Many Minds

Hi friends, we will be on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we’re putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Enjoy!

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There's an old view of the mind that goes something like this: The world is flooding in, and we're sitting back, just trying to process it all. Our minds are basically passive and reactive, always a step behind. Contrast that view with a new one that’s quickly gaining ground. According to this alternative, we don't just react to the world, we anticipate it. We’re not leaning back but trying to stay a step ahead—our minds are fundamentally active and predictive. And our predictions aren't just idle guesses, either—they're shaping how we experience the world. This new view is known as the “predictive processing framework”, and it has implications, not just for how we perceive, but also for how we act and how we feel, for our happiness and our well-being.

My guest today isDr. Mark Miller. Mark is a philosopher of cognition and senior research fellow at the Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies at Monash University. He's part of a new wave of intensely interdisciplinary scholars who are working at the intersections of philosophy, neuroscience, and psychiatry.

Here, Mark and I sketch the predictive processing framework and unpack some of its key pillars. We discuss how this approach can inform our understanding of depression, addiction, and PTSD. We sketch out notions of loops and slopes, stickiness and rigidity, wobble and volatility, edges and grip. And, on the way, we will have a bit to say about video games, play, horror, psychedelics, and meditation.

This was all pretty new terrain for me, but Mark proved an affable and capable guide. If you enjoy this episode and want to explore some of these topics further, definitely check out theContemplative Science Podcast, which Mark co-hosts.

Alright friends, on to my chat with Mark Miller. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is availablehere.

Notes and links

4:15 – Thewebsiteof the Hokkaido University Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience (CHAIN). Thewebsiteof the Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies (M3CS).

6:00 –Dr. Miller co-hosts theContemplative Science podcast, a project of M3CS.

7:30 – For one introduction to the predictive processing framework, see thisarticleby Dr. Miller and colleagues.

11:00 – See Dr. Miller’sessayin Aeon on social media, co-authored with Ben White, as well as this moredetailed treatmentfor an academic audience.

12:00 –See apaperby Dr. Miller and colleagues on depression.

14:00 –Anintroductionto the subfield of “computational psychiatry.”

17:00 –Andy Clark’s“watershed” paperon the predictive processing framework.

18:00 –Arecent bookon “active inference” (which is largely synonymous with the predictive processing approach).

22:00 –Achapteron the idea of the “body as the first prior.”

24:30 –Ademoof the “hollow face” illusion.

29:00 – On the potential value of psychedelics in jarring people out of trenches and ruts, see also ourearlier episodewith Alison Gopnik.

31:00 –Seeour recent episodewith Dimitris Xygalatas.

34:30 –Apopular articleon children wanting to hear the same stories over and over.

38:00 –ApaperbyColtan Scrivnerand colleagues on horror fans and psychological resilience during COVD-19.

42:30 –Arecent articleby Dr. Miller and colleagues about the “predictive dynamics of happiness and well-being,” which covers much of the same terrain as this episode.

46:00 –Arecent paperby Dr. Miller and colleagues on the evocative notion of “grip.”

50:00 – Arecent paperby Dr. Miller and colleagues about video games and predictive processing.

57:00 –Apaperby Dr. Miller and colleagues in which they discuss meditation in the context of the prediction processing approach.

Dr. Miller recommends books by the philosopherAndy Clark, including:

Surfing Uncertainty

You can read more about Dr. Miller’s work on hiswebsiteand follow him onTwitter.

Many Mindsis 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 byKensy 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 (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).

You can subscribe toMany Mindson Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

**You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletterhere!**

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].

For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/),or follow us on Twitter:@ManyMindsPod.

Welcome back all! So, this episode is a first for us. Two firsts, actually. For one, it features our first-ever repeat guest: Andrew Barron, a neuroscientist at Macquarie University. If you're a long-time listener, you might remember that Andy was actually the guest on our very first episode, 'Of bees and brains,' in February 2020. And, second, this episode is our first-ever "live show." We recorded this interview in July at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute in St Andrews, Scotland.

Andy and his colleagues—the philosophers Marta Halina and Colin Klein—just released an ambitious paper titled 'Transitions in Cognitive Evolution.' In it, they take a wide-angle view of mind; they zoom out to try to tell an overarching story of how brains and cognition evolved across the tree of life. The story, as they tell it, is not about a smoothly gradual evolution of cognitive sophistication. Rather, it's a story built around five major transitions—fundamental changes, that is, to how organisms process information. 

In this conversation, Andy and I discuss their framework and how it takes inspiration from other transitional accounts of life and mind. We lay out each of the five stages—or portals, as we refer to them—and talk about the organisms that we find on either side of these portals. We discuss what propels organisms to make these radical changes, especially considering that evolution is not prospective. It doesn't look ahead—it can't see what abilities might be possible down the road. We talk about how this framework got its start, particularly in some of Andy's thinking about insect brains and how they differ from vertebrate brains. And, as a bit of a bonus, we left in some of the live Q & A with the audience. In it we touch on octopuses, eusocial insects, oysters, and a bunch else. 

Speaking of major transitions, I will be going on parental leave for much of the fall. So this is, in fact, the final episode of Season 4 and then the podcast will go on a brief hiatus. Before we get started on Season 5, we'll be putting up some of our favorite episodes from the archive.

Alright friends, on to my conversation with Dr. Andrew Barron, recorded live at DISI 2023. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:30 – For further information about the “major transitions” project, see the project’s web page here.

7:00 – Many transitional accounts of evolution draw inspiration from the classic book The Major Transitions in Evolution.

8:00 – One influential previous transitional account of the evolution of cognition was put forward by Dennett in Kinds of Minds. Another was put forward by Ginsburg and Jablonka in The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul.

12:45 – A brief introduction to cnidaria.

18:00 – The idea of cellular memory has been garnering more and more attention—see, e.g., this popular article.  

21:00 – The idea of “reflective” systems is also used in computer science. 

26:00 – The scala naturae, or Great Chain of Being, was the notion that organisms could be arranged on a scale of sophistication, with humans on the top of the scale. 

30:00 – The “teleological fallacy” as Dr. Barron and colleagues describe it in their paper is the fallacy of “appeal[ing] to later benefits to explain earlier changes.”

34:00 – A brief introduction to the phylum gastropoda.

37:00 – For an overview of Dr. Barron’s work on the neuroscience of honey bees, see our previous episode.  

Scientists who study the mind and brain have always been drawn to periods of intense change—to those life stages marked by rapid transformation. Infancy is one of those periods, of course. Adolescence is another. But there's a less-discussed time of life when our brains and minds have to reconfigure: the window surrounding when we become parents. 

My guests today are Dr. Winnie Orchard and Dr. Jodi Pawluski. Winnie is a cognitive neuroscientist and postdoctoral scholar at the Yale Child Study Center. Jodi is a neuroscientist, author, and podcaster affiliated with the University of Rennes in France. Both are experts in the neural and cognitive changes that surround pregnancy, motherhood, and parenthood more generally. 

Here, we talk about the idea of "matrescence" as a distinctive developmental stage. We discuss the research around memory loss in early motherhood, as well as findings that certain brain areas get fine-tuned during this period. We talk about postpartum anxiety, depression, and psychosis, and what may be causing them. We consider the finding that having children—and, in fact, having more children—seems to confer a protective effect on the aging brain. Throughout we talk about which of these changes also occur in fathers and other non-birthing parents. And we consider the difficulty of scientifically studying a period of life—parenthood—that is not only rife with social and psychological changes, but also fraught with expectations and narratives.

Alright friends, I hope you enjoy this one. As you'll hear, this research area is very much still in its infancy. There are definitely some provocative findings. But maybe more exciting are all the questions that remain.

Without further ado, here's my chat with Dr. Winnie Orchard and Dr. Jodi Pawluski. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode will be available soon.

Notes and links

2:45 – For more on the relationship between adolescence and “matrescence,” see this recent review paper by Winnie and colleagues in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

6:00 – For discussions surrounding the idea of “mommy brain,” see Jodi’s podcast, ‘Mommy Brain Revisited.’ See also this recent editorial by Jodi and colleagues in JAMA Neurology. 

17:00 – A recent meta-analysis on cognitive impairment during pregnancy. 

25:00 – A study by Winnie and colleagues showing subjective—but not objective—memory deficits in mothers one year after giving birth.  

26:45 – An influential study showing structural changes in the brain following pregnancy. The same study also found that some of these changes correlated with measures of maternal attachment.

28:00 – A recent review article by Jodi and colleagues on the idea of neural fine-tuning in early motherhood.  

41:45 – A recent review paper by Jodi and colleagues about the neural underpinnings of postpartum depression and anxiety. 

44:00 – A review paper about postpartum psychosis.

 51:00 – A study on the prevalence of postpartum depression across cultures. 

58:00 – A 2014 review of research on mother-child synchrony.

1:00:00 – A recent study by Winnie and colleagues looking at how having children affects later life brain function. Another study by Winnie and colleagues on the same topic. 

1:13:00 – Several studies have documented general changes in “Big 5” personality factors as people age. A study examining this in both American and Japanese participants is here.

1:18:00 – Since we recorded this interview, the publication date for the English version of Jodi’s book has been scheduled. It comes out in September 2023—more info here.

Recommendations

 Dr. Orchard recommends:

Baby Brain, Sarah McKay

Mother Brain, Chelsea Conaboy

Dr. Pawluski recommends:

Matrescence, by Lucy Jones

After the Storm, by Emma Jane Unsworth

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute

We're still on summer break, but we wanted to share a favorite interview from our archives. Enjoy!

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We’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 appreciated capacities. Bats don’t just echolocate, they also sing. And, as we’ll see, they sing with gusto. 

My guest today is Dr. Mirjam Knörnschild. She directs the Behavioral Ecology and Bioacoustics Lab at the Natural History Museum of Berlin. She and her team study bat communication, cognition, and social life; they focus in particular on bat social vocalizations—what we might call bat signals. 

Here, we do a bit of Bats 101. We talk about how bats form a spectacularly diverse group, or taxon. We talk about the mechanics of echolocation. We talk about the mind-bogglingly boisterous acoustic world of bats and how they’re able to navigate it. We discuss Mirjam and her team's recent paper in Science magazine, showing that baby bat pups babble much like human infants. And, last but not least, we talk about what it's like to be a bat.

As I say in this conversation, I've always been a bit unnerved by bats, but part of me also knew they were seriously cool. But really, I didn't know the half of it. There's so much more to these creatures than meets the casual eye.

One last thing before we jump in: as a little bonus, for this episode Mirjam was kind enough to share some examples of the bat calls we discuss in the episode. So there’s a bit of an audio appendix at the end where you can hear slowed-down versions.

On to my chat with Dr. Mirjam Knörnschild. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

7:20 – Meet the Honduran white bat, which Knörnschild likens to a “fluffy little white ping pong ball.”

13:50 – Austin, Texas is home to Bracken Cave, which harbors more than 15 million bats.

16:30 – Much of Dr. Knörnschild’s work focuses on the Greater Sac-winged bat, which is a member of the Emballonurid family.

18:00 – See the audio appendix for an example of a Greater Sac-winged bat’s echolocation calls. See also examples on Dr. Knörnschild’s website.

21:10 – A paper by Dr. Knörnschild and colleagues about how echolocation calls serve social functions in addition to navigational functions.

24:00 – A paper by Dr. Knörnschild and colleagues on the origin and diversity of bat songs.

30:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Knörnschild and colleagues on the correlation between social complexity and vocal complexity across bat species.

37:30 – A brand new special issue on vocal learning in humans and animals, including a review of vocal learning in mammals by Dr. Vincent Janik and Dr. Knörnschild.

40:35 – Dr. Knörnschild’s first scientific paper, in 2006, reported the observation that Greater Sac-winged bats seemed to babble like infants.

47:20 – A recent paper by Dr. Knörnschild and colleagues on territorial songs in male Greater Sac-winged bats.

53:45 – A very recently published paper in Science by Ahana Fernandez, Dr. Knörnschild, and collaborators; see also this popular article and a video about the findings.

1:05:30 – A recent paper by Dr. Knörnschild and colleagues on bat “motherese.”

1:12:00 – For a concise narrative summary of Dr. Knörnschild’s research, including some of the future directions she is planning to pursue, see the article ‘Bats in translation.’

1:14:00 – The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously argued that we can’t really know what it’s like to be a bat.

Dr. Knörnschild recommends two books by Merlin Tuttle:

Bats: An Illustrated Guide to All Species

The Secret Lives of Bats

You can find Dr. Knörnschild on Twitter (@MKnornschild) and follow her research at her website.   

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, 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 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: [email protected].  

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

We're taking a little summer break right now, but we wanted to share a favorite essay from our archives. Enjoy!

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Welcome 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 episode.” So that’s what we have for you today. And I hope you find it eye-opening.

Quick reminder before we get to it: As always, we could really use your help in getting the word out about the show. That might mean subscribing, if you don’t already. It might mean rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts. It might mean sending the show to a friend or two. I mean honestly it could mean knitting a Many Minds cardigan for the cold months ahead and sporting it around town. Ceaselessly.

Alright all, on to this week’s essay ‘The eye’s mind.’ Enjoy!

A text version of this episode (enriched with images!) is readable on Medium.

Notes

2:00 – The eye of the giant squid was described in detail for the first time in 2012, in this paper.

3:10 – On diversity in animal pupils, see this recent paper.

4:40 – Pupil changes to imagined and linguistically encoded light can be read about here and here.

5:30 – Eckherd Hess’s early research on pupils is summarized in his 1965 Scientific American article, ‘Attitude and Pupil Size’.

6:45 – The 1966 paper by Kahneman and Beatty is here. Or see a 2018 review of more recent research on pupils and cognitive effort.

8:10 – Hess’s studies on the social functions of pupils are recounted in his 1975 Scientific American article, ‘The Role of Pupil Size in Communication’. Several of his classic studies have been replicated just this year (with good but not perfect success).

8:50 – Mariska Kret’s suggestion about how pupils fit the baby schema can be found here.

9:45 – Kret’s studies of pupil mimicry include this one, this one, and this one, among others.

10:15 – The 2021 paper by Wohltjen & Wheatley on “pupillary synchrony” is available here.

12:00 – The 1974 Nature article titled ‘Pupils of a talking parrot’ is available here.

Correction: The audio version of this essay misstated the size of the pupil changes in Daniel Kahneman's classic studies. These changes were roughly .2 to .5 mm, not 2 to 5 mm.

Have you heard of Octopolis? It’s a site off the coast of Australia where octopuses come together. It’s been described as a kind of underwater "settlement" or "city." Now, smart as octopuses are, they are not really known for being particularly sociable. But it seems that, given the right conditions, they can shift in that direction. So it's not a huge leap to wonder whether these kinds of cephalopod congregations could eventually give rise to something else—a culture, a language, maybe something like a civilization. 

This is the idea at the center of Ray Nayler's new book, The Mountain in the Sea. It's both a thriller of sorts and a novel of ideas; it’s set in the near future, in the Con Dao archipelago of Vietnam. It grapples with the nature of intelligence and meaning, with the challenges of interspecies communication and companionship, and ultimately with what it means to be human. 

Here, Ray and I talk about how he got interested in cephalopods and how he came to know the Con Dao archipelago. We discuss some of the choices he made as an author—choices about what drives the octopuses in his book to develop symbols and about what those symbols are like. We consider the major human characters in his book, in particular two ambitious researchers who embody very different approaches to understanding minds. We also talk a fair bit about AI—another central character in the book, after all, is a super-intelligent android. Along the way, Ray and I touch on Arrival, biosemiotics, the nature of symbols, memory and storytelling, embodiment, epigenetics, cephalopod camouflage, exaptation, and the sandbox that is speculative fiction. 

This episode is obviously something a little different for us. Ray is a novelist, after all, but he’s also an intellectual omnivore, and this conversation, maybe more than any other we’ve had on the show, spans three major branches of mind—human, animal, and machine. If you enjoy this episode, note that The Mountain in the Sea just came out in paperback, with a jaw-droppingly cool cover, I’ll add. I highly recommend that you check it out.

One more thing, while I have you: If you're enjoying Many Minds, we would be most grateful for your help in getting the word out. You might consider sharing the show with a friend or a colleague, writing us a review on Apple Podcasts, or leaving us a rating on Spotify or Apple. All this would really help us grow our audience. 

Alright friends, on to my conversation with Ray Nayler. Enjoy!

 A transcript of this episode is available here. 

Notes and links

8:30 – For the review of The Mountain in the Sea in question, see here. 

14:00 – Con Dao is a national park in Vietnam.

17:00 – For our previous episode about cephalopods, see here.

19:00 – For a book-length introduction to biosemiotics, see here.  

24:00 – A video of Japanese macaques washing sweet potatoes. 

26:30 – For discussion of the human case, in which environmental pressures of some kind may have propelled cooperation, see our episode with Michael Tomasello. 

29:00 – A popular article about RNA editing in cephalopods. 

35:00 – A video of the “passing cloud” phenomenon in cuttlefish. A brief article about the phenomenon. A video showing other forms of camouflage in octopuses.

41:00 – An experimental exploration of the movement from “iconic” to “symbolic” communication in humans. 

44:00 – A popular article about the communication system used in the movie Arrival. 

49:00 – One source of inspiration for Ray’s book was Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think. 

1:00:00 – An article on the idea of “architects” and “gardeners” among writers. 

1:05:00 – Ray’s story ‘The Disintegration Loops’ is available here.

There's a common story about the human past that goes something like this. For a few hundred thousand years during the Stone Age we were kind of limping along as a species, in a bit of a cognitive rut, let’s say. But then, quite suddenly, around 30 or 40 thousand years ago in Europe, we really started to come into our own. All of a sudden we became masters of art and ornament, of symbolism and abstract thinking. This story of a kind of "cognitive revolution" in the Upper Paleolithic has been a mainstay of popular discourse for decades. I’m guessing you’re familiar with it. It's been discussed in influential books by Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari; you can read about it on Wikipedia. What you may not know is that this story, compelling as it may be, is almost certainly wrong.

My first guest today is Dr. Eleanor Scerri, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, where she heads the Pan-African Evolution research group. My second guest is Dr. Manuel Will, an archaeologist and Lecturer at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Together, Eleanor and Manuel are authors of a new paper titled 'The revolution that still isn't: The origins of behavioral complexity in Homo sapiens.' In the paper, they pull together a wealth of evidence showing that there really was no cognitive revolution—no one watershed moment in time and space. Rather, the origins of modern human cognition and culture are to be found not in one part of Europe but across Africa. And they’re also to be found much earlier than that classic picture suggests. 

Here, we talk about the “cognitive revolution" model and why it has endured. We discuss a seminal paper from the year 2000 that first influentially challenged the revolution model. We talk about the latest evidence of complex cognition from the Middle Stone Age in Africa—including the perforation of marine shells to make necklaces; and the use of ochre for engraving, painting, and even sunblock. We discuss how, though the same complex cognitive abilities were likely in place for the last few hundred thousand years, those abilities were often expressed patchily in different parts of the world at different times. And we consider the factors that led to this patchy expression, especially changes in population size.  

I confess I was always a bit taken with this whole "cognitive revolution" idea. It had a certain mystery and allure. This new picture that’s taking its place is certainly a bit messier, but no less fascinating. And, more importantly, it’s truer to the complexities of the human saga. 

Alright friends, on to my conversation with Eleanor Scerri & Manuel Will. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:30 – The paper by Dr. Scerri and Dr. Will we discuss in this episode is here. Their paper updates and pays tribute to a classic paper by McBrearty and Brooks, published in 2000.

6:00 – The classic “cognitive revolution” model sometimes discussed under the banner of “behavioral modernity” or the “Great Leap Forward.” It has been recently featured, for instance, in Harari’s Sapiens.

11:00 – Dr. Scerri has written extensively on debates about where humans evolved within Africa—see, e.g., this paper. 

18:00 – A study of perforated marine shells in North Africa during the Middle Stone Age. A paper by Dr. Will and colleagues about the use of various marine resources during this period. 

23:00 – A paper describing the uses of ochre across Africa during the Middle Stone Age. Another paper describing evidence for ochre processing 100,000 years ago at Blombos Cave in South Africa. At the same site, engraved pieces of ochre have been found.

27:00 – A study examining the evidence that ochre was used as an adhesive.

30:00 – For a recent review of the concept of “cumulative culture,” see here. We discussed the concept of “cumulative culture” in our earlier episode with Dr. Cristine Legare. 

37:00 – For an overview of the career of the human brain and the timing of various changes, see our earlier episode with Dr. Jeremy DeSilva.

38:00 – An influential study on the role of demography in the emergence of complex human behavior.

41:00 – On the idea that distinctive human intelligence is due in large part to culture and our abilities to acquire cultural knowledge, see Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success. See also our earlier episode with Dr. Michael Muthukrishna. 

45:00 – For discussion of the Neanderthals and why they may have died out, see our earlier episode with Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes. 

Recommendations

Dr. Scerri recommends research on the oldest Homo sapiens fossils, found in Morocco and described here, and new research on the evidence for the widespread burning of landscapes in Malawi, described here. 

Dr. Will rec

You know the feeling. You're trying to read or write or think through a project, maybe even just respond to an email, when your attention starts to drift. You may not even notice it until you've already picked up your phone or jumped tabs, until your mind has already wandered way off-piste. This problem of distraction has become a bit of a modern-day obsession. We now fret about how to stay focused, how to avoid time-sucks, how to use our attention wisely. But it turns out this fixation of ours—contemporary as it may seem—is really not so new. 

My guest today is Dr. Jamie Kreiner, Professor of History at the University of Georgia. Jamie is the author of a new book titled The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell us about Distraction. In the book, Jamie shows that Christian monks in late antiquity and the early middle ages were—like us—a bit obsessed with attention. And their understanding of attention fit within a broad and often remarkably detailed understanding of the mind.

In this conversation, Jamie and I talk about why monks in this era cared so much about distraction. We discuss how they understood the relationship between mind and body; how they conceptualized memory, meditation, and mind-wandering. We discuss some of the mnemonic techniques they used, some of the graphical and textual devices that helped keep them focused, and some of the metaphors and visualization techniques they innovated. Along the way we also touch on fasting, sleep, demons and angels, the problem of discernment, the state of pure prayer, the Six Wings mnemonic device, metacognitive maneuvering, and much more. 

I’ll just say I really enjoyed The Wandering Mind. As Jamie and I chat about here, the book illuminates an earlier understanding of human psychology that feels deeply familiar in some ways, and delightfully strange in others. I think you definitely get a sense of that in this conversation.

Alright friends, on to my chat with Dr. Jamie Kreiner. Enjoy!

 A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

4:00 – A webpage devoted to the Ark of Hugh of Saint Victor.

 6:30 – For a detailed (and positive) review essay about The Wandering Mind, see here.

 11:30 ­– The Redwall books, by Brian Jacques, are well known for featuring elaborate feasts. An article about some of the best of these.

18:30 – For more on how the body was understood in the early Christian world, see The Burden of the Flesh.

26:30 – Text written continuously is known as scripta continua.

27:30 – Articles that celebrate medieval marginalia can be found here, here, and here. 

40:00 – An article about the Six Wings mnemonic. For more on mnemonic techniques in the medieval world, see Mary Carruthers’ book.

53:00 – On the idea of “pure prayer,” see the book, The Ladder of Prayer and the Ship of Stirrings.

57:30 – Dr. Kreiner’s next book, which comes out in January 2024, is a translation of some of John Cassian’s work on distraction.

Dr. Kreiner’s book recommendations can be found in a recent article here.

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, 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 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: [email protected]. 

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

We humans are social animals—and that takes work. As we move through the world, we have to navigate around other people's desires, needs, and beliefs. Much of this work happens in conversation—through our words, our glances, our gestures. It happens in countless different situations, according to different norms and systems. Human social interaction is, in short, a multi-layered, delicate dance. But it’s also not the only kind of social interaction out there. Apes, dogs, and other social species also have to negotiate with others and sometimes with humans. There's not just one species of conversation, in other words—there are many. 

My guest today is Dr. Federico Rossano, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science and Director of the Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of California, San Diego. Throughout his career, Federico has studied social interaction from a number of different angles, in a range of different settings, and across different species—including humans, bonobos, orangutans, and most recently dogs. 

 Here, we discuss the field of conversation analysis and how Federico got started in it. We talk about his early work on how people use gaze in conversation, and how the use of gaze differs across cultures. We discuss how Federico ported some of the tools of conversation analysis over to study social interaction in apes. We also talk about his new line of research on how dogs use soundboards to communicate with their human caretakers. This work has been attracting a lot of buzz and also a bit of pushback, so we dig into the controversy. Along the way, we touch on: Umberto Eco; platypuses; how much work it takes to simply come across as ordinary; the concept of the human interaction engine; the Clever Hans effect; the impossible task; and why many scientists are so skittish about animal language research.

This episode is not just about different forms of conversation. It is itself a different form of conversation—at least for us. This was our first ever in-person interview, something we expect to do a bit more of going forward.

Alright friends, on to my real-life, 3d, face-to-face chat with Dr. Federico Rossano. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode will be available soon.

Notes and links 

4:00 – The classic 1964 paper, ‘The Neglected Situation,’ by Erving Goffman.

6:00 – An obituary for the novelist and semiotician, Umberto Eco, who died in 2016. His best-loved novel, perhaps, is The Name of the Rose. He’s also the author of a book of essays called, Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition.

17:30 – The classic paper, ‘On doing “being ordinary”’, by Harvey Sacks.  

20:00 – A brief introduction to Conversation Analysis. 

32:00 – Dr. Rossano’s work on gaze is summarized in his 2012 chapter, ‘Gaze in Conversation.’ His work on questions in Italian is here. 

35:30 – The quote from Georg Simmel is as follows: “[T]he totality of social relations of human beings, their self-assertions and self-abnegation, their intimacies and estrangements, would be changed in unpredictable ways if there occurred no glance of eye to eye.” 

39:50 – Dr. Rossano’s work on gaze across cultures is described here. 

43:00 – Dr. Rossano did his postdoctoral work with Michael Tomasello, who joined us for a previous episode. 

47:00 – Dr. Rossano’s work on bonobo interaction is here and here. 

56:00 – Dr. Rossano’s original work on food sharing in orangutans is here. A more recent paper on food sharing is here.

1:05:00 – The idea of the “human interaction engine” was first proposed by Stephen Levinson in 2006. 

1:10:30 – See the recent theme issue on ‘Revisiting the human “interaction engine”’. Dr. Rossano’s contributions to the issue are here and here.

1:18:00 – Dr. Rossano’s work on dogs has been done in coordination with the company FluentPet. FluentPet makes the pet-friendly buttons (aka soundboards) made famous by Bunny, the “talking dog of TikTok.”

1:23:30 – For an insider’s view of what happened in the original “animal language” studies, see a paper by Irene Pepperberg here. 

1:27:30 – A recent review by Dr. Rossano and colleagues about the use of “augmented interspecies communication devices” like the soundboards he and colleagues are currently studying. 

1:38:30 – The “impossible task,” a widely used task in comparative psychology, was first described in 2009.

1:44:45 – A recent podcast discussed

Let’s start with a little riddle: What kind of organism has no eyes, no mouth, and no brain, but—arguably—has a mind?

Most of the work on non-human minds has, naturally, focused on animals—apes, dogs, whales, bats. Some have considered other branches of the tree of life, too—cephalopods, say, or insects. But, just over the past few decades, some brave scientists and philosophers have begun to look even further. They’re starting to ask whether concepts like planning, memory, and awareness may also extend beyond animals, into an entirely different kingdom of life. They’re starting to take seriously the minds of plants. 

My guests today are Paco Calvo and Natalie Lawrence. Paco is director of the Minimal Intelligence Lab at the University of Murcia in Spain and one of the leading figures in the new science of plant intelligence. Natalie is a writer, illustrator, and historian of science based in London. Paco and Natalie are the authors a new book, Planta Sapiens. In it, they make the case that plants—though so often treated as an inert backdrop—are, in fact, cognitive creatures. Albeit creatures of a very different sort. 

In this conversation, we talk about the fact that plants are so often ignored, by both lay people and scientists alike, and consider some of the reasons why this may be. We discuss some spectacular phenomena that have recently come to light about plants—how they respond to anesthesia, how they mimic other plants’ leaves, how they seem to be able to “see” their surroundings. We talk about the question of whether certain plants have evolved to be more cognitively sophisticated than others. We consider the fact that plants and animals rely on the very same neurotransmitters and traffic in the same sort of electrical signaling. We also touch on wild versus domesticated plants, Charles Darwin’s root-brain hypothesis, plant sensing as akin to echolocation, the power and dangers of time-lapse photography, and the question of whether plants have inner experience.

Plants are super cool in themselves. Honestly, some of the stuff we discuss in this episode—if you’ve never heard it before—will kind of blow your mind. But plants are also more than that: they're a prism through which to examine some of the biggest questions about intelligence and cognition. Questions like: What are the minimal requirements for conscious experience? Are brains necessary for thinking? Can we truly compare the cognitive abilities of very different species? And should we? 

One quick announcement: for those who may be new to the show, don’t forget to check out our monthly newsletter. In it, we share recaps of our latest episodes and links to a bunch of other stuff that caught our eye. You can find the sign-up link down in the show notes. 

Alright friends, without further ado, on to my conversation with Paco Calvo and Natalie Lawrence. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode will be available soon.

Notes and links

3:00 – For a popular overview of research on the mimicking plant, Boquila trifoliata, see here. The recent study testing whether this plant can also mimic unfamiliar (plastic!) plants, see here. 

20:00 – The focus on climbing plants began at least as early as Charles Darwin—see his 1875 book, On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants. 

24:30 – For discussion of domestication and how it affects the behavior, physiology, and cognition of animals, see our earlier episode with Brian Hare.

25:00 – Darwin introduced the term “circumnutation” in his 1880 book, The Power of Movement in Plants.

28:00 – The original paper in which the idea of “plant blindness” was introduced. Since this term was coined, a wealth of research has looked at the underpinnings and consequences of “plant blindness,” and has tested interventions that might mitigate it (e.g., here).  

39:00 – A study investigating the effects of anesthetic drugs on several plants, including Venus Fly Traps.

44:00 – A recent article reviewing what we know about neurotransmitters in plants.

51:00 – A very brief overview of the vascular system of plants. 

53:00 – Our audio essay on Darwin’s “root-brain hypothesis” (or read here). 

57:00 – A recent study on peas reaching toward support poles, suggesting they are able to “see” those supports.

1:00:00 – A study examining “skototropic” behavior in a tropical vine.

1:03:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Calvo and a colleague on the question of plant sentience. Skeptical discussions of the idea of plant sentience can be found here and here.  

Paco Calvo recommends:

The Sentient Cell (forthcoming), by František Baluška and colleagues