This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.Tom Griffiths is Professor Psychology and Computation Science at Princeton University, where he directs the Computational Cognitive Science Lab. Tom uses algorithms from AI to inform his work as a psychologist—testing the ways in which hims align with or deviate from the standards set by the AI models. He’s a central figure in this field, and in this episode we go deep on how it first occurred to Tom to use computers to study the mind—as well as where this work has taken him over the years. Tom recently released a podcast series through Audible, co-hosted with Brian Christian, called Algorithms at Work. I finished it recently and can confidently say it’s one of the best podcast series I’ll listen to all year!Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out:I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.Leyla Isik is Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. She did her PhD at MIT with Nancy Kanwisher and Tommy Poggio. Leyla’s research uses state-of-the-art techniques in neuroimaging and computational modeling to study how people interpret real scenes. For instance, her studies have scanned the people of participants as they watch scenes from the TV show Sherlock. This is a crucial frontier of neuroscientific research, as it takes our most incisive tools for understanding the brain and liberates them from the confines of contrived experiments. Leyla and her research lab well-positioned to introduce fundamental insights about brain and behavior in the coming decades.Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out:I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

Neuroscientist and author Antonio Damasio discusses his book 'Descartes' Error' and the connection between emotion, reason, and the brain. He reflects on childhood curiosity and explores the role of emotions in decision-making. Damasio also delves into consciousness and polyesthetic feelings, and expresses gratitude for a brilliant mentor.

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.Tom Pettigrew is professor emeritus in the psychology department at UC Santa Cruz. He is best known as the main proponent of one of social psychology’s most prominent ideas: intergroup contact theory. In this episode, we talk about how Tom was expelled from Jr High school for standing up to a racist teacher, the formative experiences that sparked his insights into intergroup contact, the mentorship of Gordon Allport, his extended trip to apartheid South Africa, how Allport's four factors for positive intergroup contact really came from Tom himself, how Tom's thinking about intergroup contact has changed over the years, and the role of social psychological in large-scale political and societal change.Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out:I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.This week’s guest is Alan Fiske. Alan is a professor of anthropology at UCLA, who is known for his unique brand of mixing approaches from psychology and anthropology. He is the brother of Susan Fiske, a famous social psychologist and one of my first guests on this show. In this episode, we talk about growing up in an academic family, Alan joining the peace core to avoid the Vietnam draft, helping to eradicate smallpox in Congo, how travel and experiences abroad influenced decision to become an anthropologist, the tension between doing good in the work (embodied by his moither) and working with ideas (his father’s purview), how indentifying the commonalities Weber, Piaget, & Ricouer led to the development of Alan’s most influential theory, and the relationship between the fields of psychology and anthropology throughout Alan’s career.Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out:I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.My guest this week is Elizabeth Loftus. She is generally considered to be the most highly cited female psychologist of all time. She is also a controversial figure within the field. Her research has looked at the unreliability of eye witness metaphor and the nature of false memories. She’s used this compelling line of research to testify as an expert witness in court. Though she’s testified on behalf of a range of defendants, the most publicized cases she’s participated in have been high-profile men, such as Harvey Weinstein. She was the subject of a recent New Yorker profile, which delved into the legacy of this work—as well as providing detailed speculation on the root causes of why Beth is so drawn to the topic of false memories and why she’s dedicated so much of her career to bringing these topics to light in legal proceedings.In this conversation, we talked about Beth being the only woman in her mathematical psychology PhD program at Stanford; being voted least likely to succeed as a psychologist; finding a topic she actually cared about; finding a way to apply it; her first case applying psychology to legal proceedings. I also get Beth’s take on the NYer piece about her life, the controversy that’s followed her work, and whether there are limits to role that abstract knowledge can play in societal events.Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out:I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

George Lakoff, highly cited cognitive scientist, discusses his formative experiences and the genesis of his famous ideas in cognitive science and linguistics. Topics include living with a murder, childhood memories in Bayonne, studying with Noam Chomsky, exploring the metaphorical structure of mathematics and framing, and the concept of embodied cognition.

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.My guest today is Annie Murphy Paul. Annie is a science journalist, and she has a new book out. It’s getting a lot of press. She’s made the rounds on all the Big Idea podcasts. I listened to a bunch of them in prep for this episode. Three of my favorites were her talks with Adam Grant, Ezra Klein, and Scott Barry Kaufman (fun fact: AMP was actually SBK's very first guest on his podcast). They’re all great discussions, and so I tried to broach some new territory with Annie in our talk here. The basic argument of her book is about fundamentally rethinking the way we talk about the mind. Her book is called The Extended Mind, and its starting point is a paper of the same title by two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers. The basic line of argument is that we tend to think of the mind as a fundamentally bounded entity, where the bounds of thought are essentially between one’s ears. These philosophers, Annie, and the relevant academic literature, are saying: No, actually when you start to scrutinize the assumptions of that idea, the position doesn’t hold up very well. Actually our minds are inextricable from the world around us. Annie’s book is all about diving into why this is the case, and how it should change the way we interact with our surroundings.In preparation for this discussion, I revisited that original Clark and Chalmers paper from 1998. The point of the paper, as they see it, is an argument against semantic externalism. This is a philosophical position about whether the “meaning” of a word resides in our heads, or in the world. Philosophers like Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge advanced this externalist position, with the key soundbite being Putnam’s quote: “Cut the pie any way you like, meaning just ain’t in the head.” In particular, Putnam has this famous thought experiment, called Twin Earth, which him and his contemporaries use as an argument that internalism is false and externalism is true (meaning just ain’t in the head). Clark and Chalmers are kind of saying: Look, it’s not just meaning that isn’t in the head. It’s all of cognition. They call this position active externalism. There’s a quote from the paper I really love. This is Clark and Chalmers talking about the details of Twin Earth: “When I believe that water is wet and my twin believes that twin water is wet, the external features responsible for the difference in our beliefs are distal and historical, at the other end of a lengthy causal chain. Features of the present are not relevant: if I happen to be surrounded by XYZ right now (maybe I have teleported to Twin Earth), my beliefs still concern standard water, because of my history.” I have only a modest notion of what the hell they’re talking about. But I just love how the more sophisticated a philosophical argument is, the deeper it gets into the finer points of just how wet water on twin earth is, and if you were doused in it would it feel equivalently wet to substance XYZ, and how do you know whether it’s really you or twin-you who feels this wetness. At any rate, what Clark and Chalmers are saying is that our relationship to the people, objects, and tool in our external environment is not passive. We are actively thinking through the environment, as we much as are thinking through our own neurons. They give the example of Tetris and how you’re actually rotating the shapes on screen, then seeing if they fit—rather than thinking about how they might fit and then rotating accordingly.That’s a brief primer on the philosophical origins of this concept. In my conversation with Annie, we also talk about how our minds extend into our social surroundings, why writing is a form of memory, the important ideas about the extended mind that people tend to gloss over, how this concept should affect American education, and how this concept changes the way we think about other people. We also battle it out over whether a dual monitor computer set up actually works like a second brain. It was a fun conversation, and I hope you enjoy it.Annie’s Three Books:* Andy Clark: Natural-Born Cyborgs* Alva Noë: Out of Our Heads* Mark Epistein: The Zen of TherapyLike this episode? Here’s another one to check out:I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.This is a conversation I’ve been wanting to have for a long time. I met Kevin several years ago, and it was a big moment for me. This was the first time I’d ever met a real author. Of course I said something foolish. Of course he has no recollection of such foolish statements. I’m a huge admirer of his first book, The Most Dangerous Book, which tells the story behind Ulysses—one of the most controversial manuscripts of all time. It’s got an incredible cast of characters from James Joyce to Hemingway to Ezra Pound to Sylvia Beach. That book really drew me into to Kevin’s style of writing and the way he’s able to bring social analysis to bear on literary and intellectual themes.Kevin Birmingham has a PhD in English from Harvard. He actually studied under Louis Menand, whom I’ve also had on the show and is one of my all-time favorite authors. In this conversation, I definitely ask Kevin about Menand’s influence—a bit toward the end. Kevin has won numerous awards including the PEN New England Award and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. The occasion for our conversation today is the publication of his new book, which came out in November 2021. It’s called The Sinner and the Saint, and it tells the story of the creative process behind Dostoevsky’s masterpiece Crime and Punishment. Since it’s a Russian novel, the creative process entails a great deal of suffering. The book also ties in the true story of how Dostoevsky’s thriller was inspired by the real life crimes of a Frenchman, Pierre François Lacenaire. (I’d like to imagine that all French criminal masterminds are named Pierre François.)Of course I’m a cognitive scientist by training, so I don’t have a lot of background in literary analysis. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve enjoyed Kevin’s books so much, helping me, as a layman, to understand books—at least aspects of books anyway—that I wouldn’t otherwise have the tools to grasp. There’s a passage I especially love from Kevin’s recent book: “One measure of Dostoevsky’s talent is that he could make something as small as a wink turn all the gears in a complex relationship. Porfiry’s tiniest movement is either an involuntary twitch or a cunning signal. Either it means nothing or it spells out Raskolnikov’s doom. He doesn’t know how to read it, and he can’t even tell if it happened. Raskolnikov wonders if all of his blinks look like winks, if the inspector’s eyes always gleam on a horizon between empty sky and unsounded fathoms. He begins to scrutinize every detail: the way the inspector positions his body, the tone of his voice, the way he emphasized the word she. In Dostoevsky’s murder story, the detective is the mystery.”At any rate, talking to Kevin is like having a private seminar with your favorite professor. He’s able to spin some really great answers. It was a fun conversation, and I’m really looking forward to sharing it with you!Kevin’s Three Books:* James Baldwin: Notes of a Native Son* James Joyce: Ulysses* Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and PunishmentLike this episode? Here’s another one to check out:I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

Eminent scientist, Sam Gershman, discusses the structure of cognitive revolutions, inductive reasoning, and the importance of errors and biases. The speaker reflects on their personal connection with Josh Tenenbaum and their journey working in Sam's lab. They also explore Sam's productivity, managing multiple projects, and their openness to exploring unconventional ideas.