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 b...
Oct 28, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Season 2Ep. 5
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 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 roots....
Oct 14, 2020•14 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Imagine 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 inabili...
Sep 30, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Season 2Ep. 3
We’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 we’l...
Sep 16, 2020•32 min
Welcome 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 it. He ...
Sep 02, 2020•1 hr 21 min
If 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 non-fi...
Jul 29, 2020•26 min
Welcome 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 appeals t...
Jul 15, 2020•1 hr 21 min
Welcome 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 first int...
Jul 01, 2020•13 min•Season 1Ep. 10
Welcome 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 particu...
Jun 17, 2020•1 hr 32 min
A 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, context, or...
Jun 03, 2020•20 min
Greetings 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 they’...
May 20, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 7
Welcome 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 d...
May 06, 2020•11 min
Welcome 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 Cristine...
Apr 22, 2020•1 hr 19 min
Welcome 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 briefl...
Apr 08, 2020•20 min
Welcome 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 that M...
Mar 25, 2020•56 min
Welcome 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 2:58 – Wilhelm Prey...
Mar 11, 2020•10 min
Welcome 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 one ...
Feb 26, 2020•1 hr 9 min
Welcome 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 .
Feb 15, 2020•4 min
