You may not remember much about it, but chances are last night you went on a journey. As you slept, your brain concocted a story—maybe a sprawl of interconnected stories. It took you to some unreal places, gave you superpowers, unearthed old acquaintances, and twisted your perceptions. Meanwhile, billions of brains all around you, up and down the tree of life, were probably doing something very similar—dreaming, that is. But why do we do this? What could possibly be the function of these nightly ramblings? My guest today is Dr. Erik Hoel. He is a writer and a neuroscientist at Tufts University. In a paper published earlier this year, Erik presented a new theory of why we (and other creatures) dream. It's called the “over-fitted brain hypothesis”; the basic idea is that dreaming helps us stay cognitively limber, adaptable—less tied to the particulars of our previous experiences. Erik and I discuss how he came to this new theory. We talk about how his account develops an analogy between the "overfitting" problem in machine learning and the "overfitting" problem that biological brains face as well. We discuss how his hypothesis can account for the bizarre nature of dream experience. And we consider Erik's provocative suggestion that dreams are really just one type of fiction—biological fictions, if you like—and that other types of fiction may serve similar purposes. Erik is a fascinating, wide-ranging thinker (there aren’t a lot of neuroscientists who also write novels). And this is a conversation I'll be chewing on for some time. It takes on one of those timeless questions about human experience—why we dream—from an angle that feels fresh and energizing. Alright friends, on to my conversation with Dr. Erik Hoel. Hope you enjoy it!   The paper we discuss is available here. A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 4:00 – Dreams have been in the news recently, with reports of an uptick in strange dreams during the pandemic. 9:30 – An early study on “dream deprivation.” 11:00 – An article on the idea that dreams serve memory consolidation. 23:00 – A study showing that we don’t dream about reading or writing. 27:30 – An attempt to solve a Rubik’s cube with a robot hand. 32:00 – An influential paper articulating the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis. 38:30 – A recent paper on the question of whether animals like octopuses dream. 42:00 – We’ve discussed Pinker’s “music is like cheesecake” analogy in previous episodes, most recently in our discussion of the evolution of music. 46:00 – For more on these ideas, see Dr. Hoel’s essay ‘Enter the Supersensorium’—and be sure to check out his new novel The Revelations! You can find Dr. Hoel on Twitter (@erikphoel) and subscribe his newsletter on Substack.   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.

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 taking awhile because it's 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.

If you're a brain, it can be tough to stay organized. The world comes at you fast, from all angles, in different sensory formats—sights, sounds, smells. You need to take it all in, but you also need to parse it, process it, categorize it, remember and learn from it. And of course you also need react to it, preferably appropriately.  So what do you do—as a brain—to handle this organizational overload? Well, for one thing, you make maps. Lots of maps.  My guest today is Dr. Rebecca Schwarzlose, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of the new book Brainscapes: The warped, wondrous maps written in your brain—and how they guide you. Rebecca is former editor of Trends in Cognitive Sciences and is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Washington University in St Louis. Her book was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program in the Public Understanding of Science and Technology. In this conversation, Rebecca and I talk about what brain maps are and why brains evolved to make them. (And just to be clear, it’s not just human brains—it’s the brains of many creatures.) We talk about how delightfully warped these maps are —and, of course, why. We discuss how we rely on them for vision, touch, smell, and movement, not to mention for thinking about faces, places, numbers, and more. We also discuss the fascinating duality at the heart of these brain maps, which is their balance of universal and unique features. I just love this angle on neuroscience, this way of thinking about the brain as a restless, prodigious cartographer. I thoroughly enjoyed Rebecca's book. And definitely there's a lot in it we couldn't touch on in this episode—details about how the mustache bat makes echolocation maps, for example, and about how new techniques are leveraging brain maps to do something like mindreading. So I hope you enjoy the episode, but I also hope you go and check out Rebecca’s book for yourselves. Alright folks, on to my conversation with Dr. Rebecca Schwarzlose. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 3:15 – A review article by Dr. Schwarzlose’s doctoral advisor, Nancy Kanwisher, on the fusiform face area. (Be sure to check out Dr. Kanwisher’s brain course online.) 8:00 – An article on Inouye’s work and the “discovery of the visual cortex.” 14:00 – Much work has focused on the metabolic costs associated with the brain. For instance, an article on how metabolic costs of the brain shift over development. 18:30 – A study of cortical magnification in V1 and how it relates to visual acuity. 21:00 – The famous “homunculi” of the brain’s touch maps are described and depicted in this article.   28:50 – A recent popular article on the brain’s maps of odors. 32:00 – Our interview with Asifa Majid about smell across cultures. 42:00 – An article about how numbers are represented in the parietal cortex. Another article about the relationship between finger discrimination and number discrimination abilities. 46:30 – An article about how the hippocampus supports thinking about the social world. 54:00 – An article about plasticity in the developing brain. 1:01:00 – One of Dr. Schwarzlose’s earliest studies, which was on face and body maps in the fusiform gyrus.   Dr. Schwarzlose recommends the following books: Making Space, Jennifer Groh Into the Gray Zone, Adrian Own The New Mind Readers, Russell Poldrack   You can find Dr. Schwarzlose on Twitter (@gothemind) and follow her work 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.

Our planet is home to an astonishing diversity of plants—close to 400,000 species. Over the millennia, indigenous communities around the world have been studying those plants, experimenting with them, using them as a sort of free-growing pharmacy. Certain species, prepared in certain ways, might be used for digestive ailments; others for the skin, teeth, or liver. But this vast trove of medicinal knowledge is now under threat. Under two threats, really—we’re losing plant species and we’re losing indigenous languages and cultures. My guests this week are Dr. Rodrigo Camara-Leret and Dr. Jordi Bascompte, both of the University of Zurich's Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies. Rodrigo is a Senior Researcher there, and Jordi is a Full Professor. We discuss their remarkable recent paper titled 'Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge', published this past summer in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). In the paper, Rodrigo and Jordi analyzed data from three hotspots of biocultural diversity—New Guinea, the Northwest Amazon, and North America. They were trying to better understand the nature of indigenous medicinal knowledge, the threats it is facing, and how we might best protect it. This is one of those papers that immediately grabbed me. It's deeply, unclassifiably interdisciplinary; it takes on an urgent question with a clever approach; and it tells us something we genuinely didn't already know. As I already said, our global stores of ethnobotanical knowledge are under threat—and from different directions. What Jordi & Rodrigo's work shows is that, in order to protect that knowledge, we need to focus on protecting indigenous languages. Before we get to it, just wanted to mention that, as it happens, Jordi was just very recently awarded the prestigious Ramon Margalef prize for his groundbreaking contributions to the field of ecology. So it was an extra special honor to have him on this episode. Alright friends—on to my conversation with Dr. Rodrigo Cámara-Leret and Dr. Jordi Bascompte. Enjoy!   The paper we discuss is available here. A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 4:45 – The Bascompte lab focuses on the architecture of biodiversity. 9:30 – Dr. Cámara-Leret and Dr. Bascompte have previously worked together on indigenous knowledge networks. 12:00 – The concept of “ecosystem services” is central in ecology. 16:30 – Dr. Cámara-Leret has previously worked on plant biodiversity in New Guinea, as well as on ethnobotany in Northwestern South America.   25:30 – A 2000 paper estimated that only about 6% of the world’s plant species have been screen for biological activity. 36:20 – Dr. Bascompte very recently won the 2021 Margalef Award for his contributions to ecology. End-of-show recommendations: Dr. Bascompte recommends Perspectives in Ecological Theory, by Ramon Margalef. Dr. Cámara-Leret recommends Where the Gods Reign, by Richard Evans Schultes, and One River, by Wade Davis.   You can find Dr. Cámara-Leret on Twitter (@R_CamaraLeret) and follow his research at his website. You can follow Dr. Bascompte’s work at his 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.

Welcome back folks! Today’s episode circles some big questions. What does it mean to be human? What’s distinctive about the human mind and the human mode of being? What is human nature—if such a thing exists—and how could we catch a glimpse of it? Should we go looking for it in other primate species? Should we look deep in our fossil record? My guest today is Dr. Agustín Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is the other of a number of books, most recently The Creative Spark, in 2017, and Why We Believe, in 2019. Agustín was trained as a biological anthropologist, but as, you’ll hear, he’s very much interested in the whole human, not just our skulls and teeth and genes. He’s spent the better part of his career trying to build a more integrated, more fully fleshed out view of our species—one that takes seriously our bodies and brains, our culture and cognition, our primate heritage and our Pleistocene past.  Here we talk about Agustín’s career—how he got into anthropology in the first place, and how he went from observing langurs in Indonesia, to writing about human creativity and belief. We discuss the human niche and why it’s distinctive (but maybe not unique). We touch on monogamy and how it’s not a monolith. We talk about maleness and masculinity. And, for those who’ve been following recent hubbubs online, rest assured that we also talk about Darwin—and specifically what Darwin got wrong about biological sex and race. I’ve been following Agustín’s work for some time and was thrilled to get him on the show. He’s an unusually expansive and boundary-crossing thinker—and that’s on full display in this conversation. He also doesn’t shy away from messiness. He welcomes the mess. He celebrates complexity. He enthuses about the richly, entangled human condition. Whether or not you yourself celebrate mess and complexity and entanglement—I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy hearing what Agustín has to say about it.  One quick announcement before he get to it: we’d like to welcome a new member of the Many Minds team: Cecilia Padilla. She is our new Assistant Producer, and we’re super excited to have her on board.  Alright friends—here’s my chat with Dr. Agustín Fuentes. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.    Notes and links 6:00 – One of the first anthropology courses to inspire Dr. Fuentes was taught by Dr. Phyllis Dolhinow of UC Berkeley. 9:15 – An early publication by Dr. Fuentes on the Mentawai langur (Presbytis potenziani). 12:00 – A 2012 paper by Dr. Fuentes laying out the aims, findings, and history of the subfield known as ethnoprimatology, which studies interactions between humans and primates. 13:30 – A 2013 paper by Dr. Fuentes describing ethnoprimatological findings from Bali. 17:30 – Dr. Fuentes’s 1998 paper on monogamy, which he considers one of his first important contributions to the field. 22:00 – In 2008 Dr. Fuentes published Evolution and Human Behavior, a book-length comparison of different accounts of why humans are the way they are. 23:15 – The classic book on niche construction by Odling-Smee and colleagues. A single-article discussion of the concept of niche construction is available here. 26:00 – The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis website, which Dr. Fuentes recommends. 29:40 – A paper by Dr. Fuentes on the human niche. 32:00 – One distinctive aspect of the human niche—belief—is discussed extensively in Dr. Fuentes’s book Why We Believe. 37:00 – Dr. Fuentes recently reviewed Kindred, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, who we had on the show previously. 39:30 – Dr. Fuentes’s recent paper on the search for the “roots” of masculinity. 54:00 – Dr. Fuentes recently wrote a chapter on Darwin’s account of the “races of man” in A Most Interesting Problem, a volume edited by Jeremy De Silva. See also his recent editorial in Science, which raised quite a stir. Dr. Fuentes also recommends the chapter in the De Silva volume by Dr. Holly Dunsworth titled ‘This View of Wife.’ 1:03:00 – For the broader historical and biographical context of Darwin’s ideas, I recommend Janet Browne’s two-volume biography. 1:12:15 – Dr. Fuentes quotes Tim Ingold’s idea that “anthropology is philosophy with people in it.” If you’re interested in learning more about the topics we discussed, be sure to check out Why We Believe and The Creative Spark. Dr. Fuentes also recommends: Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes The Promise of Contemporary Primatology, Erin P. Riley Emergent Warfare in Our Evolutionary Past, Nam C. Kim & Marc Kissel Recent books on race by Dorothy Roberts and Alondra Nelson Anthropology: Why It Matters, Tim Ingold Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony, Kevin Laland Pink Brain, Blue Brain, Lise Eliot The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry   You can find Dr. Fuentes on Twitter (@Anthrofuentes) and follow his research 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. 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 folks! Today, we’ve got an audio essay for you. I won’t say too too much—don’t want to spoil it—but it’s about pupils. Not as in students, but as in the dark cores of our eyes. This one of those that’s been in the works for a little while. About a year ago I started collecting all the cool new pupil-related stuff coming out. Then at some point this summer some extra cool stuff came out and I said, “That’s it—time to do it, time to pull this material together into some kind of episode.” So that’s what we have for you today. And I hope you find it eye-opening. Quick reminder before we get to it: As always, we could really use your help in getting the word out about the show. That might mean subscribing, if you don’t already. It might mean rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts. It might mean sending the show to a friend or two. I mean honestly it could mean knitting a Many Minds cardigan for the cold months ahead and sporting it around town. Ceaselessly. Alright all, on to this week’s essay ‘The eye’s mind.’ Enjoy!   A text version of this episode (enriched with images!) is readable on Medium.   Notes 2:00 – The eye of the giant squid was described in detail for the first time in 2012, in this paper. 3:10 – On diversity in animal pupils, see this recent paper. 4:40 – Pupil changes to imagined and linguistically encoded light can be read about here and here. 5:30 – Eckherd Hess’s early research on pupils is summarized in his 1965 Scientific American article, ‘Attitude and Pupil Size’. 6:45 – The 1966 paper by Kahneman and Beatty is here. Or see a 2018 review of more recent research on pupils and cognitive effort. 8:10 – Hess’s studies on the social functions of pupils are recounted in his 1975 Scientific American article, ‘The Role of Pupil Size in Communication’. Several of his classic studies have been replicated just this year (with good but not perfect success). 8:50 – Mariska Kret’s suggestion about how pupils fit the baby schema can be found here. 9:45 – Kret’s studies of pupil mimicry include this one, this one, and this one, among others. 10:15 – The 2021 paper by Wohltjen & Wheatley on “pupillary synchrony” is available here. 12:00 – The 1974 Nature article titled ‘Pupils of a talking parrot’ is available here.   Correction: The audio version of this essay misstated the size of the pupil changes in Daniel Kahneman's classic studies. These changes were roughly .2 to .5 mm, not 2 to 5 mm.

We’ve got something special for you today folks: bats. That’s right: bats.  Ever since Thomas Nagel wrote his famous essay on what it’s like to be a bat, these flying, furry, nocturnal, shrieky mammals have taken up roost in our scientific imaginations. They’ve become a kind of poster child—or poster creature?—for the idea that our world is full of truly alien minds, inhabiting otherworldly lifeworlds. On today’s show, we dive deep into these other minds—and into some of their less appreciated capacities. Bat don’t just echolocate, they also sing. And, as we’ll see, they sing with gusto.  My guest today is Dr. Mirjam Knörnschild. She directs the Behavioral Ecology and Bioacoustics Lab at the Natural History Museum of Berlin. She and her team study bat communication, cognition, and social life; they focus in particular on bat social vocalizations—what we might call bat signals.  Here, we do a bit of Bats 101. We talk about how bats form a spectacularly diverse group, or taxon. We talk about the mechanics of echolocation. We talk about the mind-bogglingly boisterous acoustic world of bats and how they’re able to navigate it. We discuss Mirjam and her team's recent paper in Science magazine, showing that baby bat pups babble much like human infants. And, last but not least, we talk about what it's like to be a bat. As I say in this conversation, I've always been a bit unnerved by bats, but part of me also knew they were seriously cool. But really, I didn't know the half of it. There's so much more to these creatures than meets the casual eye. One last thing before we jump in: as a little bonus, for this episode Mirjam was kind enough to share some examples of the bat calls we discuss in the episode. So there’s a bit of an audio appendix at the end where you can hear slowed-down versions. On to my chat with Dr. Mirjam Knörnschild. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 7:20 – Meet the Honduran white bat, which Knörnschild likens to a “fluffy little white ping pong ball.” 13:50 – Austin, Texas is home to Bracken Cave, which harbors more than 15 million bats. 16:30 – Much of Dr. Knörnschild’s work focuses on the Greater Sac-winged bat, which is a member of the Emballonurid family. 18:00 – See the audio appendix for an example of a Greater Sac-winged bat’s echolocation calls. See also examples on Dr. Knörnschild’s website. 21:10 – A paper by Dr. Knörnschild and colleagues about how echolocation calls serve social functions in addition to navigational functions. 24:00 – A paper by Dr. Knörnschild and colleagues on the origin and diversity of bat songs. 30:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Knörnschild and colleagues on the correlation between social complexity and vocal complexity across bat species. 37:30 – A brand new special issue on vocal learning in humans and animals, including a review of vocal learning in mammals by Dr. Vincent Janik and Dr. Knörnschild. 40:35 – Dr. Knörnschild’s first scientific paper, in 2006, reported the observation that Greater Sac-winged bats seemed to babble like infants. 47:20 – A recent paper by Dr. Knörnschild and colleagues on territorial songs in male Greater Sac-winged bats. 53:45 – A very recently published paper in Science by Ahana Fernandez, Dr. Knörnschild, and collaborators; see also this popular article and a video about the findings. 1:05:30 – A recent paper by Dr. Knörnschild and colleagues on bat “motherese.” 1:12:00 – For a concise narrative summary of Dr. Knörnschild’s research, including some of the future directions she is planning to pursue, see the article ‘Bats in translation.’ 1:14:00 – The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously argued that we can’t really know what it’s like to be a bat.   Dr. Knörnschild recommends two books by Merlin Tuttle: Bats: An Illustrated Guide to All Species The Secret Lives of Bats You can find Dr. Knörnschild on Twitter (@MKnornschild) and follow her 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 creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Isabelle Laumer. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Exploring the evolutionary origins of music, discussing its functions as a signal of coalitional quality, the auditory cheesecake hypothesis, and how vocalizations in animals may have led to the evolution of music and rhythmic signals. The podcast also explores music's connection to coalition building, feasts, and the potential role in the evolution of language.

Welcome back friends! Cue the kazoos and the champagne—after a short summer snooze, we’re much revived and ready for a third season of Many Minds! I could not be more thrilled about the guest we have to help kick things off: Dr. Alison Gopnik. Alison is a Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She’s the author of several books, including most recently The Gardener and the Carpenter, and she writes the “Mind and Matter” column for the Wall Street Journal. She also recently became the president-elect of the Association for Psychological Science. As many of you know, Alison is a distinguished developmental psychologist—she’s been thinking deeply about children and writing insightfully about them for decades. But more recently she’s stepped back to think also about childhood itself: that long period where we’re kind of needy, messy, dreamy, and blissfully unproductive. She notes that childhood may be one of the most puzzling and distinctive things about our species. Though it is perhaps rivaled by the other extreme of the human lifespan: old age, or as she calls it, “elderhood.” Here Alison and I talk about childhood and elderhood and how they go hand in hand. We discuss how they evolved, and, of course, why. We consider how they are associated with different modes of thinking and different ways of being. We talk about Alison’s radical suggestion that it’s during these bookends of life—our first act and last act—that we are, in fact, at our most human. Something I especially enjoyed about this conversation—and you’ll definitely notice it if you’ve been listening to the show for awhile—is how often we hit on themes and topics from past episodes. We touch on cephalopods, orcas, bees, and Neanderthals; we talk about the tension between imitation and innovation and about why adults don’t change their minds. But here, of course, we’re seeing all this familiar terrain from new angles. But before we get to the episode, just wanted to say a quick but heartfelt thanks for all your support over our first two seasons. The best way to keep supporting the show is just to keep listening, to rate and review us if you haven’t already, and, of course, to recommend us to a friend or colleague. Alright folks, looking forward to spending more time with you in the coming months. Here’s my conversation with Dr. Alison Gopnik. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 4:00 – On our distinctive life history, see Dr. Gopnik’s recent paper ‘Childhood as a solution to explore-exploit tensions’ and her 2020 piece in Aeon magazine. Some of this terrain is also covered in her most recent book, The Gardener and the Carpenter. 8:30 – The term “alloparents” was introduced by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. See especially her book Mothers and Others. 11:30 – A recent study of hunting productivity and life history by Jeremy Koster, Michael Gurven, and colleagues. 13:40 – A 1972 paper by Jerome Bruner on the uses of immaturity. 15:00 – One of Dr. Gopnik’s (co-authored) earlier books was The Scientist in the Crib. 20:15 – A paper on life history and brain size in marsupials. 21:00 – On the explore-exploit tradeoff, see especially Dr. Gopnik’s recent paper ‘Childhood as a solution to explore-exploit tensions.’ 29:30 – The 1983 paper that described this analogy with metallurgy and the “simulated annealing” approach to optimization. 35:30 – A paper on the division of labor among bees. 37:00 – See Dr. Gopnik’s recent column titled ‘The Many Minds of the Octopus.’ 40:00 – A paper on the role of climate variability in evolution. 43:00 – A series of papers by Dr. Gopnik and colleagues suggest that children have a more exploratory mindset than adults. See here, here, and here. 49:30 – On the finding that adolescents are more flexible than either young children or adults on a social task, see here. 52:00 – Michael Pollan’s new book, This is Your Mind on Plants, discusses three drugs derived from plants. 55:00 – A paper by (former guest!) Cristine Legare about the trade-offs between imitation and innovation. 56:20 – Dr. Gopnik’s most recent column on altruism and aging. 1:00:20 – A paper by Dr. Gopnik and collaborators on causal learning across cultures and socioeconomic strata, which included children in Peru. Dr. Gopnik recommends a recent special issue on life history and learning. You can find Dr. Gopnik on Twitter (@AlisonGopnik) and follow her work on 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 creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Isabelle Laumer. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

We're on summer break this week. Back in a couple weeks with the kick-off of Season 3! In the meanwhile, here's a favorite episode from our archives: a conversation with Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes about her 2020 book, Kindred. Enjoy! --- You probably think you know the Neanderthals. We’ve all been hearing about them since we were kids, after all. They were all over the comics; they were in museum dioramas and on cartoons. They were always cast as mammoth-eating, cave-dwelling dimwits—nasty brutes, in other words. You probably also learned that they died off because they couldn’t keep pace with us, Homo sapiens, their svelter, savvier superiors. That’s story we had long been told anyhow. But, over the past few decades, there’s been a slow-moving sea change—a revolution in how archaeologists understand our closest cousins. For this episode I talked to Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes about this revolution. She is a Neanderthal specialist and the author of the new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. Rebecca and I discuss the new picture of Neanderthals emerging from the latest archaeological research. We talk about where they lived, what they ate, the tools and clothing they made. We talk about the evidence that they had a considerable degree of cognitive sophistication and—very possibly—an aesthetic sense. Once we put all this together—and let the new picture come into focus—the gap long thought to separate them from us from them starts to close. And this makes the question of why they vanished about 40 thousand years ago all the more puzzling. I really hope you enjoy this one—I certainly did. And if you do, I definitely encourage you to check out Kindred!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links  Most of the topics we discuss are treated in detail in Rebecca Wragg Sykes’s book, Kindred. 5:40 – Earlier book-length treatments of the Neanderthals include The Smart Neanderthal and Neanderthals Revisited. 9:15 – The archaeological site of Atapuerca in Spain, which includes the Sima de los Huesos (Pit of Bones). 11:20 – The Neander Valley in Germany was the site of the very first Neanderthal find in 1856. 11:50 – Another early site was Krapina, Croatia, which is now home to a Neanderthal museum. 24:30 – A recent academic article on the complexity of Neanderthal tool use. 28:27 – A French site—La Folie—gives a sense of what some Neanderthal dwellings were like. 41:05 – A popular article about the “wow site” at Bruniquel. The original academic article. 49:16 – An article on the evidence that Neanderthals were preparing and using birch tar. 56:45 – Some evidence suggests Neanderthals were interested in bird feathers and talons. 1:01:30 – There is now evidence for repeated phases of interbreeding between human and Neanderthals. 1:05:00 – Other ancient hominin species included the Denisovans. 1:07:00 – There are some reasons to believe that pathogens carried by humans may have played a role in the demise of the Neanderthals. 1:13:30 – Another richly imaginative treatment of ancient human life is Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic, by Mark Edmonds. To keep up with the latest Neanderthal research, Dr. Wragg Sykes recommends following archaeologists such as John Hawks (@johnhawks). She is also on Twitter (@LeMoustier) and her website is: https://www.rebeccawraggsykes.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.