Many Minds

We'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 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 then uses that stick to retrieve a stone that was just out of his reach, behind some bars; then he retrieves another stone in the same way; then a third. One at a time, he picks up the stones, takes them across the way, and plunks them down a tube. Nothing happens at first but, after the third stone, the combined weight lowers a trap door, releasing a long stick. The subject then uses that long stick to carefully pry out his reward from a deep hole. It's an impressive display of problem solving. But what's most remarkable is that the subject in question is not a Psych 101 student but a bird—a New Caledonian crow, to be exact—and his name is 007. My guest on today's show is Alex Taylor, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Auckland. He's the one who devised this challenge for 007—it brings together a number of tasks he's used with New Caledonian crows over the years to try to understand their striking capacities for tool use, for planning, and for reasoning of different kinds. We talk about how Alex got interested in crows and how he studies them; we talk about what seems to be going on in their minds when they solve multi-step puzzles; we talk about the kinds of tools that crows make and use in the wild and the emerging evidence that using those tools puts them in a good mood. We then zoom out to discuss some of the leading ideas about what drives the evolution of intelligence behavior, whether in crows or chimps or children. We also touch on some of Alex's new work with another species—the kea, an alpine parrot native to the south Island of New Zealand. We talk about how the kea are in some ways a foil to the New Caledonian crow—a bit more curious, a bit more fun-loving—but also super sharp in their own ways. This conversation was a real treat. Like many folks, it seems, during the lockdown this spring I found myself with a newfound interest in birds. So I was especially excited to get to tour the world of avian cognition with Alex—a leading researcher in the area and an affable guide at that. I think you'll get a kick out of this one folks—and I'm happy to bet it'll have you looking at your neighborhood corvids in a whole new light. Without further preamble, here's my conversation with Dr. Alex Taylor. Enjoy. A transcript of this interview is available here. Notes and links 4:00 ­– A popular article about the famed feats of Betty, a New Caledonian crow. An early publication establishing these crows' impressive tool-making abilities. 8:00 – The corvid family is large and diverse. Accessible introductions to corvids and corvid cognition can be found here and here. 13:30 – Dr. Taylor's first study with crows dealt with meta-tool use—the use of one tool on another. An image depicting the set-up of the study can be found here. 17:30 – An article about how New Caledonian crows craft and use tools in the wild. 19:34 – A study suggesting that the pandanus tools made by New Caledonian crows may exhibit cumulative cultural evolution. (We discussed the importance of cumulative culture in humans in an earlier episode.) 22:20 – A 2019 study by Dr. Taylor and colleagues investigating the types of mental representations crows seem to be using during multi-stage problem solving tasks. 24:10 – A 2019 study by Dr. Taylor and colleagues suggesting crows might enjoy using tools. The procedure involved a cognitive bias task first developed in this 2004 study. 30:50 – A classic study in psychology analyzing individual differences in how much people like thinking—that is, their "need for cognition." 35:00 – Aesop's fable about the crow and the pitcher. The fable was first adapted into an experimental task in this study. Dr. Taylor and colleagues have since used variations of the task to probe crows' causal understanding. Here is one overview of this work. 41:20 – A study by Dr. Taylor and colleagues examining how human children do on the Aesop's fable task. 42:35 – Dr. Taylor's "signature testing" proposal is discussed here. 53:50 – A 2017 study showing that monkeys can be trained to pass the mirror test by using laser pointers. (We discussed the mirror test in a previous episode.) 56:34 – A paper by Dr. Taylor and a colleague discussing the equivocal evidence for the "technical intelligence hypothesis"—the idea that selection for tool use leads to selection for general intelligence. 58:17– An article about "encephalization" as a proxy for animal intelligence. 1:02: 35 – A paper by the philosopher Kim Sterelny about the origins of human intelligence. 1:04:33 – Read about the charismatic kea here. 1:09:45 – A 2017 study showing that a distinctive vocalization produced by kea may be involved in positive emotional contagion, much like human laughter. In a new project, in collaboration with Ximena Nelson and other colleagues, Dr. Taylor is trying to further understand this behavior. 1:10:48 – A recent study by Dr. Taylor and colleagues about the kea's ability to integrate different kinds of information. Watch a video about this study here. Alex Taylor's end-of-show recommendations: The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman The Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerman Bird Brain by Nathan Emery The best way to keep up with Dr. Taylor's work is to follow his lab on Twitter (@AnimalMindsUoA) or Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/AnimalMindsUoA/). You can also check out his lab website: http://www.animalmindslab.com. Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Welcome 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 of What it Means to Be Human. In it, she confronts our species' epic struggle with our animal nature. We have this tendency to see ourselves as above and beyond the natural order, as possessing something special, something extraordinary that sets us apart. And yet it's no secret that we are also biological organisms, made from the same stuff as the rest of the animal kingdom and bound by the same laws and limits. You can sense the struggle; you can probably feel the tension. Through the lens of this struggle, Melanie's book takes in a huge sweep of terrain. It considers our tendency to dehumanize other humans and "dementalize" animals; it discusses our alienation from our own bodies; it takes up our desire to colonize space and upload our minds so they survive our death. That's not all. It also zooms in on paleolithic cave art, neuro-essentialism, the notions of personhood and dignity, not to mention mass extinction and machine intelligence and a whole lot else. It's a provocative book and a brave book, and chatting with Melanie about it was a real treat. An announcement, or re-announcement, I suppose: Applications for the 2021 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute are now open. Check out our amazing faculty (including some former guests of the show) and find further details at disi.org. I'll just mention here that Melanie and I first met at the 2020 institute—she was one of our Storytellers. So, you know, more evidence that cool people who think about cool things are to be found at DISI. Alright folks—hope you enjoy this one. And, if you do, definitely pick up Melanie's book. It'll be out Tuesday, March 23 in the US. A transcript of this show is available here. Notes and links 9:24 – "Substance dualism" is one of several forms of dualism. See here. 12:30 – A primer on elephant cognition. 18:00 – One of the works on dehumanization that Challenger discusses in her book is Less than Human by David Livingstone Smith. The topic is also discussed at length in a book we featured in December, Survival of the Friendliest, by Brian Hare & Vanessa Woods. 21:30 – A recent review of the wide literature on "terror management theory." 25:50 – An article reviewing work on "mental time travel," which Challenger views as one of our key capacities as humans. 30:46 – A study by Amy Fitzgerald and colleagues on crime rates in the proximity of slaughterhouses. 33:50 – The Cave of Altamira in Spain. 38:30 – Here we discuss the work of researcher Kim Hill. 45:50 – John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690, can be read here. 53:57 – See Challenger's previous book about extinction. 55:45 – Read about the 2009 Copenhagen accord here. Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our NEW website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Do 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 apes also tease each other playfully—whether they share our early-emerging impulse to prank and razz each other. My guests are Johanna Eckert, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and Erica Cartmill, Associate Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. (For those who may not know, Erica is one of the founders and directors of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, the organization behind Many Minds.) In their paper, Johanna, Erica, and their co-author Sasha Winkler review a wealth of observations made over the years that together suggest that apes do indeed have the pranking impulse. They seem to tease each other in many of the ways infants do, in fact. Here, we talk about some of these fascinating observations and why they deserve a fresh interpretation. We consider what makes teasing such a cognitively rich behavior. We discuss the different functions teasing may serve and talk about how research on primate teasing is part of a bigger zeitgeist of work on positive emotions in non-human animals. I'm an inveterate teaser myself; I come from a family of teasers. And I'm someone who tends to show affection for people by teasing them. So I was super excited to dive into this topic. Teasing is fascinating on its own, no question. But it becomes that much more so when we realize that it may shed light on the evolutionarty roots of humor and joking. Understanding teasing can, in other words, help us understand the phylogeny of funniness. But, before we get going, two bits of exciting news. The first is that we have a new website at disi.org. You'll find Many Minds there under the 'Podcast' tab. Check it out. The second bit is that applications for the 2021 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute are now open! You'll find the link and bunch more info on the new website, under the 'Apply' tab. There are two application tracks, an academic track and a storytelling track. If you like this show—and the kinds of topics we cover—there's a pretty good chance you'd be interested in DISI. So definitely consider applying yourself and please do share with anyone who may be interested. Alright, friends—now on to my conversation about playful teasing with Dr. Johanna Eckert and Dr. Erica Cartmill! Hope you enjoy this one! The paper we discuss is here. A transcript of this show is available here. Notes and links 5:20 – A paper stemming from Dr. Cartmill's dissertation work on gesture in orangutans. 9:45 – Learn more about the work of Professor Vasudevi Reddy here. 12:10 – For more about Koko the Gorilla, who died in 2018, see here and here. 14:15 – Meet the orangutans at the Leipzig Zoo, including Bimbo, here. 16:00 – A recent review article about "theory of mind" in non-human animals. 19:15 – A classic article on tactical deception in primates. 24:00 – Many animals seem to enjoy jumping on the backs of capybaras. 27:20 – A paper on play fighting and its possible functions. 30:00 – A recent review of gesture in non-human primates by Dr. Cartmill and another former guest, Dr. Cat Hobaiter. 41:00 – One example of a recent study using thermal imaging in chimpanzees. 46:45 – The Latke-Hamantash Debate is a (humorous) yearly ritual at the University of Chicago. Dr. Eckert's end-of-show reading recommendations: The Psychology of Humor, by Rod Martin and Thomas Ford Important early work by Otto Adang on teasing in chimpanzees, including here and here Dr. Cartmill's end-of-show reading recommendations: Teasing and clowning in infancy, by Vasudevi Reddy and Gina Mireault Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, by Ted Cohen Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our NEW website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Guess 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 scholar at the University of California Berkeley and the author of three widely acclaimed books: The Most Human Human, published in 2011; Algorithms To Live By, co-authored with Tom Griffiths and published in 2016; and most recently, The Alignment Problem. It was published this past fall and it's the focus of our conversation in this episode. The alignment problem, put simply, is the problem of building artificial intelligences—machine learning systems, for instance—that do what we want them to do, that both reflect and further our values. This is harder to do than you might think, and it's more important than ever. As Brian and I discuss, machine learning is becoming increasingly pervasive in everyday life—though it's sometimes invisible. It's working in the background every time we snap a photo or hop on Facebook. Companies are using it to sift resumes; courts are using it to make parole decisions. We are already trusting these systems with a bunch of important tasks, in other words. And as we rely on them in more and more domains, the alignment problem will only become that much more pressing. In the course of laying out this problem, Brian's book also offers a captivating history of machine learning and AI. Since their very beginnings, these fields have been formed through interaction with philosophy, psychology, mathematics, and neuroscience. Brian traces these interactions in fascinating detail—and brings them right up to the present moment. As he describes, machine learning today is not only informed by the latest advances in the cognitive sciences, it's also propelling those advances. This is a wide-ranging and illuminating conversation folks. And, if I may say so, it's also an important one. Brian makes a compelling case, I think, that the alignment problem is one of the defining issues of our age. And he writes about it—and talks about it here—with such clarity and insight. I hope you enjoy this one. And, if you do, be sure to check out Brian's book. Happy birthday to us—and on to my conversation with Brian Christian. Enjoy! A transcript of this show is available here. Notes and links 7:26 - Norbert Wiener's article from 1960, 'Some moral and technical consequences of automation'. 8:35 - 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' is an episode from the animated film, Fantasia (1940). Before that, it was a poem by Goethe. 13:00 - A well-known incident in which Google's nascent auto-tagging function went terribly awry. 13:30 - The 'Labeled Faces in the Wild' database can be viewed here. 18:35 - A groundbreaking article in ProPublica on the biases inherent in the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) tool. 25:00 – The website of the Future of Humanity Institute, mentioned in several places, is here. 25:55 - For an account of the collaboration between Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch, see here. 29:35- An article about the racial biases built into photographic film technology in the 20th century. 31:45 - The much-investigated Tempe crash involving a driverless car and a pedestrian: 37:17 - The psychologist Edward Thorndike developed the "law of effect." Here is one of his papers on the law. 44:40 - A highly influential 2015 paper in Nature in which a deep-Q network was able to surpass human performance on a number of classic Atari games, and yet not score a single point on 'Montezuma's Revenge.' 47:38 - A chapter on the classic "preferential looking" paradigm in developmental psychology: 53:40 - A blog post discussing the relationship between dopamine in the brain and temporal difference learning. Here is the paper in Science in which this relationship was first articulated. 1:00:00 - A paper on the concept of "coherent extrapolated volition." 1:01:40 - An article on the notion of "iterated distillation and amplification." 1:10:15 - The fourth edition of a seminal textbook by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, AI a Modern approach, is available here: http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ 1:13:00 - An article on Warren McCulloch's poetry. 1:17:45 - The concept of "reductions" is central in computer science and mathematics. Brian Christian's end-of-show reading recommendations: The Alignment Newsletter, written by Rohin Shah Invisible Women, by Caroline Criado Perez: The Gardener and the Carpenter, Alison Gopnik: You can keep up with Brian at his personal website or on Twitter. Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

In this episode, Dr. Michael Muthukrishna discusses the unique characteristics of humans, including the role of neural hardware and cultural software. They explore topics such as the impact of social groups on cultural skills, the power of collective brains in innovation, the double-edged nature of diversity, and the need for psychology to become a historical science. They also touch upon whale and dolphin brains, religious history, and the Flynn effect.

Today 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 octopuses carrying coconut shells for protection, or pretending to be a hermit grab or a flounder. Maybe you saw the recent documentary My Octopus Teacher where the main octopus character gathers a bunch of shells into a kind of makeshift armor to protect herself against an imminent shark attack. This is all jaw-droppingly, head-scratchingly cool stuff. But you may have also wondered, as I have, what's really going on—cognitively— behind these behaviors. What's happening in the minds of these creatures when they pull off these fancy feats? Could the mechanisms involved actually be simpler than you might at first guess? This really is the core issue in Alex's paper and we circle around it for much of the conversation. But, in circling, we touch on a lot. We cover some Cephalopod 101 type stuff—when cephalopods split from vertebrates, what cephalopods brains are like, why octopuses tends to hog the limelight when squid and cuttlefish are pretty impressive, too. We talk about Alex's studies of self-control in cuttlefish, styled on the classic marshmallow experiments. We talk about the cephalopod gift for disguise and whether this gift might suggest a form of bodily awareness or maybe even theory of mind. And we zoom out to talk about the evolution of cognitive sophistication generally and how cephalopods can help us understand the kinds of forces that drive it. I've been excited about cephalopods for awhile now, but having this conversation made me that much more so. It's convinced me that we still have a ton to learn about—and probably from—these brainy, shape-shifting creatures. So let's get to it. Here's my conversation with Dr. Alex Schnell. Enjoy! The paper we discuss is here. A transcript of this episode is available here. Notes and links 14:35 – Watch a video of octopuses carrying coconuts here. See the original research study on this behavior here. 16:45 – A paper showing that Eurasian jays can think beyond their current state to consider future needs. 17:40 – The paper reporting the original pretzel experiments in human children. 29:10 – A video of an octopus purportedly changing colors while dreaming. 32:10 – Another recent paper published by Dr. Schnell, led by her colleague Piero Amodio, about the evolutionary drivers of cephalopod intelligence and animal intelligence generally. 38:20 – A recent discussion of animal sentience and the "precautionary principle." Dr. Schnell's end-of-show reading recommendations: A recent paper by P. Billard and colleagues Recent work by Piero Amodio Research at the Cognitive Neuroethology of Cephalopods (NECC) lab You can follow Dr. Schnell at her website or on Twitter. Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Welcome 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, distinct footprints. I was out in the park totally transfixed by these crisp perfect animal tracks. (I'm still not sure what kind of animal, some small to medium mammal.) And, anyway, I got to thinking about how many of us have lost touch with tracks—just like we've lost touch with so many other natural phenomena, from bird calls to constellations. And I started thinking about the many meanings of tracks. The roles they've played. What they can tell us. So that was the seed from which this essay grew. In it we talk about how archaeologists have used trackways to reconstruct our prehistory; about how, according to some, tracking played a role in our cognitive evolution; and we talk about how about tracks are mainstay of myth and metaphor and visual culture. Lots here folks—I think you'll enjoy it. A text version of this essay is available on Medium. Notes and links 2:45 – The Laetoli prints have been written about in numerous places. Early reports by Mary Leakey and colleagues are here and here. A brief, accessible, up-to-date overview is here. 4:15 – The 2013 prints from Norfolk, England are widely known as the Happisburgh prints. Read the original report here. 4:40 – Read the paper about the 2020 prints from White Sands National Monument here. A popular article about the trackway can be read here. 6:15 – Read Kim Shaw-Williams' "social trackways theory" paper here. More recently, he has expanded these ideas to cover the evolution of language. 8:20 – A 2003 paper by Deborah Wells and colleagues, about the directional tracking abilities of dogs, can be read here. A follow-up is here. 9:30 – Louis Liebenberg's book The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science can be read here. 10:45 – The Robert Macfarlane quote comes from his book The Old Ways. 11:00 – Ethnographic evidence of peopel's ability to recognize individual tracks in some communities is discussed by Liebenberg and Shaw-Williams. 11:30 – Wikipedia has articles about the Ciguapa and Curupira. Read about the Konderong here. The number words of the Xerénte can be read about here. Sesotho time metaphors are briefly mentioned here. 12:15 – Read about the origins of Chinese characters in bird tracks here. View scanned pages of the Boturini Codex here. 13:55 – One recent new analysis of the Laetoli prints can be read here. Another striking recently reported ancient trackway is mentioned here. 14:20 – The Emerson essay from which this quote comes can be viewed here. Correction: The audio version of this episode misstates the age of the trackway discovered near Norfolk, England. It is estimated to be 800,000 years old, not 80,000. Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play—or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

When 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 the author of book published this summer titled Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding our Origins and Rediscovering our Common Humanity. We talked about Brian's research with dogs, foxes, and bonobos and how it led him to a big idea at the center of this new book. The idea is that, much as we domesticated farm animals to make them tamer and easier to work with, we also seem to have domesticated ourselves at some point in our evolutionary past. This process is known as self-domestication—a selection for friendliness. But beyond making us gentler and smilier, the domestication process also had a bunch of unexpected impacts on our behaviors, bodies, and brains. Really unexpected, like the fact that we have globe-shaped heads. According to Brian and Vanessa's account, self-domestication was in fact the force that allowed ancient humans to develop larger social networks and, in turn, more sophisticated technologies. So it may hold the answer to why we're still around while other hominin species—like the Neanderthals—aren't. As Brian says at one point in our conversation, the book is really offering an account of human nature. And, importantly, it's a dual nature. Lurking behind our friendliness—co-existing and co-evolved with our newfound chumminess—is a darker side, a capacity for real cruelty. I consider the human self-domestication hypothesis to be one of the most fascinating ideas of that last decade. Right now it's really at the center of a lot of conversations about human origins and about human and animal minds. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available here. Notes and links Note: Much of what we discuss is covered in Survival of the Friendliest, but additional readings and sources are also listed here. 6:42 – Read the paper inspired by Dr. Hare's early observations about how his dog Oreo could understand human pointing gestures. 8:40 – In one study, Dr. Hare traveled to Siberia to study a population of domesticated foxes—and specifically to ask whether they would show a predilection for cooperative communication. The long-running fox-farm experiment is the subject of a book titled How to Tame a Fox (And Build a Dog). 10:50 – Around the same time as his research in Siberia, Dr. Hare also published work examining how bonobos exhibit more tolerance than chimpanzees. 15:15 – A recent article voicing skepticism about the fox-farm research and the so-called "domestication syndrome." 17:30 – See Dr. Hare's 2017 book, Bonobos: Unique in Mind, Brain, and Behavior, co-authored with Shinya Yamamato. 30:00 – A long-standing puzzle in paleoanthropology is why modern human behavior—as judged by advanced tool use, symbolism, etc.—lagged behind modern human anatomy by more than a hundred thousand years. The eventual emergence of modern behavior is sometimes described as the Upper Paleolithic Revolution. 40:00 – An article Dr. Hare published along with Robert L. Cieri, Steven Churchill, and other colleagues on the origins of "behavioral modernity." 48:30 – Steven Pinker—among other scholars—has argued that violence has declined in human societies from prehistory until today. This idea has been both influential and controversial. 58:45 – Evidence from social psychology suggests that cross-group friendships might be especially powerful in changing attitudes. Here's one paper on the power of inter-group contact. Brian Hare's end-of-show recommendations: Richard Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox David Livingston Smith, On Inhumanity David Stasavage, The Decline and Rise of Democracy See also: books by Joseph Henrich and Michael Tomasello The best way to keep up with Dr. Hare's work is on Twitter (@bharedogguy) website: http://brianhare.net/ Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Welcome 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. We flesh out this idea by walking through a bunch of examples that show how where we stand shapes the facts we attend to, believe, accept, and resist. We also talk about our moment present, polarized and fractured as it is. As we discuss, standpoint epistemology might offer tools to help us make sense of what's happening, understand where others are coming from, and maybe even bridge some of the chasms that divide us. Enjoy! A transcript of this show is available here. Notes and links 2:10 – Learn more about Dr. Toole's outreach organization, Corrupt the Youth. And for more about Dr. Toole's work with the program see this recent profile in Guernica magazine. 6:15 – Socrates was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth. 9:00 – Corrupt the Youth often begins with lessons on the allegory of the cave and the ring of Gyges. 19:50 – For more on the significance of "fake barn country," see this entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Gettier's groundbreaking paper is here. 23:00 – We mention a number of early pioneers in standpoint epistemology, including Rebecca Kukla, Sandra Harding, and Donna Haraway. 26:40 – Jane Addams's letter about women and public housekeeping. 32:20 – Dr. Toole's recent paper—'From Standpoint Epistemology to Epistemic Oppression'—discusses the distinction between marginalized and dominant knowers, among other topics. 32:55 – Kristie Dotson's classic paper on epistemic oppression. You can also listen to a podcast with her here. 37:00 – Indigenous communities in Australia have long known that certain birds spread fire in order to flush out prey. This example is discussed in Dr. Toole's article 'Demarginalizing Standpoint Epistemology.' 38:20 – We discuss three key theses in the standpoint epistemology framework: the situated knowledge thesis; the achievement thesis; and the epistemic privilege thesis. 41:10 – Read more about W.E.B. Dubois's notion of "double consciousness" here. 43:29 – The particular sense of "conceptual resources" we discuss here was introduced by Gaile Pohlhaus, and is further developed by Dr. Toole in her paper, 'From Standpoint Epistemology to Epistemic Oppression.' 44:50 – The concept of "misogynoir" is discussed here. 59:40 – The notion of "consciousness raising" has its roots feminism, as discussed here. 1:11:35 – A recent interview in The Atlantic in which former US President Barack Obama referred to our current moment as one of "epistemological crisis." Briana Toole's end-of-show recommendations: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, by bell hooks Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde Learning from the Outsider Within, Patricia Hill Collins Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan an Nancy Tuana The best way to keep up with Dr. Toole's work is at her website: http://www.brianatoole.com/ Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Today 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 notion of hygge, or, my favorite, the Japan concept of tsundoku. These examples are fun and get a lot of attention, and they certainly make it clear that there's at least some variation. But a more provocative possibility is that even everyday words that seem easy to translate—words for concepts like chair, beautiful, or walk—might actually differ considerably from one language to the next. Today I talk to Dr. Bill Thompson, a postdoc at Princeton University in the Department of Computer Science and Dr. Gary Lupyan, a Professor at the University of Wisconsin in the Department of Psychology. Along with their co-author Sean Roberts, they published a paper this summer that looks at just this issue, at whether basic words have the same meanings across languages. The paper's title is: "Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment." We talk about the computational approach they use to quantify the similarity of word meanings. We consider their finding that certain kinds of concepts are more similar across languages than others. We discuss the role of culture in shaping concepts. And we talk a bit about why their paper caused something of a stir online. I found this to be a really thought-provoking conversation. It circles around one of the deepest questions we can ask about the human mind: Where do our concepts come from? Spoiler: we don't settle the question once and for all here. But we do throw some light on it—perhaps. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Bill Thompson and Dr. Gary Lupyan. Enjoy! The paper we discuss is here. A transcript of this episode is available here. Notes and links 9:20 – A very brief introduction to distributional semantics. A core tenet of such approaches is that "you shall know a word by the company it keeps"—as J. R. Firth famously put it. 16:00 – The Intercontinental Dictionary Series divides the words of the world's languages into 22 semantic domains. See also this blog post by Sean Roberts, in which he reports the results of a survey the authors did on how translatable people thought words from these domains would be across languages. 22:10 – The D-Place dataset is here. 27:00 – The popular write-up which, when shared on Twitter, caused a bit of a stir. End-of-show reading recommendations: Comparing lexicons cross-linguistically, by Asifa Majid The Conceptual Mind: New Directions in the Study of Concepts, edited by Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence Words and the Mind, edited by Barbara Malt and Phillip Wolff Does vocabulary help structure the mind? by Gary Lupyan and Martin Zettersten Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.