Many Minds

Gary Lupyan, a UW–Madison psychologist who studies language and cognition, and Mike Frank, a Stanford psychologist focused on language learning in children, explore what modern AI reveals about the mind. They compare LLMs to child learning, debate data gaps and grounding, examine language as a potent training signal, and probe model reasoning, confabulations, and the limits of pattern matching.

Rob Dunn, Professor of Applied Ecology who studies the creatures around us, joins to explore interspecies mutualisms. He discusses fermentation and how yeasts shaped human history. He tells stories of honeyguides, dolphin-human fishing, dogs as sensory partners, and the curious roles of cats, maggots, cheese microbes, and body microbes. The conversation invites thinking about a less lonely, more biodiverse future.

Melanie Mitchell, computer scientist and Santa Fe Institute professor who wrote AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans, joins to unpack seven vivid metaphors for AI. They compare AI to crowds, role-players, alien intelligences, cultural technologies, and more. Short scenes explore anthropomorphism, evaluation pitfalls, analogy-making by models, and how these metaphors shape law, policy, and how we relate to AI.

Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford who studies the origins of animal behavior, explores why humans kiss. She traces kissing across primates, considers functions like mate assessment, microbiome sharing and pre‑mastication roots. The conversation highlights deep evolutionary roots, cultural variation, and surprising methods used to study this intimate, risky behavior.

Metaphors matter. They enliven our speech and our prose; they animate our arguments and stir our passions. Some metaphors power political movements; others propel scientific revolutions. These little figures of speech delight, provoke, captivate, shock, amuse, and galvanize us. In one way or another, metaphors just seem to help us make sense of a messy world. But how do they do all this? Whence their peculiar powers? What does it say about the human mind that we just can't escape our metaphors—and frankly don't want to? My guest today is Dr. Stephen Flusberg. Steve is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Vassar College, where he directs the Framing, Reasoning, And Metaphor (FRAME) Lab. Here, Steve and I talk about what metaphors are and why we're so drawn to them. We discuss some of the misleading ideas about metaphor you may remember from middle school literature class. We consider why some metaphors work and others flop. We talk about the metaphors we use for climate change and prevalence and potency of war metaphors across different realms of public discourse. We consider how metaphor operates in science and in scientific theorizing. Finally, we talk about the question of whether there are some ideas that we simply can't grasp literally, concepts we can only approach through metaphor. Along the way, Steve and I talk about: "aura farming"; nautical metaphors and textile metaphors; the outmoded idea that metaphors are mere adornments; metaphor versus analogy; dead metaphors and how to resuscitate them; shadows and footprints; Dan Dennett's technique of metaphorical triangulation; and the brain-as-computer metaphor—and whether it is actually a metaphor. Alright, friends this is a fun one. Steve has spent his entire career exploring this fascinating terrain—and, as you'll see, he's a lively and affable guide. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Steve Flusberg. Notes 3:00 – For more on "beige flags," see here. For more on "aura farming," see here. 8:00 – For an overview of metaphor in communication and thought, see here for an article by Dr. Flusberg and co-authors. 18:00 – The "life is a journey" (or "career is a journey") metaphor—as well as other examples we discuss—are treated at length in the classic book, Metaphors We Live By. 24:00 – For a detailed academic treatment of the relationship between metaphor and analogy, see here. 32:00 – Some of the best-studied "orientational metaphors" are those found in the domain of time. See here and here. 37:00 – For more on metaphors used in discussions of environmental issues, see a paper by Dr. Flusberg and a colleague here. 42:00 – For more on the idea of the "climate shadow," see here. 46:00 – The study by Dr. Flusberg and colleagues comparing the effects of race and war metaphors for climate change. 55:00 – The article by Dr. Flusberg and colleagues on the role of war metaphors across different areas of public discourse. 1:04:00 – For an influential discussion of the role of metaphors and analogies in science, see here. For Kensy's take on Darwin's metaphors for natural selection, see here. For discussion of whether the "brain-as-computer" metaphor is actually a metaphor, see here and here. 1:12:00 – For more on the history of metaphors in the English language—including analyses of which source domains have historically been the most fruitful—see here. 1:14:00 – For discussion of the (disputed) idea of "dead metaphors," see here and here. 1:17:00 – The idea of "theory-constitutive metaphors" in science is discussed in a chapter by Richard Boyd in this book. 1:19:00 – For a preview of Dr. Flusberg's in-progress paper on the philosopher Daniel Dennett and his technique of "metaphorical triangulation," see here. 1:33:00 – For the (extremely short) Borges' story on maps that are too accurate to be useful, see here. Recommendations Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson Consciousness Explained, by Daniel Dennett Three Sheets to the Wind, by Cynthia Barrett Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Hello friends, and happy new year! We're gearing up for a new run of episodes starting later in January. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives. ------ [originally aired October 16, 2024] IQ is, to say the least, a fraught concept. Psychologists have studied IQ—or g for "general cognitive ability"—maybe more than any other psychological construct. And they've learned some interesting things about it. That it's remarkably stable over the lifespan. That it really is general: people who ace one test of intellectual ability tend to ace others. And that IQs have risen markedly over the last century. At the same time, IQ seems to be met with increasing squeamishness, if not outright disdain, in many circles. It's often seen as crude, misguided, reductive—maybe a whole lot worse. There's no question, after all, that IQ has been misused—that it still gets misused—for all kinds of racist, classist, colonialist purposes. As if this wasn't all thorny enough, the study of IQ is also intimately bound up with the study of genetics. It's right there in the roiling center of debates about how genes and environment make us who we are. So, yeah, what to make of all this? How should we be thinking about IQ? My guest today is Dr. Eric Turkheimer. Eric is Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He has studied intelligence and many other complex human traits for decades, and he's a major figure in the field of "behavior genetics." Eric also has a new book out this fall—which I highly recommend—titled Understanding the Nature-Nurture Debate. In a field that has sometimes been accused of rampant optimism, Eric is—as you'll hear—a bit more measured. In this conversation, Eric and I focus on intelligence and its putatively genetic basis. We talk about why Eric doubts that we are anywhere close to an account of the biology of IQ. We discuss what makes intelligence such a formidable construct in psychology and why essentialist understandings of it are so intuitive. We talk about Francis Galton and the long shadow he's cast on the study of human behavior. We discuss the classic era of Twin Studies—an era in which researchers started to derive quantitative estimates of the heritability of complex traits. We talk about how the main takeaway from that era was that genes are quite important indeed, and about how more recent genetic techniques suggest that takeaway may have been a bit simplistic. Along the way, Eric and I touch on spelling ability, child prodigies, the chemical composition of money, the shared quirks of twins reared apart, the Flynn Effect, the Reverse Flynn Effect, birth order, the genetics of height, the problem of missing heritability, whether we should still be using IQ scores, and the role of behavior genetics in the broader social sciences. Alright folks, lots in here—let's just get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Eric Turkheimer. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available here. Notes and links 3:30 – The 1994 book The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein a Charles Murray, dealt largely with the putative social implications of IQ research. It was extremely controversial and widely discussed. For an overview of the book and controversy, see the Wikipedia article here. 6:00 – For discussion of the "all parents are environmentalists…" quip, see here. 12:00 – The notion of "multiple intelligences" was popularized by the psychologist Howard Gardner—see here for an overview. See here for an attempt to test the claims of the "multiple intelligences" framework using some of the methods of traditional IQ research. For work on EQ (or Emotional Intelligence) see here. 19:00 – Dr. Turkheimer has also laid out his spelling test analogy in a Substack post. 22:30 – Dr. Turkheimer's 1998 paper, "Heritability and Biological Explanation." 24:30 – For an in-passing treatment of the processing efficiency idea, see p. 195 of Daniel Nettle's book Personality. See also Richard Haier's book, The Neuroscience of Intelligence. 26:00 – The original study on the relationship between pupil size and intelligence. A more recent study that fails to replicate those findings. 31:00 – For an argument that child prodigies constitute an argument for "nature," see here. For a memorable narrative account of one child prodigy, see here. 32:00 – A meta-analysis of the Flynn effect. We have previously discussed the Flynn Effect in an episode with Michael Muthukrishna. 37:00 – James Flynn's book, What is Intelligence? On the reversal of the Flynn Effect, see here. 40:00 – The phrase "nature-nurture" originally comes from Shakespeare and was picked up by Francis Galton. In The Tempest, Prospero describes Caliban as "a born devil on whose nature/ Nurture can never stick." 41:00 – For a biography of Galton, see here. For an article-length account of Galton's role in the birth of eugenics, see here. 50:00 – For an account of R.A. Fisher's 1918 paper and its continuing influence, see here. 55:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer's paper on the "nonshared environment"—E in the ACE model. 57:00 – A study coming out of the Minnesota Study of Twins reared apart. A New York Times article recounting some of the interesting anecdata in the Minnesota Study. 1:00:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer's 2000 paper on the "three laws of behavior genetics." Note that this is not, in fact, Dr. Turkheimer's most cited paper (though it is very well cited). 1:03:00 – For another view of the state of behavior genetics in the postgenomic era, see here. 1:11:00 – For Dr. Turkheimer's work on poverty, heritability, and IQ, see here. 1:13:00 – A recent large-scale analysis of birth order effects on personality. 1:16:00 – For Dr. Turkheimer's take on the missing heritability problem, see here and here. 1:19:00 – A recent study on the missing heritability problem in the case of height. 1:30:00 – On the dark side of IQ, see Chapter 9 of Dr. Turkheimer's book. See also Radiolab's series on g. 1:31:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer's Substack, The Gloomy Prospect. Recommendations The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden Intelligence, Stuart Ritchie Intelligence and How to Get It, Richard Nisbett "Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents'' (Ted talk), James Flynn Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Matthew Cobb, a biologist and historian of science renowned for his work on neuroscience, dives deep into the complexities of the human brain. He discusses the historical shift from viewing the heart as the center of thought to recognizing the brain's role. Cobb illuminates the evolution of ideas like phrenology and localization of function, alongside the modern challenges of understanding consciousness. He critiques the limitations of psychiatric drugs and the ambitious yet flawed Human Brain Project, all while exploring how consciousness may emerge from neural interactions.

Alright, friends—we've come to the end of the 2025 run of Many Minds! Our final episode of the year is an audio essay by yours truly. This is a classic format for the show, one that we only do every so often. Today's essay is about names. It's about the question of whether animals have something like names for each other. And it's also about a deeper question: What even is a name? How do humans use names? How does the historical and ethnographic record kind of complicate our everyday understanding of what names are. I had a lot of fun putting this together, and I do hope you enjoy it. Now, the holiday season is a time when people might be shopping around for new podcasts to listen to. That makes it a great time to recommend us to your friends and family and colleagues. You can think of it as an especially thoughtful gift, one that's absolutely free, and that keeps on giving throughout the year. Speaking of gifts, as an addendum to this episode you'll find a little stocking stuffer after the credits. It's a reading of a poem that figures prominently in today's essay. Without further ado, here is my essay—'In search of names.' Enjoy! A text version of this essay is available here. Notes 2:00 – The text of 'The Naming of Cats' by T.S. Eliot is here. See also the full collection, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. The lines about cats' taste preferences and cats having different kinds of minds comes from another poem in the collection, 'The Ad-Dressing of Cats.' 3:00 – The 2019 study finding that cats know their names, and the 2022 study showing that cats know the names of their friends. 4:00 – For an overview of research on dolphin "signature whistles," see here. 5:00 – For the 2024 study reporting name-like rumbles in elephants, see here. 6:00 – For the 2024 study reporting vocal labels for individuals in marmosets, see here. A critical response to the study is here; the authors' response to the criticism is here. 12:00 – For overviews of cross-cultural variation in names and naming practices, see here, here, here, and here. Richard Alford's 1988 study, published in book form, is here. 13:30 – The study reporting name signs in Kata Kolok is here. 15:00 – For research on expectations based on the sounds of people's names, see here and here. 16:00 – For recent work on the "face-name matching effect," see here. For the study on "nominative determinism" in the medical profession, see here. (Note that, while this latter study does report empirical data, its rigor is questionable. And, yet, at least one other study has reported similar findings.) 17:30 – For the example of over-used names in Scotland, see here. 19:30 – For discussion of names in New Guinea, see here. For examples of research on "teknonymy," see here and here. For discussion of Penan "necronyms," see here. 20:30 – For an overview of name taboos, see here. For more on "alexinomia," see here. 22:30 – For an example of recent work on "name uniqueness," see here. 23:00 – William Safire's column on dog names is here. The study of gravestones in the world's oldest pet cemetery is here. Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Dr. Philippa Brakes, a behavioral ecologist and conservation scientist, delves into the vibrant world of animal cultures, challenging the notion that culture is uniquely human. She explores how social learning facilitates cultural transmission among species, from birds' songs to chimpanzee tool use. The discussion reveals the profound implications for conservation, emphasizing that recognizing animal cultures has intrinsic value beyond mere utility. Philippa also highlights innovative ideas like 'cultural rescue' to aid endangered species, making a compelling case for a new approach in wildlife management.

In this discussion, Dr. Ali Boyle, a philosopher at the London School of Economics, and Dr. Johannes Mahr, a researcher at York University in Toronto, dive deep into the mysteries of memory. They explore the intriguing relationship between episodic and semantic memory, proposing that episodic memory aids communication and enriches our semantic knowledge. They also discuss why certain memories linger and the implications for children and animals. Expect insight into how memory shapes our experiences and understanding of the world.