Many Minds

Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy! ---- [originally aired July 20, 2022] The world is bigger than you think. I don’t mean geographically, though maybe that too. I mean in terms of its textures and sounds and smells; I mean in terms of its hues and vibrations. There are depths and layers to the world that we don’t usually experience, that we might actually never be able to experience. Our senses just aren’t wired to take it all in. We’re simply not tuned to all the dimensions of reality’s rich splendor. But there is a way we can appreciate these hidden dimensions: with a flex of the imagination, we can step into the worlds of other creatures; we can try out different eyes and noses; we can voyage into different perceptual universes. Or at least we can try.  My guest today is Ed Yong, author of the new book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Arounds Us. Ed is a science writer for The Atlantic and the author of an exceptional earlier book on the microbiome called I Contain Multitudes. This new book tours the wide diversity of animal senses. It asks what it’s like to be a bat, sure, but also what it’s like to be a star-nosed mole, a manatee, or a mantis shrimp. Informed by some truly extraordinary science, the book considers how it might feel to electrolocate around the ocean, to hear through the threads of a web, or to be tugged by the earth's magnetic field. There’s a lot of praise I could lavish on this book, but I’ll just say this: it really makes you feel more alive. Reading it makes everything, in fact, seem more alive. It makes the world seem richer, more vivid, somehow more technicolor and finely textured. It makes you realize that every organism, all the creatures we share this planet with, possesses a kind of vibrant genius all their own. After this episode we will be on a short holiday, and then we’ll be gearing up for Season 4. If you have guests or topics you want us to cover, please send us a note. And, of course: if you’ve enjoyed the show so far, we would be most grateful if you would leave us a rating or a review. I know I say this all the time, and it’s probably a bit annoying: but it really, truly helps, and I would personally, very much appreciate it! Alright friends, now to my conversation with Ed Yong. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 3:30 – One of our earlier audio essays—'Me, my umwelt, and I’—profiled von Uexküll and his concept of an Umwelt. 6:00 – The classic Nagel article ‘What is it like to be a bat?’; Mike Tomasello’s recent variant, ‘What is it like to be a chimpanzee?’, which we discussed just last episode. 10:00 – One of many articles by Ed about COVID-19. He was awarded a Pulitzer prize for his coverage of the pandemic. 14:30 – A popular article on proprioception. 19:00 – A research article on the evolution of opsin proteins. 20:00 – A primer on echolocation. 25:00 – A brief article on heat-sensitive pits in snakes. 26:30 – An academic article about the “star” of the star-nosed mole. A video showing the star-nosed mole in action. 31:00 – A popular article about the eyes of starfish. 32:00 – A collection of research articles about the Ampullae of Lorenzini. 35:00 – A very recent article about spider webs as “outsourced” hearing. 38:00 – A research article about aspects of bird song that humans can’t hear. 40:00 – A study by Lucy Bates and colleagues about how elephants operate with a spatial model of where their kin are. You can read more about Ed’s work at his website, catch up on his stories in The Atlantic, or follow him on Twitter.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.  For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy! ---- [originally aired May 25, 2022] When we think about ancient humans, we often imagine them doing certain kinds of things. Usually very serious things like hunting game and making tools, foraging for food and building fires, maybe performing the occasional intricate ritual. But there was definitely more to the deep past than all this adulting. There were children around, too—lots of them—no doubt running around and wreaking havoc, much as they do today. But what were the kids up to, exactly? What games were they playing? What toys did they have? What were their lives like? My guest today is Dr. Michelle Langley, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Michelle grapples with questions about children, play, and childhood in the deep past. In recent work, she draws on ethnographic reports to assemble a picture of what children have in common all across the globe. She then uses that understanding to cast new light on the archaeological record, to make fresh inferences about what kids must have been doing, making, and leaving behind. In this conversation, Michelle and I talk about the kinds of basic activities that have long been a mainstay of childhood everywhere—activities like playing with dolls, keeping pets, collecting shells, and building forts. We discuss how archaeologists often assume that hard-to-interpret objects have ritual purpose, when, in fact, those objects could just as easily be toys. We talk about how children seek out and engineer “secret spaces”. We also touch on how a male-centric bias has distorted archaeological discussions; how the baby sling may have been the primordial container; and how otters stash their favorite tools in their armpits. This is a super fun one, folks. But first a tiny bit of housekeeping: in case you missed the news, we have new newsletter. Seriously, who wouldn’t want a monthly dose of Many Minds right in their inbox? You can find a sign-up link in the show notes. Alright friends, on to my conversation with Dr. Michelle Langley. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 2:30 – A 15,000 year old horse figurine from Les Espélugues cave in France. 6:00 – A classic paper by Conkey & Spector that helped initiate a wave of feminist archaeology. 7:30 – Dr. Langley’s first paper to examine children’s leavings in the archaeological record. 8:30 – See here for discussion and examples of perforated batons or bâton percés. 9:30 – Dr. Langley’s paper, co-authored with Mirani Litster, ‘Is it ritual? Or is it children?’ 14:00 – An influential discussion of ethnographic analogies in archaeology. 18:30 – A paper on the interpretation of Dorset miniature harpoon heads. 23:30 – An article on the Neanderthal ornamental use of raptor feathers. 29:00 - Dr. Langley’s paper on identifying children’s secret spaces in the archaeological record. 30:30 – A book by David Sobel on children’s special spaces. 34:00 – A website about the site of Étiolles. 40:00 – A figure showing the layout of the Bruniquel Cave, including the secondary structures. 41:00 ­– More information about the mammoth bone huts of Ukraine. 44:00 – A paper by Dr. Langley and Thomas Suddendorf on bags and other “mobile containers” in human evolution. 47:00 – A video showing a sea otter using their underarm “pocket” to store objects. 50:00 – The “carrier bag theory of evolution” was proposed by Elizabeth Fisher in Women’s Creation. This later inspired Ursula Le Guin to propose the “carrier bag theory of fiction.” 51:30 – An experimental study by Dr. Langley and colleagues on children’s emerging intuitions about the use of containers and bags. 55:30 – A paper by Dr. Langley and colleagues on early symbolic behavior in Indonesia. Dr. Langley recommends: Growing up in the Ice Age, by April Nowell You can read more about Dr. Langley’s work at her website and follow her on Twitter.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.  For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. This week's episode is in our audio essay format. Enjoy! ---- [originally aired May 26, 2021] 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, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.  For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.  

Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy! ---- [originally aired June 23, 2021] 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, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.  For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Hi friends, we're on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy! ---- [originally aired February 17, 2021] 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, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.  For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

In this archived episode, the hosts delve into the effects of alcohol and various substances, genetic factors and response to alcohol, evolutionary self-medication in animals, the origins of alcohol and intoxicants in human history, animal intoxication, the dark side of alcohol, and book recommendations on the topic of intoxication.

Hi friends, we will be on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Sadly, the guest featured in this week's archive pick—Karen Bakker—passed way last month. Her colleagues at UBC posted a rememberance here.  ——— Consider the peacock. Its plumage is legendary—those shimmering, iridescent colors, and those eerie, enchanting eyespots. But what often goes less appreciated (at least by us humans) is that this chromatic extravaganza is also a sonic extravaganza. The peacock's display operates in infrasound, an acoustic dimension that we simply can't hear without assistance. Which raises a question: If we're oblivious to the full vibrancy of the peacock's display, what other sounds might we be missing out on? My guest today is Dr. Karen Bakker. Karen is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia and author of the new book, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants. In the book, Karen dives into rich realms of sound that, for one reason or another, humans have tended to ignore. In this conversation, Karen and I discuss the twin fields of "bioacoustics" and "ecoacoustics." We talk about "deep listening" and "digital listening", "infrasound" and "ultrasound." We discuss why sound is such a ubiquitous signaling medium across the tree of life. We consider the fact that scientific discoveries about sound have often been resisted. We touch on debates about whether animal communication systems constitute languages, and discuss new efforts to decode those systems using AI. We also talk about turtles, bats, plants, coral, bees, and—yes—peacocks. If you enjoy our conversation, I strongly recommend Karen's book. It’s really bursting with insight, science, and stories—all presented with unusual clarity. Another year of Many Minds is drawing to a close and we're about to go on a brief holiday hiatus. But first a little end-of-year ask: What topics or thinkers would you like to see us feature in 2023? If you have any ideas, we’d love to hear them. You can email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. Alright friends, I hope you enjoy the holidays. And I hope you enjoy this conversation with Dr. Karen Bakker.   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 3:30 – A range of bat sounds are available on the website of Dr. Mirjam Knörnschild (who was previously featured on the show!). 4:30 – The winner of the 2014 ‘Most Beautiful Sound in the World’ contest was a recording of a froggy swamp in Malaysia. 10:30 – A popular article profiling the relatively young field of “bioacoustics.” A recent academic article by Dr. Bakker and a colleague about “conservation acoustics” in particular. 11:30 – A popular article about the use of acoustic technologies to discover and monitor whale populations. 17:00 – A research article about the involvement of infrasound in peacock mating displays. 23:30 – A research study showing that coral larvae move toward reef sounds. 28:00 – A review paper by Camila Ferrara and colleagues about sound communication in Amazonian river turtles. 31:00 – A research article by Heidi Appel and a colleague about plants responding to the sounds of leaf-chewing. 35:00 – A recent historical study of Karl von Frisch and his work with honey bees. A recent study suggesting the possibility of play in bumble bees (not honey bees). 42:00 – A popular article profiling the field of “biosemiotics.” 48:00 – An essay by Dr. Bakker about honeybee communication and how technologies may be helping us understand it. 53:00 – Dr. Bakker recommends books by Indigenous scholars Robin Wall-Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass), Dylan Robinson (Hungry Listening), and John Borrows. Dr. Bakker recommends: A number of examples of the “sounds of life” are collected at Dr. Bakker’s website, here. The same site also includes recommendations for getting involved in citizen science. In addition to the books by Indigenous scholars listed above, Dr. Bakker recommends work by Monica Gagliano. You can read more about Karen’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. **You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!** We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Discover why our brains shrank 3000 years ago, the connection between upright walking and brain evolution, the empirical basis of brain size reduction, the role of ants in understanding brain evolution, and book recommendations on Neanderthals and the peopling of the Americas.

Hi friends, we will be on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy! ———  There's an old view of the mind that goes something like this: The world is flooding in, and we're sitting back, just trying to process it all. Our minds are basically passive and reactive, always a step behind. Contrast that view with a new one that’s quickly gaining ground. According to this alternative, we don't just react to the world, we anticipate it. We’re not leaning back but trying to stay a step ahead—our minds are fundamentally active and predictive. And our predictions aren't just idle guesses, either—they're shaping how we experience the world. This new view is known as the “predictive processing framework”, and it has implications, not just for how we perceive, but also for how we act and how we feel, for our happiness and our well-being. My guest today is Dr. Mark Miller. Mark is a philosopher of cognition and senior research fellow at the Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies at Monash University. He's part of a new wave of intensely interdisciplinary scholars who are working at the intersections of philosophy, neuroscience, and psychiatry. Here, Mark and I sketch the predictive processing framework and unpack some of its key pillars. We discuss how this approach can inform our understanding of depression, addiction, and PTSD. We sketch out notions of loops and slopes, stickiness and rigidity, wobble and volatility, edges and grip. And, on the way, we will have a bit to say about video games, play, horror, psychedelics, and meditation. This was all pretty new terrain for me, but Mark proved an affable and capable guide. If you enjoy this episode and want to explore some of these topics further, definitely check out the Contemplative Science Podcast, which Mark co-hosts. Alright friends, on to my chat with Mark Miller. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 4:15 – The website of the Hokkaido University Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience (CHAIN). The website of the Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies (M3CS). 6:00 – Dr. Miller co-hosts the Contemplative Science podcast, a project of M3CS. 7:30 – For one introduction to the predictive processing framework, see this article by Dr. Miller and colleagues. 11:00 – See Dr. Miller’s essay in Aeon on social media, co-authored with Ben White, as well as this more detailed treatment for an academic audience. 12:00 – See a paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues on depression. 14:00 – An introduction to the subfield of “computational psychiatry.” 17:00 – Andy Clark’s “watershed” paper on the predictive processing framework. 18:00 – A recent book on “active inference” (which is largely synonymous with the predictive processing approach). 22:00 – A chapter on the idea of the “body as the first prior.” 24:30 – A demo of the “hollow face” illusion. 29:00 – On the potential value of psychedelics in jarring people out of trenches and ruts, see also our earlier episode with Alison Gopnik.   31:00 – See our recent episode with Dimitris Xygalatas. 34:30 – A popular article on children wanting to hear the same stories over and over. 38:00 – A paper by Coltan Scrivner and colleagues on horror fans and psychological resilience during COVD-19. 42:30 – A recent article by Dr. Miller and colleagues about the “predictive dynamics of happiness and well-being,” which covers much of the same terrain as this episode. 46:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues on the evocative notion of “grip.” 50:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues about video games and predictive processing. 57:00 – A paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues in which they discuss meditation in the context of the prediction processing approach.   Dr. Miller recommends books by the philosopher Andy Clark, including: Surfing Uncertainty   You can read more about Dr. Miller’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.     Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. **You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!** We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Welcome back all! So, this episode is a first for us. Two firsts, actually. For one, it features our first-ever repeat guest: Andrew Barron, a neuroscientist at Macquarie University. If you're a long-time listener, you might remember that Andy was actually the guest on our very first episode, 'Of bees and brains,' in February 2020. And, second, this episode is our first-ever "live show." We recorded this interview in July at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute in St Andrews, Scotland. Andy and his colleagues—the philosophers Marta Halina and Colin Klein—just released an ambitious paper titled 'Transitions in Cognitive Evolution.' In it, they take a wide-angle view of mind; they zoom out to try to tell an overarching story of how brains and cognition evolved across the tree of life. The story, as they tell it, is not about a smoothly gradual evolution of cognitive sophistication. Rather, it's a story built around five major transitions—fundamental changes, that is, to how organisms process information.  In this conversation, Andy and I discuss their framework and how it takes inspiration from other transitional accounts of life and mind. We lay out each of the five stages—or portals, as we refer to them—and talk about the organisms that we find on either side of these portals. We discuss what propels organisms to make these radical changes, especially considering that evolution is not prospective. It doesn't look ahead—it can't see what abilities might be possible down the road. We talk about how this framework got its start, particularly in some of Andy's thinking about insect brains and how they differ from vertebrate brains. And, as a bit of a bonus, we left in some of the live Q & A with the audience. In it we touch on octopuses, eusocial insects, oysters, and a bunch else.  Speaking of major transitions, I will be going on parental leave for much of the fall. So this is, in fact, the final episode of Season 4 and then the podcast will go on a brief hiatus. Before we get started on Season 5, we'll be putting up some of our favorite episodes from the archive. Alright friends, on to my conversation with Dr. Andrew Barron, recorded live at DISI 2023. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 3:30 – For further information about the “major transitions” project, see the project’s web page here. 7:00 – Many transitional accounts of evolution draw inspiration from the classic book The Major Transitions in Evolution. 8:00 – One influential previous transitional account of the evolution of cognition was put forward by Dennett in Kinds of Minds. Another was put forward by Ginsburg and Jablonka in The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul. 12:45 – A brief introduction to cnidaria. 18:00 – The idea of cellular memory has been garnering more and more attention—see, e.g., this popular article.   21:00 – The idea of “reflective” systems is also used in computer science.  26:00 – The scala naturae, or Great Chain of Being, was the notion that organisms could be arranged on a scale of sophistication, with humans on the top of the scale.  30:00 – The “teleological fallacy” as Dr. Barron and colleagues describe it in their paper is the fallacy of “appeal[ing] to later benefits to explain earlier changes.” 34:00 – A brief introduction to the phylum gastropoda. 37:00 – For an overview of Dr. Barron’s work on the neuroscience of honey bees, see our previous episode.   48:30 – It’s commonly observed in popular coverage of octopuses that their brains are “decentralized” (e.g., here, here, and here).  55:00 – In discussions of human brain evolution, it has been argued that certain kinds of cognitive offloading (e.g., writing) have allowed our brains to actually shrink in recent history. See our earlier episode with Jeremy DeSilva.  58:00 – On the notion of “Turing completeness,” see here. The idea of an “Infinite Improbability Drive” comes (apparently) from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  1:00:06 – For a discussion of eusociality and individuality in the context of “major transitions” ideas, see here.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.  For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.