Many Minds
112 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago -Our world is brimming with beings—human, animal, and artificial. We explore how they think, sense, feel, and learn. Conversations and more, every two weeks.
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Episodes
Of chimps and children
July 12, 2022 21:36 - 44 minutes - 61 MBWelcome 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 ho...
The ABCs of writing systems
June 22, 2022 10:00 - 1 hour - 103 MBHave 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...
The brilliant swarm
June 08, 2022 10:00 - 45 minutes - 63.1 MBRight 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 D...
Children in the deep past
May 25, 2022 10:00 - 58 minutes - 80.5 MBWhen 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? Wha...
The quest for human uniqueness
May 11, 2022 10:00 - 13 minutes - 18.7 MBWelcome back friends! Today’s episode is an audio essay. Those who’ve listened to the show for a while now know that this is a classic Many Minds genre. But we actually haven’t done one in quite awhile. This one takes on a topic that is big, consequential, and above all quite fun: our species’ long-running obsession with our own uniqueness. I won’t say too much more—don’t want to spoil anything—but, like a lot of our essays, this one’s a mix of history of ideas and contemporary science, leav...
Animal minds and animal morality
April 27, 2022 10:00 - 1 hour - 75.5 MBYour friend is in a bit of distress. They’ve just been dunked in a pool, and they can’t pull themselves out. You’re looking on as they’re paddling furiously, trying to hold onto the pool’s ledge. Fortunately, there’s a way to save your friend, to give them an escape route. The thing is, there’s also something else vying for your attention at the moment: a chunk of chocolate. So what do you do? Do you first nab the chocolate and then free your friend? Turns out that most rats in this positi...
What is language for?
April 13, 2022 10:00 - 1 hour - 106 MBWelcome back friends and happy spring! (Or fall, as the case may be.) Today's show takes on a disarmingly simple question: What is language for? As in, why do we say things to each other? What do words do for us? Why do our languages label some aspects of the world, but not others? My guest today is Dr. Nick Enfield. He's Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Nick has authored or edited more than a dozen books on different aspects of human language and communication—books on ...
From the archive: The root-brain hypothesis
March 30, 2022 10:00 - 13 minutes - 19.1 MBFriends—we're busy with some spring cleaning this week, but will be back in mid-April. In the meanwhile, here's a favorite audio essay from our archives. Enjoy! ______ Welcome back folks! Today is a return to one of our favorite formats: the audio essay. If you like your audio essays short, concise, and full of tidbits, then this one will not disappoint. We take a look at a 140-year-old idea but very much a radical one—the root-brain hypothesis. It was proposed by Charles Darwin in a boo...
Blindness, neuroplasticity, and the origins of concepts
March 16, 2022 10:00 - 1 hour - 94.2 MBIt’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 in...
Magic and the bird mind
March 02, 2022 11:00 - 40 minutes - 55.5 MBTo be a good magician, you have to be a good psychologist. If you want to pull off a really good magic trick, you need to know your audience—what they are likely to attend to or gloss over, what shortcuts they take, what predictions they tend to make. Which all raises a question: Could you get to know a new audience, a very different audience, by seeing which tricks they fall for and which they don't? Could we use magic as a scientific tool, in other words, as a window into minds that may be...
Many Minds turns two! Looking back on some favorite moments
February 16, 2022 11:00 - 28 minutes - 38.8 MBI have this theory about podcasts—it’s almost certainly not original, and it's probably not right. But anyway, I have this theory that what makes for a great podcast episode is really just a few good moments. Sure, it’s nice if the conversation has a satisfying arc and good energy; it's great if it’s not too dense or repetitive—all that stuff matters. But I think what really makes an interview stick out for us—and stick with us—are these little time slices. Charged little moments that burn a...
Why did our brains shrink 3000 years ago?
February 02, 2022 11:00 - 46 minutes - 64.4 MBYou have a big brain. I have a big brain. We, as a species, have pretty big brains. But this wasn't always the case. Way back when, our brains were much smaller; then they went through a bit of growth spurt, one that lasted for a couple million years. This steady ballooning of brain size is one of the key themes of the human story. But then there's a late-breaking twist in that story—a kind of unexpected epilogue. You see, after our brains grew, they shrank. But when this shrinkage happened ...
Architects of the underworld
January 19, 2022 11:00 - 58 minutes - 80.1 MBYou’ve probably seen those lists of the so-called “wonders of the world.” Many are works of architecture: the Great Wall, the pyramids, the colosseum, Taj Mahal. But these lists are, in a sense, always incomplete. Our world holds other architectural wonders, after all—albeit ones that are hidden from human eyes, made from different materials, and a bit scaled down. I’m talking, of course, about the wonders of the underworld. I’m talking about ant nests. My guest today is Dr. Walter Tschink...
From the archive: Cultures of the deep
January 07, 2022 17:49 - 1 hour - 105 MBWe're on a brief winter break right now, but we'll be back later in January. To tide you over, here's one of our favorite episodes from 2021: a conversation with Dr. Luke Rendell about culture in whales and dolphins. Enjoy! -- Whales and dolphins are, without a doubt, some of the most charismatic, enigmatic creatures around. Part of what draws us to them is that—different as our worlds are from theirs, different as our bodies are—we sense a certain kinship. We know they’ve got big brain...
Intoxication
December 22, 2021 11:00 - 1 hour - 109 MBA pharmacologist and a philosopher walk into a bar. This is not the start of a joke—it’s the start of our 2021 finale and our first ever theme episode. The idea with these theme episodes is that we have not one but two guests, from different fields, coming together to discuss a topic of mutual interest. Our theme for this first one—in the spirit of the holiday season—is intoxication and our guests are Dr. Oné Pagán and Dr. Edward Slingerland. Oné is a Professor of Biology at West Chester U...
Why do we dream?
December 08, 2021 11:00 - 48 minutes - 66.1 MBYou 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 nig...
Why is AI so hard?
November 24, 2021 11:00 - 53 minutes - 72.9 MBI’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. ...
The brain's many maps
November 10, 2021 11:00 - 1 hour - 88.7 MBIf 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 Schwarzlo...
Plants, languages, and the loss of medicinal knowledge
October 27, 2021 10:00 - 41 minutes - 57.3 MBOur 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 lo...
Monkeys, monogamy, and masculinity
October 13, 2021 10:00 - 1 hour - 104 MBWelcome 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 Cre...
The eye's mind
September 29, 2021 10:00 - 13 minutes - 19 MBWelcome 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 ep...
Bat signals
September 15, 2021 10:00 - 1 hour - 109 MBWe’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 apprec...
The roots of rhythm
September 01, 2021 10:00 - 1 hour - 88.6 MBWhy do we make music? Why do we love music? Well, you say, because it's in our nature. Our brains were sculpted over the course of evolution to delight in sonic sequences, to remember melodies, to revel in rhythms. Perhaps. But, actually, not everyone thinks music is an adaptation. Not everything we do was directly shaped by natural selection. And even if music was an evolutionary adaptation, that raises a bunch of further questions, like: Why would musical abilities have been an advantage...
Babies, grandmas, and our most human capacities
August 18, 2021 10:00 - 1 hour - 89.6 MBWelcome 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” colum...
From the archive: Revising the Neanderthal Story
August 04, 2021 17:41 - 1 hour - 108 MBWe'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 ...
Mind everywhere
July 21, 2021 10:00 - 1 hour - 86.2 MBPreferences, decisions, goals. When you hear these words, you probably think of humans. Or, if not humans then maybe charismatic animals—you know, great apes, certain species of birds, maybe dogs. In any case, I bet you think of creatures that are more or less cognitively sophisticated. I know I do. But, according to some researchers, this is an outmoded and over-narrow way of thinking. They propose that decisions and goals—not to mention other fancy-seeming constructs like memory, problem-s...
Changing cultures, changing minds?
July 07, 2021 10:00 - 43 minutes - 59.4 MBPublic opinion can sometimes shift dramatically over time. Beliefs that were widely held a few decades ago may now seem antiquated or even repugnant. But what’s driving these shifts? Is it individual people changing their minds? Or is it just folks with old-fashioned worldviews dying out and being replaced? My guest on today’s show is Dr. Stephen Vaisey. He’s a Professor of Sociology and Political Science at Duke University and co-director of the compellingly named Worldview Lab. In a rece...
The scents of language
June 23, 2021 10:00 - 1 hour - 102 MBYou’ve no doubt heard that—as humans—our sense of smell is, well, kind of pathetic. The idea goes all the way back to Aristotle, that we have advanced senses—especially sight and hearing—and then lowly, underdeveloped ones—taste and smell. It’s an idea that has been repeated and elaborated over and over, throughout Western intellectual history. Along with it comes a related notion: that smells are nearly impossible to talk about, that odors simply can’t be captured in words. These ideas may ...
Is speciesism in our nature?
June 09, 2021 10:00 - 31 minutes - 43.1 MBLet’s say you’re out on the open sea, having a leisurely sail, when you suddenly encounter not one but two sinking boats. One is a boat with two dogs in it; the other is a boat with a single human in it. You can only save one of the boats, so which one do you pick? The answer may seem obvious—you save the boat with the human, right? For many adults—even those who have a special love for animals—there’s little question that a human life is simply worth more, perhaps way more, than an animal...
The puzzle of piloerection
May 26, 2021 10:00 - 13 minutes - 18.2 MBWelcome back folks! We’ve got an audio essay for you this week. It touches on art, music, the skin, the spine, individual differences, vestigial responses, tiny muscles. There’s even some Darwin thrown in there. It’s a fun one. Hope you enjoy it! A text version of this essay is available on Medium. Notes and links 1:30 – The novel that very recently gave me goosebumps. 2:00 – A brief discussion of Nabokov and his ideas about the tell-tale tingle. 2:45 – Some terms for goose...
Cultures of the deep
May 12, 2021 10:00 - 1 hour - 105 MBWhales and dolphins are, without a doubt, some of the most charismatic, enigmatic creatures around. Part of what draws us to them is that—different as our worlds are from theirs, different as our bodies are—we sense a certain kinship. We know they’ve got big brains, much like we do. We know that some cetacean species live long lives, sing songs, and form close bonds. If you’re like me, you may have also wondered about other parallels. For example, do whales and dolphins have something we mi...
Why some see spirits
April 28, 2021 10:00 - 1 hour - 87.6 MBHave you ever seen what seemed to be a spirit? Or heard a voice from an unseen source? Or maybe just sensed a presence and found yourself with goosebumps all over? These kinds of experiences can be incredibly powerful— life-altering, in fact—but they don’t happen often, and they don’t happen to everyone. So what drives this individual variation? Why do some of us have these extraordinary experiences while others never do? Could it be something about our personalities? Or our cultures? Could ...
The story of numerals
April 14, 2021 10:00 - 1 hour - 106 MBGreetings, all! It’s been a minute, but we’re back, we’re refreshed, and we’re buzzing with excitement about the next few months of Many Minds. This episode we’re talking about one of humanity’s most powerful cognitive tools: numerals. Numerals are those unassuming symbols we use whenever we read clocks, check calendars, dial phone numbers, or do arithmetic. My guest on today’s show is Stephen Chrisomalis. Steve is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wayne State University in Michiga...
From the archive: Clever crows and cheeky keas
March 31, 2021 18:23 - 1 hour - 112 MBWe're doing some spring cleaning this week, but please enjoy this pick from our archives. It's a conversation with Dr. Alex Taylor that aired originally in September 2020. We've got a terrific spring lined up for the show. See you in two weeks! --- There’s a viral video clip from 2014—maybe you’ve seen it. It features a subject in a pretty remarkable psychology experiment. He’s put in room full of different apparatuses, one of which contains reward. After sizing up the room, the subje...
An animal in denial
March 17, 2021 10:00 - 1 hour - 89.4 MBWelcome back folks! Don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, but rumor is that in certain parts of the Northern Hemisphere, the signs of spring are starting to emerge—little buds and shocks of color. We’ll be monitoring the situation closely over the coming weeks. My guest today is Melanie Challenger. Melanie is a writer and researcher whose work explores the relationship between humans and the natural world. The subject of our conversation is her latest book, How to be Animal: A New History...
Our pranking primate cousins
March 03, 2021 11:00 - 48 minutes - 66 MBDo you remember the first time you made a good joke? Most likely not. Turns out the first forms of humor emerge super early in infancy, before the first birthday even. We’re not talking about stand-up routines here. We’re talking about a more basic but no less interesting behavior: teasing. In what’s known as “playful teasing,” one individual intentionally violates another’s expectations for the sake of amusement. In this week’s episode, we’re going behind a recent paper that ask whether ...
Aligning AI with our values
February 17, 2021 11:00 - 1 hour - 114 MBGuess what folks: we are celebrating a birthday this week. That’s right, Many Minds has reached the ripe age of one year old. Not sure how old that is in podcast years, exactly, but it’s definitely a landmark that we’re proud of. Please no gifts, but, as always, you’re encouraged to share the show with a friend, write a review, or give us a shout out on social. To help mark this milestone we’ve got a great episode for you. My guest is the writer, Brian Christian. Brian is a visiting schola...
Culture, innovation, and the collective brain
February 03, 2021 11:00 - 1 hour - 123 MBGreetings friends and happy February! Today’s episode is a conversation with Dr. Michael Muthukrishna, an Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics. Michael’s research takes on a suite of topics that all start from a single big question: Why are we so different from other animals? Part of the answer has to do with our neural hardware. There’s no question we’ve got big brains—and Michael has some cool things to say about why they may have gotten so big. Bu...
The savvy cephalopod
January 20, 2021 11:00 - 42 minutes - 58 MBToday we’ve got another “behind the paper” episode for you. In it, we’re talking about some of the most alien-seeming yet charismatic creatures around. I chatted with Dr. Alex Schnell, a Comparative Psychologist and Research Fellow at Cambridge University. We discuss a paper she recently published with a few colleagues titled, ‘How intelligent is a cephalopod?’ I’ve been charmed by cephalopods for awhile now—octopuses specifically. Maybe you have too. You’ve probably seen those videos of o...
Telling tracks
January 06, 2021 11:00 - 15 minutes - 20.7 MBWelcome to our first episode of 2021! Super excited to get this year going—we’ve got, I promise, lots of great conversations in store for you. But this week, to kick things off, we have a brief audio essay. It’s about tracks—that’s right, footprints. This might seem at first glance like a narrow topic but, fear not, it contains multitudes. I started thinking about this theme a month or so ago after the first snowfall of the winter. It was just a dusting but perfect conditions for clear, di...
Humans, dogs, and other domesticated animals
December 09, 2020 11:00 - 1 hour - 95 MBWhen you think of domestication, I bet you think of farm animals—you know cows and pigs and alpacas—or maybe house pets. You might think of corn or wheat or rice. You probably don’t think of us—humans, Homo sapiens. But, by the end of today’s conversation, I’m guessing you will. For this episode I talked with Dr. Brian Hare of Duke University. He’s a core member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience there, as well a Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology. Along with Vanessa Woods, he’s ...
From where we stand
November 25, 2020 11:00 - 1 hour - 107 MBWelcome back folks! Today’s episode is a conversation about the nature of knowledge. I talked with Dr. Briana Toole, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. Briana specializes in epistemology—the branch of philosophy that grapples with all things knowledge-related. In her work she is helping develop a new framework called “standpoint epistemology.” The basic idea is that what we know depends in part on our social position—on our gender, our race, and other factors....
Lost in translation?
November 11, 2020 11:00 - 33 minutes - 46.1 MBToday we’ve got another installment in our “behind the paper” format. In case you missed the first iteration, these are 30-minute or so interviews that dig into recent notable papers. This episode takes on a timeless question: Do concepts differ from one language to the next, or are they basically the same? Maybe you think we already know the answer. You’ve probably heard of cases where one language labels a concept that other languages don’t—the German word schaudenfreude, or the Danish n...
Revising the Neanderthal story
October 28, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 108 MBYou 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, ther...
The root-brain hypothesis
October 14, 2020 10:00 - 13 minutes - 19.1 MBWelcome back folks! Today is a return to one of our favorite formats: the audio essay. If you like your audio essays short, concise, and full of tidbits, then this mini will not disappoint. We take a look at a 140-year-old idea but very much a radical one—the root-brain hypothesis. It was proposed by Charles Darwin in a book published in the twilight of his career. The idea, in short, is that plants have a structure that is, in some ways, brain-like—and it is located underground, at their ...
When the mind's eye can't see
September 30, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 91.1 MBImagine a friend’s face. How much detail do you see? Do you see the color of their hair? What about the curve of their smile? For many people, this mental image will be relatively vivid. A somewhat watered down picture, sure, but still a picture—still something similar to what they would see if that friend were sitting across from them. For other folks, though, there’s no image there at all. There's just no way to will it into being. Such people have what is now known as “aphantasia”—the ina...
Do baboons understand death?
September 16, 2020 10:00 - 32 minutes - 44.5 MBWe’ve got a little something different for you today—a new format we’ll be experimenting with over the next few months. You can think of it as a kind of “behind the paper” series. The idea is to take notable articles from the last year or so and talk to their authors. We’ll delve into each paper’s backstory, sketch its broader context, and dig up some of that fun stuff that just doesn’t get mentioned in a formal scientific write-up. We’ll still be doing our longform interviews as well, but ...
Clever crows and cheeky keas
September 02, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 112 MBWelcome back everyone! Hope you all had a great August. And hope you’re all—like me—jazzed about the start of Season 2 of Many Minds. There’s a viral video clip from 2014—maybe you’ve seen it. It features a subject in a pretty remarkable psychology experiment. He’s put in room full of different apparatuses, one of which contains reward. After sizing up the room, the subject gets started. The first thing he does is tug on a string until he can reach a short stick that’s tied to the end of i...
What kindled your interest in minds?
July 29, 2020 10:00 - 25 minutes - 35.6 MBIf you’re listening to this podcast, it’s a safe bet that you’re interested in minds. You probably have been for awhile. But what sparked it in you? What’s kept it going? For some folks it may have been something they learned in school. Perhaps it was a stray factoid. It could have been a museum visit, or a scientific finding they heard about on the radio. But very often it seems that what sparks or stokes our interest in minds comes from elsewhere—from outside the classroom, from outside ...
The shaman, the witch, and the folktale
July 15, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 111 MBWelcome back all! Today’s episode is a conversation with Dr. Manvir Singh. Manvir recently finished his PhD in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and will soon begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. Manvir studies human culture. In particular, he focuses on certain cultural practices and products that spring up over and over again across the world’s societies—often in strikingly similar form. To explain these similarities, Manvir appea...