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
WEIRD: Adventures of an acronym
July 01, 2020 10:00 - 12 minutes - 17.4 MBWelcome to our 10th episode! Today’s show is another in our ‘mini minds’ series. We’ve been experimenting with different formats for our minis, as you may have noticed, but today we’ve got another in the classic blogpost style. The topic is the acronym WEIRD—maybe you’ve heard it used. It stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It’s become a shorthand for the idea that people in WEIRD societies are a bit unusual relative to the rest our species. The term was fir...
How do chimps communicate?
June 17, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 126 MBWelcome back everyone! My guest on today’s show is Dr. Cat Hobaiter. Cat is a Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, where she’s part of research unit called the Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution. Cat spends a good chunk of her time, not in Scotland, however, but in Africa, where she conducts fieldwork on great apes. Her primary research site is in the Budongo Forest Reserve in Uganda. Along with her team there, she studies the social behavior of wild chimpanzees—in part...
A mini minds with many voices
June 03, 2020 10:00 - 19 minutes - 27 MBA warm welcome back! On this “mini minds” installment, we tried something a little different. We reached out to former participants in the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI)—including grad students, post docs, and faculty—to ask them a couple questions. What we’ve done for this episode put together a selection of their answers. Here were the questions: 1. What is a book you’ve read over the last couple months and would recommend—perhaps because it offered insight, comfort, conte...
Message to the Stars
May 20, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 93.7 MBGreetings all—and a warm welcome back for another episode! Today’s show is a conversation with Daniel Oberhaus. Daniel is a staff writer for Wired magazine and the author of the book Extraterrestrial Languages, published by MIT Press in 2019. The book charts the history of humanity’s efforts at “interstellar communication”—our attempts to send messages to the stars in the hopes that alien life forms might receive them. Daniel and I talk about what these messages have contained, what forms th...
Message to the stars
May 20, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 93.7 MBGreetings all—and a warm welcome back for another episode! Today’s show is a conversation with Daniel Oberhaus. Daniel is a staff writer for Wired magazine and the author of the book Extraterrestrial Languages, published by MIT Press in 2019. The book charts the history of humanity’s efforts at “interstellar communication”—our attempts to send messages to the stars in the hopes that alien life forms might receive them. Daniel and I talk about what these messages have contained, what forms th...
Me, my umwelt, and I
May 06, 2020 10:00 - 10 minutes - 15 MBWelcome to the sixth episode of Many Minds! Today we have another ‘mini minds’ for you. We’ll be talking about umwelt theory—the idea that every species has its own self-world, its own private and peculiar mode of sensing and being. The theory was first put forth in the 1900s by a theoretical biologist named Jakob von Uexküll. He developed the umwelt concept in a short treatise that blended scientific and literary in striking and whimsical way. Remarkably—despite its age—umwelt theory is not...
Born to be cultured
April 22, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 108 MBWelcome back! Today’s episode is a conversation with Cristine Legare. Cristine is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on how our minds allow us to do culture—to learn it, to create it, and to pass it on. Among other things, we talk about cumulative culture and the human capacities for imitation and innovation. We talk about the power of ritual and about thorny questions surrounding human uniqueness. We touch on work that Cris...
Artificial Olympians
April 08, 2020 10:00 - 19 minutes - 26.8 MBWelcome to our next ‘Mini Minds’ installment! As I mentioned before, we’re still figuring out what we want this format to be, so you can expect a bit of tinkering over the coming months. Our first mini was a short audio blogpost of sorts, and today’s mini is a mini interview. I chatted with Matt Crosby. He’s a postdoc at Imperial College London and has been spearheading a super cool project called the Animal AI Olympics. (If you recall, this is something that Marta Halina and I touched on ...
Can artificial minds think creatively?
March 25, 2020 10:00 - 55 minutes - 76.5 MBWelcome back! Our guest today is Marta Halina, a University Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Marta’s current focus is the philosophy of artificial intelligence. We discuss what philosophers can contribute to AI. We talk about AlphaGo and its stunning defeat of one of the world’s most celebrated Go champions. We puzzle over whether artificial minds can think creatively. (We also touch briefly on a project t...
The monkey in the mirror
March 11, 2020 10:00 - 9 minutes - 13.6 MBWelcome to our second episode—and our very first installment of Mini Minds! Mini Minds is a short, snack-sized format that will alternate with our longer conversations. Today’s Mini is a primer on the mirror self-recognition test. This is a classic paradigm in comparative psychology—and, as we’ll see, it continues to generate both results and criticism. Thanks for listening, and we hope you enjoy the mini format! A text version of this "mini" is readable here. Notes and links ...
Of bees and brains
February 26, 2020 11:00 - 1 hour - 94.3 MBWelcome to our first full-length episode! The guest for our inaugural interview is Dr. Andrew Barron, a neuroethologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. (In case you’re wondering what a neuroethologist is, don’t’ worry, we get to that.) Andrew specializes in honey bees. He studies their minute brains, their natural behaviors, and their remarkable cognitive abilities. We probably don’t have to tell you that bees are cool. Humans have been fascinated with them for centuries. But...
Introducing 'Many Minds'
February 15, 2020 00:13 - 4 minutes - 5.55 MBWelcome to 'Many Minds,' a podcast about the curious ways that mind manifests—in humans, animals, and machines. We spotlight the findings, theories, and phenomena that are changing how we think about minds. A text version of this episode is available here.