This recording is the seventh part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood. In this episode, we look at adolescence, including questions such as: Does adolescence really exist? How does it vary across societies? What role do adolescents play in social change? Why are teenaged boys so obnoxious? Enjoy the episode.

This recording is the sixth part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood. In this episode, we look at children learning through work, including questions such as: When do children start doing chores? What is their attitude to them? How does learning through chores tend to differ by gender? How do young people learn crafts? What are apprenticeships like? Why do they exist separately from the main body of craft learning? How similar are any of these learning situations to school? What ancient institutions might school have evolved from? Enjoy the episode.

This recording is the fifth part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood. In this episode, we look at the nature and role of play in children's lives, including questions such as: In societies without many material possessions, what do children play with? Are there any toys? What kind of games do children play? How does this vary from culture to culture? What commonalities are there in play behaviour between humans and other animals, and across human societies? Why do human societies, and animal species, vary in their play behaviour in the way they do? In what way is play an evolutionary adaptation? What is the "purpose" of play, biologically speaking? How do adult attitudes to play vary across cultures? How does play influence children's development? What implications are there for education more broadly? Enjoy the episode.

This recording is the fourth part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood. In this episode, we look at the transition in children's lives into the "age of sense" and the way in which they learn their culture, including questions such as: What ways of learning do we see consistently across cultures? What differences in attitude to learning do we see between industrialised cultures and pre-state societies? How does this vary over the lifespan? What role does the family play in children's education in different societies? Enjoy the episode.

This recording is the third part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood. In this episode, we look at community involvement in childrearing, including questions such as: Why do some anthropologists consider attachment theory, the most well-established component of developmental psychology, to be "cultural ideology"? Why, in most societies, are older sisters so keen to raise their younger siblings? What is "toddler rejection" and why is it so common cross-culturally? Do modern ideas of investing in children through parent-child play really make a difference? Enjoy the episode.

This recording is the second part of a multi-part episode on Professor David Lancy's book The Anthropology of Childhood. In this episode, we look at reproduction and the family, including questions such as: What attitudes and practices are there to family size and family planning in pre-state societies? What are the roles of mothers and fathers in these societies? How do cultural practices such as patri- vs. matrilocal residence or monogamy vs. polygamy vs. polyandry affect family structure and the raising of children? How do all of the above vary in societies with different subsistence patterns (subsitence farmers vs. herders vs. hunter-gatherers)? Can the variation by subsistence pattern be explained through evolutionary and/or economic factors? Enjoy the episode.

The Anthropology of Childhood is a monumental work of scholarship. Professor David Lancy has combed the ethnographic record with an eye to understanding the range of experiences of children around the world in different types of societies - hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers and herders, pastoral nomads, and modern industrialised societies, particularly in the West and in East Asia. The author also considers juveniles of other primates, such as chimpanzees and bonobos. I consider it to be so rich in content, and so important, that I am doing my longest episode ever, splitting this up into nine (!) individual recordings. Otherwise I would be talking continuously for over six hours straight. The reason I think this is so worth studying is that it provides us with insight into what we take for granted. Culturally, we are all fish that can't see the water that surrounds us. By looking at a broad survey of human and other primate societies we can see what we might have thought to be cultural and yet is in fact a human universal (such as family drama or boys forming gangs); and, on the other hand, behaviours that we may have thought to be part of human nature but are actually specific to a very restricted set of cultures (such as parent-child play or - importantly! - teaching). The material in this many-part episode includes a number of difficult themes, since unfamiliar societies often do things in a way that violates our moral sense. However, I am not interested in judging the morality or not of other cultures' practices, but simply want to know about them and understand them. For this reason, I might talk about some shocking things in an apparently blasé or rather academically detached fashion - not because there are no practices mentioned that I consider distasteful, but because I am not interested in discussing these issues. Please bear this in mind when listening. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 89. The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond; 99. China's Examination Hell by Ichisada Miyazaki

Rote memorisation is commonly reviled. I think some careful consideration of its role is in order. In short, my position is that rote memorisation is an inefficient approach, but sometimes difficult to avoid (such as when learning foreign language vocabulary), and should not be shied away from when there is no other option, though we should certainly do what we can to use alternatives. In the recording I also talk about ways to reduce or eliminate rote memorisation where possible, cultural differences between China and the West, and my own experience of learning vocabulary, among other things. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES Cognitive science (general): 19. Seven Myths about Education by Daisy Christodoulou; 52. How We Learn by Benedict Carey; 79. What Learning Is; 80. The Chimp Paradox by Steve Peters; 81a. The Myth of Learning Styles; 81b. on the Expertise Reversal Effect; 82. Memorable Teaching by Pepps McCrea; 85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Dan Willingham; 86. Learning as information compression

This book is about slot machines. It is creepy. By way of this book, we can arrive at a new psychological idea which Natasha Dow Schüll calls "the machine zone", but I prefer to call "dark flow". The word flow is already used in psychology to refer to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's concept of optimal experience, in which time distorts, the sense of self disappears, and the subconscious and conscious mind work in harmony. Dark flow is similar to flow, but... for want of a better term, it's evil. Whereas flow allows us to both enjoy our lives to the fullest and grow as a person, dark flow entails the same kind of perfect absorption but with the goal of self-destruction. Both the aim and the result are an obliteration of one's life. It's like a disease that swallows all of a person's time, money, and thought; the subject craves the sense of release from reality that the flow process provides, and ultimately acquiesces to, or even seeks, the destruction of their life that follows. Death metaphors are very common in participants' descriptions of this phenomenon and their state of mind. While reading this book, I had something of a recognition of this feeling of escape, driven by a pathological desire for more flow in a fantasy world. I've had this feeling playing (and anticipating playing) computer games. I happen to have played them a fair bit as a teenager, and so the psychology of it is subjectively familiar to me. The fact that I wish to avoid their negative consequences is why I perceive technologies such as slot machines to be outright unholy. Apart from revealing a potential dark side to the otherwise much-lauded concept of flow, this book's relevance concerns its appearance in an era of addictive digital technology, particularly such that is available to and targeted at children. The analogy between a slot machine and a smartphone is hardly far-fetched. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 10. Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi Episodes I have done on computer games are somewhat relevant, but they generally do not look at the phenomenon of addiction, which would be most pertinent to this episode's content. In future I intend to record more episodes on the pitfalls and strange psychology of digital technology.

This recording serves as an appendix to the episode on James Paul Gee's book What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. In his book, he provides 36 principles of learning that he proposes in his book on the basis of the psychological effectiveness of computer games. In my opinion, 36 principles is far too many; ideally, I would have five or fewer. I thought that a principle was supposed to be a distillation, and so a proliferation of them seems counterproductive and rather ironic. But I still wanted to go through his principles to be fair to him and his book. What's striking is how he is occasionally absolutely correct in his assertions, yet at other times completely off the mark. He is another example of somebody who is apparently academically respected within the field of education, and yet says things which are completely unreal and make little if any sense to those who know the basics. Enjoy the episode.