If your podcast listening habits are anything like mine, you might be out for a walk right now. Maybe you’re wandering the neighborhood, just blocks from home, or maybe you’re further afield. In either case, I’m guessing you’re finding your way without too much trouble—you’re letting some intuitive sense steer you, track how far you’ve gone, tell you where to go next. This inner navigator of yours is doing all in the background, as your mind wanders elsewhere, and magically it gets it all right. Most of the time, anyway. But how is it doing it? What allows us to pull this off? My guest today is Dr. Hugo Spiers, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. His lab studies how our brains "remember the past, navigate the present, and imagine the future.” In recent years Hugo and his group have used a wide variety of methods—and some astonishingly large datasets—to shed light on central questions about human spatial abilities.  Here, Hugo and I do a quick tour of the neuroscience of navigation—including the main brain structures involved and how they were discovered. We talk about research on a very peculiar population, the London taxi driver. We discuss the game Sea Hero Quest and what it's teaching us about navigation abilities around the world. We also touch on what GPS might be doing to us; whether the hippocampus actually resembles a seahorse; the ingenious layout of our brain's inner grids; navigation ability as an early sign of Alzheimer's; how “place cells” actually map more than just place; and how the monarch butterfly finds its way. Super excited to share this one folks—this is an episode that's been on our wish list for some time. For mobile organisms like us, navigation is life or death—it’s as basic as eating or breathing. So when we dig into the foundations of these spatial abilities, we’re really digging into some of the most basic foundations of mind.  So let’s get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Hugo Spiers. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 4:00 – A brief documentary about a person with developmental topographical disorder. 8:00 – There have been a slew of popular articles about the question of whether GPS is undermining our navigation abilities—see here and here. 12:00 – A classic academic article about path integration in mammals. 14:00 – The classic academic article by Edward Tolman on the idea of “cognitive maps.” 16:00 – A side-by-side comparison of a human hippocampus and seahorse. The resemblance is indeed striking. 18:00 – A classic academic article reporting “place cells” in rats. 21:00 ­– A research article on seasonal changes in hippocampus size across different species. 22:00 – A recent academic article on interactions between the hippocampus and the striatum in navigation. 23:30 – An article reviewing the first decade of research on “grid cells.” A video showing the activity of grid cells in a rat. 26:00 – The long struggle to calculate longitude is subject of a much-beloved book by Dava Sobel. 27:00 – The press release announcing the Nobel prize for the discovery of grid cells and place cells. 31:00 – A popular article about ‘The Knowledge’—a famed test for London taxi drivers. 33:30 – The celebrated original study by Eleanor Maquire and colleagues on structural changes in the brains of London taxi drivers. The (also-celebrated) follow-up study that Dr. Spiers was part of, comparing London taxi and bus drivers. 37:00 – More about the Taxi Brains project can be found here. 41:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Spiers’ team, led by Eva-Maria Griesbauer, reviews the cognitive neuroscience studies on London taxi drivers and dives deep into the learning techniques the drivers use. 44:30 – A paper by Dr. Spiers and team providing an overview of Sea Hero Quest and the studies it has been used for to date. A video demo of the game, and a popular article describing its motivation. Dr. Spiers developed the idea for the game in collaboration with Michael Hornberger. 50:00 – A recent research article looking at the value of Sea Hero Quest in detecting those at risk for Alzheimers. 53:00 – One of the first studies by Dr. Spiers and colleagues using Sea Hero Quest to test a vast sample and examine effects of variables like age, gender, and nationality. 54:30 – A more recent paper by Dr. Spiers and colleagues examining the effect of growing up in cities that are more or less “griddy.” 57:00 – A study by Dr. Spiers and colleagues showing a relationship between real-world navigation ability and navigation performance in Sea Hero Quest. 1:04:00 – The website of the International Orienteering Foundation. A video showing the sport. 1:06:00 – A review paper by Dr. Spiers and colleagues about the potential roles of cognitive maps in navigation and beyond. 1:07:00 – A review of “concept cells”, aka “Halle Berre cells.” 1:08:00 – A recent opinion piece by Dr. Spiers on the question of how many maps—and of what kind—the hippocampus implements. 1:10:30 – A recent research article on “time cells” in the hippocampus. 1:14:30 – A recent review article about monarch butterfly navigation.   Dr. Spiers recommends: Human Spatial Navigation, by Ekstrom, Spiers, Bohbot, and Rosenbaum ‘The Cognitive Map in Humans: Spatial Navigation and Beyond,’ by Epstein, Patai, Julian, and Spiers You can read more about Dr. Spiers 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.

And we're back. We're rested, we're rejuvenated, and we're ready for Season 4 of Many Minds! We're also, frankly, a bit hot. As I am recording this there is a heat dome parked over California and there is sweat under my headphones. But, more to the point, we've got a great episode to kick the new season off. My guest today is Dr. Irene Pepperberg. For more than forty years now, Irene has been doing groundbreaking research on parrots, with a focus on how they think and communicate. She is best known for her work with an African Grey parrot named Alex. Alex learned English words for numbers, shapes, colors, and more; he asked questions and talked to himself; he sometimes even invented words of his own. He was, in short, pretty remarkable. In this conversation, Irene and I talk about Alex, as well as his successors in the lab, Griffin and Athena. We talk about these animals' histories and personalities and their most impressive feats. We discuss how parrots are like human children in some ways—and unlike them in others. And while we talk a lot about verbal abilities, we also discuss visual working memory, delayed gratification, and optical illusions. Finally, we touch on the power of symbols, parrot communication and cognition in the wild, and the future of animal communication research.  One quick production note: there are just couple of patches of fuzzy audio here. Please do stick with it though—things get smooth later on and this conversation is just too chock full of cool stuff, really wouldn’t want you to miss it.  Alright friends, a very warm welcome back, and on to my chat with Dr. Irene Pepperberg. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.    Notes and links 3:00 – For some reflections on the early days of “animal language studies,” see Dr. Pepperberg’s recent paper ‘Nonhuman and nonhuman-human communication: Some issues and questions.’ 5:00 ­– Dr. Pepperberg is the author of two influential books about her research with Alex. The first is The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots; the second Alex & Me, which was a New York Times bestseller. 6:15 – One of the original studies on parrot vocal abilities by Dietmar Todt. For more on the “modelling” technique that Dr. Pepperberg adapted, see her recent paper. 9:00 – Read an article that the New York Times published about Alex upon his death in 2007. 10:00 – Photos of Alex, Griffin, and Athena can be found on the Alex Foundation website. 17:00 – For an example of Dr. Pepperberg’s classic work teaching the parrots to talk about shape and color, see here. For one of her more recent studies on shape learning, see here. 19:00 – For an example of Dr. Pepperberg’s classic work teaching the parrots to talk about numbers, see here. For a review of numerical concepts in the parrots, see here.   24:00 – Alex originally learned “none” in the context of learning the concepts of same and different. For the original paper, see here. 28:30 – For Dr. Pepperberg’s recent work on delayed gratification, see here and here. For a recent effort to “revisit” the classic Marshmallow Task in human children, see here. 33:00 – For a recent study by Dr. Pepperberg and colleagues on “inference by exclusion”, see here. 35:30 – A popular article about recent research showing that baby parrots babble. For discussion of babbling in baby bats, see our earlier interview with Dr. Mirjam Knörnschild. 37:00 – An older article in Scientific American describing some of David Premack’s work teaching apes to use symbols. 38:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Pepperberg and colleagues involving a “shell game on steroids” (to test “visual working memory manipulation”). 41:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Pepperberg and colleagues looking at the parrots’ ability to reason about probabilities. 43:30 – For the “transformative power of symbols” idea as it applies to humans, see here. 45:00 – See Dr. Pepperberg’s recent article reviewing her research on visual perception in parrots, including work using optical illusions. 48:00 – A recent research article comparing birds’ and primates’ brains. 51:00 – For Dr. Pepperberg’s recent reflections on the past and future of “animal language studies,” see here.   54:00 – A short animated video explaining the “gavagai problem,” which is associated with the issue of the “indeterminacy of translation.”   You can read more about Dr. Pepperberg’s work and collaborators—human and parrot!—at the Alex Foundation website.   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. 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.

Friends, here's another favorite episode from our archives while we're still on summer break. Enjoy! ---- It’s an old question: How does experience shape our minds and brains? Some people play the piano; others drive taxis; others grow up trilingual. For years now, scientists have examined how these and other kinds of life experiences can lead to subtle differences in our concepts and cortexes. But to really push on the question, to really explore the limits of how experience can rewire us, some researchers have turned to an especially dramatic case: blindness. What does a life without visual input do to the mind and brain? My guest today is Dr. Marina Bedny, an Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. For more than a decade now, Marina has been researching blindness and, in particular, what blindness can tell us much about where our concepts come from and about how our brains get organized. Here, Marina and I discuss how people who have been blind since birth nonetheless develop rich, sophisticated understandings of the visual world. We talk about how the visual cortex in blind folks gets repurposed for other decidedly non-visual functions, like language. We consider the intriguing findings that blind people very often outperform sighted people in certain kinds of tasks. On the way, we also touch on John Locke and the British empiricists; the notion of cortical recycling; the possibility of re-opening the brain's critical periods; and a bunch else.  This was a super thought-provoking conversation—I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I think you will too. But, before we get to it, a final reminder about the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, or DISI. This year’s DISI will be not only in-person but held in the charming seaside city of St Andrews, Scotland. More details at disi.org. The application window is only open for a little while longer, so better act fast.  Alright friends, on to my chat with Dr. Marina Bedny. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 3:30 ­– A popular article and video on the ideas of John Locke and other empiricists. 4:50 – One of the original articles by the philosopher Frank Jackson on Mary the color scientist. 7:35 – The 1985 book by Dr. Barbara Landau and Dr. Lila Gleitman on language acquisition in (a few) blind children. 11:00 – Dr. Bedny’s first study involving blind subjects, in collaboration with Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone and Dr. Rebecca Saxe. 15:00 – A recent study in Dr. Bedny’s lab, led by Dr. Judy Kim, comparing color knowledge in blind and sighted adults. 23:30 – A recent study by Dr. Bedny and collaborators on blind people’s understanding of visual verbs like sparkle, glow, peek, and stare. 30:30 – A recent study in Dr. Bedny’s lab, led by Dr. Judy Kim, comparing knowledge of animal appearance in blind and sighted adults. 34:00 – Tour an interactive model of the visual cortex—and the rest of the brain—here. 36:00 – A now-classic paper by Dr. Norihiro Sadato and colleagues on how reading Braille activates blind people’s “visual” cortex. 37:30– The “metamodal” hypothesis and the “pluripotent” hypothesis are compared in Dr. Bedny’s recent article in TiCs. 45:30 – A 2011 paper by Dr. Bedny and colleagues about how, in blind people, the “visual” cortex is involved in language processing. 49:00 – A paper showing that “visual” areas in blind people are highly synchronized when listening to stories. A more recent paper in a similar vein. 53:00 – A now-classic paper by Dehaene and Cohen on the “cultural recycling” of certain brain areas. 56:00 – A paper by Dr. Bedny and colleagues on sensitive periods and cortical specialization. 1:01:00 – A recent paper from Dr. Bedny’s lab, led by Karen Arcos, showing superior verbal working memory in blind relative to sighted adults. 1:03:30 – Another study from Dr. Bedny’s lab showing that blind people are less likely than sighted people to be led astray by garden-path sentences.   Dr. Bedny recommends: Her TiCs article on the “pluripotent cortex” Recent papers (e.g. here and here) from her lab led by Dr. Judy Kim A now-classic paper on cortical recycling.   You can read more about Dr. Bedny’s work at her lab’s website.   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 Cecilia Padilla. Creative support is provided by 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. 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 on break this month, but are sharing some favorite episodes from our archives to tide you over. Enjoy, friends!   I’m betting you’ve heard about the next generation of artificial intelligence, the one that’s just around the corner. It’s going to be pervasive, all-competent, maybe super-intelligent. We’ll rely on it to drive cars, write novels, diagnose diseases, and make scientific breakthroughs. It will do all these things better, faster, more safely than we bumbling humans ever could. The thing is, we’ve been promised this for years. If this next level of AI is coming, it seems to be taking its time. Might it be that AI is simply harder than we thought? My guest today is Dr. Melanie Mitchell. She is the Davis Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and the author of a number of books, including her latest, which is titled ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans.’  In this conversation we zoom in on Melanie’s widely discussed recent essay, 'Why AI is harder than we think.’ We talk about the repeating cycle of hype and disenchantment within AI, and how it stretches back to the first years of the field. We walk through four fallacies that Mitchell identifies that lead us to think that super smart AI is closer than it actually is. We talk about self-driving cars, brittleness, adversarial perturbations, Moravec’s paradox, analogy, brains in vats, and embodied cognition, among other topics. And we discuss an all-important concept, one we can’t easily define but we can all agree AI is sorely lacking: common sense.  Across her scholarly publications and public-facing essays, Melanie has recently emerged as one of our most cogent and thoughtful guides to AI research. I’ve been following her work for a while now and was really stoked to get to chat with her. Her essay is insightful, lucid, and just plain fun—if you enjoy this conversation, I definitely suggest you check it out for yourselves.  Alright folks, on to my conversation with Dr. Melanie Mitchell. And for those in the US—happy thanksgiving!  The paper we discuss is available here. A transcript of this episode is available here.    Notes and links 5:00 – A recent essay by Dr. Mitchell on self-driving cars and common sense. 14:00 – An influential paper from 2013 titled ‘Intriguing properties of neural networks.’ 16:50 – A video introduction to “deep learning.” 19:00 – A paper on “first step fallacies” in AI by Hubert Dreyfus. 21:00 – For a discussion of Alpha Go’s recent success with the game of Go, see our earlier interview with Dr. Marta Halina. 26:00 – An influential 1976 paper titled, ‘Artificial intelligence meets natural stupidity.’ 31:00 – A popular Twitter account that tags recent findings with “In mice.” 38:00 – A paper by Lawrence Barsalou on “grounded cognition.” For related ideas see Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By. 41:00 – A recent book by Brian Cantwell Smith, The Promise of Artificial Intelligence. 43:00 – An article on the idea of “core knowledge.” 47:00 – The CYC project. 49:30 – A recent article by Dr. Mitchell about analogies people have been using to understand COVID-19. 50:30 – An op-ed by Dr. Mitchell about why we should not worry os much about super-intelligence.   End-of-show recommendations: Dr. Mitchell’s 2019 book, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans Blake et al., 2017, ‘Building Machines that Think and Learn Like People’ Chollet, 2019, ‘On the Measure of Intelligence’   You can find Dr. Mitchell on Twitter (@MelMitchell1) and follow his research at her website. 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 Cecilia Padilla. Creative support is provided by 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. 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.

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 (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 Cecilia Padilla. Creative support is provided by 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, friends! Apologies for the brief delay in getting this episode out. We’re now happily back on track and super stoked for what we have coming up—starting with today’s episode. My guest is Dr. Michael Tomasello, a voraciously interdisciplinary thinker, an incredibly productive scientist, and a pioneer in the systematic comparison of chimpanzee and human capacities. Mike is a Distinguished Professor in the department of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University, where also holds appointments in Evolutionary Anthropology, Philosophy, and Linguistics. He is the author of growing list of influential books, including the recent Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny and a new book coming out this fall titled The Evolution of Agency. In this conversation, Mike and I talk about how he came to study both children and chimpanzees. We discuss the challenges of working with each of these groups—and the challenges of comparing them. We talk about some of the key concepts that have figured prominently in Mike’s work over the years—like joint attention and false belief—and well as some of the concepts he’s been elaborating more recently—including norms, roles, and agency. We also discuss Vygotsky and Piaget; how humans got started down the path toward intense interdependence and cooperation; and what Mike thinks he got wrong earlier in his career. Lots in here, folks—let’s just get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Michael Tomasello. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 3:30 – Early in his career, Dr. Tomasello was affiliated with the storied Yerkes Primate Center. 5:00 – Major works by Lev Vygotsky (in translation) include Mind in Society and Thought and Language. 7:00 – A video about some of the early work of Wolfgang Kohler. 10:30 – Dr. Tomasello is the Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. 17:00 – A chapter outlining some key results of “looking time” (or “preferential-looking”) experiments in developmental psychology. 21:00 – A recent article by Cathal O’Madagain and Dr. Tomasello about “joint attention to mental content.” 25:00 – A paper by Holger Diessel on demonstratives and joint attention. 25:00 – A video describing work that Dr. Tomasello and colleagues have carried out on chimpanzee theory of mind. A 2019 general audience article summarizing the state of this research. 28:00 – Dr. Tomasello’s book on child development, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny, was published in 2018. 31:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Tomasello on the importance of roles in human cognition and social life. 34:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Tomasello on the psychology behind the human sense of obligation. 35:00 – A paper of Art Markman and C. Hunt Stillwell on “role-governed categories.” 36:00 – A paper by Christophe Boesch on “cooperative hunting roles” among chimpanzees. 38:00 – A very recent paper by Dr. Tomasello, “What is it like to be a chimpanzee?” 39:15 – A study by Dr. Tomasello and colleagues about whether apes (and children) monitor their decisions. 40:45 – Dr. Tomasello’s most cited book, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, was published in 2001. 43:00 – Dr. Tomasello’s next book, The Evolution of Agency, will be published in September by MIT press. You can read more about Dr. Tomasello’s work at his website.   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 Cecilia Padilla. Creative support is provided by 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.

Have you ever pondered the letter P, or maybe reflected on the letter R? As in, thought about their structures, their shapes, and how they came to be. I, to be honest, had not. I have never given these letters—or any other letters—much thought. But that’s what we’re up to today. In this episode, we’re looking across the world’s hundred plus scripts and asking some basic questions: How are they alike? How do they differ? And why do they have the shapes that they do? My guests are Dr. Yoolim Kim and Dr. Olivier Morin. Yoolim is a Psycholinguist at the Korea Institute at Harvard University, and Olivier is director of the Minds and Traditions research group (aka ‘The Mint’) at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. Olivier and Yoolim, along with other colleagues, have recently launched a new online game called Glyph. You can play right now. It asks players to help describe, break down, and classify the characters of dozens of writing systems around the world.   Here, we talk about Glyph and what Yoolim and Olivier hope to learn from it. We do a bit of ‘Writing Systems 101’ and shine a spotlight on two scripts with fascinating origin stories: Hangul, the Korean script which was devised in the 15th century and Vai, a script invented in Liberia in the 19th century. We also talk about how universal cognitive factors shape writing systems and about whether the writing system you use shapes how you think. Finally, we discuss the earliest writing systems and what they were used for; the myth that the alphabet is the most advanced type of writing system; and the understudied—but not uncommon!—phenomenon of “biscriptalism.” If you enjoy this episode, be sure to check out Glyph. It sounds super fun and engrossing—and I’ll definitely be playing it myself! On to my conversation with Dr. Yoolim Kim and Dr. Olivier Morin. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 2:30 – You can sign up to play Glyph and watch a video about the game here. 6:30 – The International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA. 10:00 – In addition to writing, Dr. Morin’s group at the MPI has also studied coin designs and other aspects of visual culture. 16:30 – A paper by Dr. Morin and colleagues about writing as one of many kinds of “graphic codes.” 18:40 – An explanation of the international laundry symbols. 19:50 – A video about how Egyptian hieroglyphs were decoded. A website where you can see your name written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. 24:50 – An article laying out five major types of writing system, distinguished by the linguistic unit they encode. 27:40 – More information about Hangul and Vai. 33:00 – A pioneering early paper by Mark Changizi and colleagues about the origins of letter shapes. 34:00 – A research paper by Dr. Morin about how cognitive biases for cardinal shapes and vertical symmetry shape letter forms. 37:30 – A cuneiform tablet, which shows how the script has a distinctive three-dimensional “wedge-shaped” quality. 41:30 – A research paper by Dr. Morin and colleagues on how the Vai script seems to have gotten simpler over its short history. A general audience treatment of the same study by co-author Piers Kelly. 42:00 – A research paper by Dr. Helena Miton and Dr. Morin about what determines the complexity of written letters. 45:00 – The Ogham script, which may have needed to grow more complex over time rather than simplify. 46:00 – An article on the origins of writing in different parts of the world. An article on the rebus principle. 48:30 – Our earlier essay on footprints, which discusses the idea that bird tracks inspired the Chinese writing system. 50:00 – A paper in which Dr. Morin and colleagues discuss the role of early writing in “recitation practices”. 52:00 ­– The idea that literacy profoundly affects cognition was famously articulated by Jack Goody in The Domestication of the Savage Mind. A paper by Stanislas Dehaene and a colleague about the “Visual Word Form Area” and how it becomes rapidly specialized for reading. 55:00 – Korean readers are often “biscriptal” in that they are familiar with both Hangul and Hanja. 57:30 – A paper by Dr. Kim and colleagues on whether Hanja shapes the mental lexicon of Korean speakers. 59:00 – A research paper examining some of the effects of biscriptalism. 1:03 – A paper by Isabelle Dautriche and colleagues about how word forms are clustered in the lexicon.   Dr. Kim recommends: In the Land of Invented Languages, by Arika Okrent Highly Irregular, by Arika Okrent Frindle, by Andrew Clements   Dr. Morin recommends: The Greatest Invention, by Silvia Ferrara Stories of Your Life, by Ted Chiang Codes of the Underworld, by Diego Gambetta You can read more about Dr. Morin’s lab on the Mint website and follow him on Twitter. You can read more about Dr. Kim’s research 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 help from assistant producer Cecilia Padilla. Creative support is provided by 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.

Right now, as I’m recording this, there’s an astonishing spectacle unfolding in the forests of Tennessee. Every June, vast swarms of Photinus carolinus fireflies light up the night there. The members of this particular species don’t just blink erratically and independently. They sync up; they flash in a dazzling unison, creating waves of light that seem to propagate through the forest. But how do they do it? How do these tiny creatures pull off such a brilliant display? My guest today is Dr. Orit Peleg. She’s an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the BioFrontiers Institute, at the University of Colorado – Boulder. Though a physicist by training, Orit and her lab focus on the dynamics of living systems, and they have recently taken up the puzzle of firefly synchrony. Here, we talk about what it’s like to do fieldwork on fireflies. We discuss the colorful history of research in this area and how the phenomenon of firefly synchrony was originally contested and explained away. We talk about what Orit and her team have learned about the mechanisms of this synchrony—and about their methods, which include rich in-the-wild recordings, experiments involving tents and LEDs, and a fair bit of modeling and math. We also touch on the firing of neurons, the pulsing of heart cells, the clapping of hands, and other examples of synchronization in the natural world. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, we would really appreciate a rating or review or a recommendation to a friend. Thanks so much in advance for your support. Alright, friends, on to my chat with Dr. Orit Peleg. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 2:30 – A video of firefly synchrony, produced by the Peleg lab from their own data, is available here. Other videos are here and here. A general audience essay about firefly synchrony that Dr. Peleg wrote is here; another general audience essay about the Peleg lab’s work on fireflies is here. Firefly photography is an entire genre these days. 3:15 – Dr. Peleg and collaborators have conducted fieldwork on fireflies (different species) in Tennessee, South Carolina, and Arizona. 8:00 – The website of the mathematician and popularizer Steven Strogatz. 11:00 – An example of Dr. Peleg’s work on bee swarms. A popular article she wrote on the topic. 13:30 – An example of an early report on firefly synchrony in Science magazine. Pioneering earlier work by Buck & Buck on the topic. An interview with Lynn Faust. 20:00 – Our previous episode on bat signals also discussed the issue of a congested signalling channel. 24:00 – Dr. Peleg and her lab have put out a number of studies on firefly synchrony in recent years—see here, here, and here (preprint). 32:00 – An academic review of the “integrate and fire” model. 34:00 – A video of an audience applauding and eventually syncing up. 40:00 – An article about the work of Todd Oakley on bioluminescence in sea fireflies. Edith Widder’s book, Below the Edge of Darkness. 42:30 – An article by Dr. Peleg and a colleague on dung beetle navigation.   Dr. Peleg recommends: Silent Sparks, by Sara Lewis Sync, by Steven Strogatz David Attenborough’s Life that Glows   You can read more about Dr. Peleg’s work at 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 Cecilia Padilla. Creative support is provided by 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.

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 (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 Cecilia Padilla. Creative support is provided by 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.

This audio essay uncovers our deep-rooted fascination with what makes humanity unique. It dives into the historic debates surrounding the hippocampus and what truly distinguishes us from other species. The complexities of defining our cognitive abilities are explored, revealing how this obsession has sparked scientific discoveries across species. Expect a blend of engaging history and contemporary science, sprinkled with intriguing speculation!