern Michigan University Dániel Czégel, Graduate Student at Eötvös University, Budapest Hungary Amalia Bastos, Graduate Student in Comparative Psychology at the University of Auckland Jacob Foster, Founding Co-Director of DISI, Associate Professor of Sociology, UCLA Colin Conwell, Graduate Student in the Department of Psychology, Harvard University Alina Arseniev-Koehler, Graduate Student in the Department of Sociology, UCLA Efrén Cruz Cortés, Eberly Postdoctroal Research Fellow, Penn State University Chris Krupenye, Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Psychology, Durham University (UK) Haleh Yazdi, Graduate Student in the Departments of Psychology, UCSD   Book recommendations Man Is Not Alone, by Abraham Joshua Heschel At the Existentialist Café, by Sarah Bakewell Confucius Beyond the Analects, by Michael Hunter The Book of Life, edited by Stephen Jay Gould What is Life, by Lynn Margulus and Dorian Sagan The Sense of Style, by Steven Pinker Indiscrete Thoughts, by Gian-Carlo Rota What It’s Like to Be a Bird, by David Sibley Why Fish Don’t Exist, by Lulu Miller   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.

Greetings all—and a warm welcome back for another episode! Today’s show is a conversation with Daniel Oberhaus. Daniel is a staff writer for Wired magazine and the author of the book Extraterrestrial Languages, published by MIT Press in 2019. The book charts the history of humanity’s efforts at “interstellar communication”—our attempts to send messages to the stars in the hopes that alien life forms might receive them. Daniel and I talk about what these messages have contained, what forms they’ve taken, and the thinking and theories behind them. As you might guess, the history of interstellar communication is packed full of colorful episodes, charismatic characters, and quirky passion projects. But it’s also full of deep questions—questions about the very nature of communication, about the essence of human language, about why minds think in the ways they do, about the origins of mathematics, about what can and should be said on behalf of our species—or our planet. Apologies for the long list, but there really is a lot in play here—we touch on a bunch of it but for the fuller story, I definitely recommend you check out Daniel’s book. Thank you so much for joining us, as always. Enjoy and take care!   A transcript of this interview is available here.   Notes and links  Most of the topics we discuss are treated in detail in Daniel Oberhaus’s book, Extraterrestrial Languages. 2:38 – In 1960 the mathematician Hans Freudenthal published a book called Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse. Here is Daniel’s original article profiling Freudenthal and his ideas. 5:08 – There were a number of fanciful early schemes for communicating with aliens. For example, Carl Friedrich Gauss, better known for his contributions to mathematics, reportedly proposed building a large right triangle as a kind of message. 10:30 – The Arecibo message was devised and sent by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan in 1974. 11:25 – Two important acronyms in this world: the search for extraterrestrial life (SETI) and messaging extraterrestrial life (METI). 14:40 – In case you need a refresher on what an exoplanet is—as I did—here is a place to start. 20:38 – For more on the idea of Mathematical Platonism, see this article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A few alternatives to Mathematical Platonism have been proposed, including the theories of Embodied Mathematics put forward by George Lakoff & Rafael Núñez in Where Mathematics Comes From. 27:00 – A brief survey of the different numeral base systems used in across human languages. 28:30 – For a bit about John Lilly, read his obituary or see this article on his role in SETI. Lilly promoted the idea that communicating with aliens might be akin to communicating with dolphins. 30:50 – Another analogy: decoding alien messages might be like decoding ancient scripts like Linear B. 34:20 – For more on the dolphin whistle research we discuss, see here. 36:16 – Noam Chomsky’s idea that recursion is a key—perhaps the key feature—of human language is controversial. For discussion of this claim—and an equally controversial rejection of it—see this article. 37:50 – For examples of the communication abilities of Koko the gorilla, see here. Koko died in 2018. 44:45 – See here for more about the Pioneer Plaques, and here for more about the Golden Voyager Record. 48:30 – Here is a list of the musical recordings that were included on the Golden Voyager Record. 51:20 – For more about the Cosmic Call messages, see here. 53:10 – The controversial Pioneer Plaque image. 56:49 – The website for METI International. 1:03:30 – The 2015 announcement of a $100 million donation to fund SETI research is discussed here.   Daniel Oberhaus’s end-of-show recommendations: Intelligent Life in the Universe, by I.S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, edited by Carl Sagan The best way to keep up with Daniel is on Twitter @DMOberhaus. His personal website is: http://www.danieloberhaus.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.

This podcast explores the concept of umwelt theory, which suggests that every species has its own unique way of sensing and experiencing the world. It discusses Jacob von Uexküll's influential work and its continued relevance today. The podcast delves into examples of animals and their private worlds, as well as the interface theory of perception, which emphasizes the variation of reality and meaning across species.

Welcome back! Today’s episode is a conversation with Cristine Legare. Cristine is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on how our minds allow us to do culture—to learn it, to create it, and to pass it on. Among other things, we talk about cumulative culture and the human capacities for imitation and innovation. We talk about the power of ritual and about thorny questions surrounding human uniqueness. We touch on work that Cristine and her team have done in Vanuatu. And we muse about the problems facing psychology—in particular the so-called WEIRD problem. For those who may not know, this is the issue of psychologists unduly focusing on a thin slice of humanity—namely, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) folks. I found Cristine’s perspective on this issue—and really on all these issues—super insightful. Without further ado, here is my conversation with Dr. Cristine Legare. Hope you enjoy it! And please be well.   A transcript of this episode is available here.    Notes and links 2:35 – An article about “cumulative culture.” 3:25 –There is debate about whether any non-human animals show evidence of cumulative culture. Here is one review of the topic. 6:30 – A paper by Dr. Legare and a colleague on imitation and innovation as “dual engines of cultural learning.” 10:53 – One of Dr. Legare’s studies examining children’s flexible understanding of when to imitate faithfully. 13:07 – A popular article about the puzzle of why chimps in Zambia started to put grass in their ears. The primary research was reported here. 14:25 – The literature on so-called “over-imitation” is substantial. Here is a recent review. 19:14 – An encyclopedia article by Dr. Legare and a colleague on ritual. See also their paper on the social functions of rituals. 25:45 – Here is the original paper report on the “illusion of explanatory depth.” 28:42 – A paper on how a culture’s history of migration affects how often its members smile. 34:45 – This article describes the puzzle of chimpanzees throwing rocks at trees. 40:18 – This paper by Joe Henrich and colleagues is the source of the acronym WEIRD—that is, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic—and is one of the most cited and discussed papers in the last decade of psychology. Here is a recent popular article on the current state of the WEIRD problem. Finally, see this paper by Dr. Legare and colleagues about the WEIRD bias in developmental psychology. 49:00 – Dr. Legare has done a number of studies in Vanuatu, a culturally diverse archipelago in the South Pacific. 49:32 – A study by Dr. Legare and colleagues comparing triadic interactions in the US and in Vanuatu. 55:51 – Barbara Rogoff, mentioned here, has done a range of important work on learning styles across cultures. See, for example, her book, The Cultural Nature of Human Development. 59:55 – A study by Dr. Legare and colleagues showing that adults in the US and Vanuatu differ in how they evaluate the intelligence of conforming vs non-conforming children. Dr. Legare’s end-of-show recommendations: A good summary of some of the research we discussed by Dr. Legare and her colleagues can be found here. See also the following books: The Secret of Our Success (2018), by Joe Henrich Cognitive Gadgets (2018), by Cecilia Heyes A Different Kind of Animal (2018), by Robert Boyd Minds Make Societies (2018), by Pascal Boyer   The best ways to keep up with Dr. Legare’s research: http://www.cristinelegare.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.