An insightful and engaging conversation with @pbrakes.bsky.social on how and why to conserve animal cultures

A look back out our five most popular episodes of 2025!! 🎉🎉 (in order of release)

Had fun with this one! In which I discuss: dolphins, elephants, marmosets, teknonymy, necronymy, reciprocal names in New Guinea, nominative determinism, the Bob-Kirk effect, the face-name-matching effect, name signs, toponyms, dog names, name uniqueness, alexinomia, toponyms, name taboos, etc.

For the finale of season 7, we have a new audio essay out @manymindspod.bsky.social by @kensycoop.bsky.social! It's an exploration of names in the animal kingdom - what they are, who uses them, and why. In case you get hooked, we've put together a separate playlist of all our essays so far. Enjoy!

Come for the (more-puzzling-than-you-realize!) puzzle of episodic memory. Stay for our discussion of infantile amnesia, highly superior autobiographical memory, cryptomnesia, evidential systems in languages, cow stomachs...

Awesome collection of papers—and a great introduction by @schrisomalis.bsky.social & @helenamiton.bsky.social!

My main takeaway from this one: Dog domestication is a singular "natural experiment" in brain evolution, one that we're just starting to understand. It's a bit bonkers more neuroscientists aren't working on it.

Natalie Lawrence (ENCHANTED CREATURES) and I (HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY) were interviewed by @kensycoop.bsky.social on the @manymindspod.bsky.social #podcast! Some monster-making egs we explored: 1/ 💙📚 🧪🗃 #ancient #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thCentury #politics #psychology #HAMH 🧵

My reaction to social AI had always been one of dismay, disgust, fatalism, maybe even grief for our species. I won't say this conversation left me feeling optimistic, exactly, but it certainly broadened my imagination.

A fun one! In which we discuss... - the deep evolutionary history of birds - sci-fi-sounding structures in bird brains - the perennial puzzle of magnetoreception - seasonal changes in bird (and some mammal) brains - unihemispheric sleep - gynandromophry - the extractive foraging hypothesis etc.!

This was as good as I hoped—surprised I haven't been hearing more buzz about it!

Why do we smile? What makes pulling back the lip corners a fundamentally positive act? Why don’t we beam out good vibes by blinking our eyes or wrinkling our noses? From our archive, @kensycoop.bsky.social's essay about the (murky) origins of the smile: disi.org/dawn-of-the-...

Super fun having @manvir.bsky.social on the podcast (again)! I strongly recommend his new book—especially if you like your non-fiction laced with personal narrative, quirky characters, & history of ideas.

Thank you, @kensycoop.bsky.social, for having me on! We had a great conversation about shamanism—its cognitive foundations, place in Paleolithic societies, role in Abrahamic religions, manifestations in industrialized societies (including hedge wizards), and much more.

A fascinating podcast with Sheina Lew-Levy and Dorsa Amir about childhood across cultures, very insightful ideas about how contemporary Western parents could learn from forager childhoods, especially the importance of peer culture (read the Opies!). podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/v...

This was such a fun conversation about childhood, play, and agency across cultures. Thanks for having @sheinalew.bsky.social & I on the show!

This was such a fun conversation - grateful for Kensy's excellent questions and a space to share my ongoing project with @lmesseri.bsky.social!

In which we discuss... - the Big Five and other "Big Few" models - the Myer's Briggs - how personality reliably changes with age - how personality *doesn't* really change with life events - the (putative) biological basis of personality - how personality varies by gender, birth order (?), occupation

More colorful example of a coordination device: the Jivaro "banana clock." Every guest invited to a feast gets a green banana from the same stalk. When the bananas are just about ripe, the guests know the event is due. (hat tip to William Buckner; reported in Harner, 1973)

Lots in this one! We touch on: - ontological shock - mysticism - "comforting delusions" - "unselfing" - microdosing - placebo effects & adverse effects - physicalism and idealism - belief change - environmental virtues - meditation - psychedelics as "agents of moral enhancement"

“Handy Mnemonics: The Five-Fingered Memory Machine” — @kensycoop explores the history of storing knowledge on the surface of fingers and palms: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/handy-mnemonics

A few highlights from my "time tools" paper in 🧵 below. First, up "mountain calendars"...

The biology of cephalopod camouflage is just as intricate, bizarre, and enigma-riddled as you might hope. Super fascinating stuff in this one!

How are humans able to make sense of time? Not with special biology but with “time tools”—ideas, practices, and artifacts that render time more concrete. My new paper explores this vast, varied toolkit—one that makes use of knots, nuts, hands, flowers, mountains, shadows, and much more. (link 👇)

Here's a very interesting read for the cognitive anthropologists out there. @kensycoop.bsky.social discusses the many ways by which humans have made sense of the passing of time. Humans being humans, there are many unexpectedly delightful solutions to the problem of time-keeping – such as knotting.

Part of the "many" in 'Many Minds' is that we try to feature a wide breadth of disciplines. This is our first episode with a literary scholar—and a fun one!

Thanks to @kensycoop.bsky.social for this great interview about my book. We cover domestication syndrome, plasticity-led evolution, soft inheritance, animal traditions, how culture shapes evolution, and more. Kensy also does a wonderful production job, turning me into a coherent speaker! Thank you

The Many Minds podcast with the very sharp @kensycoop.bsky.social is one of my faves these days, and I especially love this episode with @tanialombrozo.bsky.social , which does a deep dive in how we learn not just by experience or exposure but also by thinking. open.spotify.com/episode/1Clj...

Really enjoyed this one! In which we discuss: - the prehistory of string - why anthropology fell in—and out of—love with string figures - Jacob's Ladder and other strikingly widespread figures - knots galore - topology as the first branch of math - why the human mind is drawn to string figures etc.

Excited for my 7th DISI! Happy—of course—to answer any questions if you're thinking of applying.

Enjoyed this one! In which we discuss: - the curse of knowledge & illusion of explanatory depth - why chain-of-thought prompting works (or doesn't) - "Explain Like I'm Five" - the Tower of Pisa thought experiment - representational re-description - learning by writing, talking, & presenting - etc.!

Naturally, I love all our episodes equally. But these 5 are great!

A fun one to close out the year! In which we discuss: - the puzzle of (left) lateralization - neural plasticity & redundancy - the power/limits of fMRI - whether the brain reflects linguistic theorizing - networks, areas, natural kinds - Broca, Wernicke, Chomsky - the brains of polyglots Etc.!

Strikes me that our 15-month-old definitely uses interjections way more often than “real” words. Partial list: Ohh ["Just noticed something cool!"] Ohh-ho-ho ["Just noticed something REALLY cool!"] Wow / Whoa (“Cool”!) Uh-oh [something fell] Ahhhh [appreciating drink] Mm-nom-nom [appreciating food]

Some weaverbird knots and stitches.

Still in the market for suitable alternatives...

Are you more of a bird or a frog? Hedgehog or fox? Ant, spider, or bee? My recent post about animal-based schemes for talking about differences in intellectual/academic personality. kensycooperrider.com/blog/2024/10...

Welcome new followers!! We're a podcast about minds—human, animal, artificial. We explore the diversity of thinking/sensing/learning from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Recent topics: the "wood wide web," machine culture, genetics of IQ, electroreception, and more! disi.org/manyminds/

In which we discuss... * what counts as art * AI as tool, medium, collaborator, curator * possible effects of AI on cultural/cognitive diversity * how ChatGPT is changing human language * generalized Darwinism * whether AIs will displace human podcasters ... among other topics!

This was great. Can't recall ever being excited for a collection of letters to come out... www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

In which we discuss... * what counts as art * AI as tool, medium, collaborator, curator * possible effects of AI on cultural/cognitive diversity * how ChatGPT is changing human language * generalized Darwinism * whether AIs will displace human podcasters ... among other topics!

I wanted to do this episode because I genuinely wasn't sure how to think about IQ. Hoping to do more in the "How should we think about [ ]?" spirit. What other constructs/debates/paradigms/subfields would be worth featuring?

Would love to hear your nominations! I don't trust my judgment on which episodes are best—too deep in them all.

In which we discuss: spelling ability, child prodigies, the chemical composition of money, the shared quirks of twins reared apart, the Flynn Effect (and reverse Flynn Effect), birth order, the genetics of height, and the problem of missing heritability—among other topics!

How does one thinker differ from another? I wrote about a fun tradition of classifying intellectual personality in terms of certain emblematic animals—foxes, frogs, birds, bees, and more. (First blogpost in—yikes!—almost three years.) kensycooperrider.com/blog/2024/10...

Do check this one out! Especially if you (like me) got a bit enchanted with all this talk of tree communication and cooperation...

New preprint!! 📣📣 A review of gesture in New Guinea, covering: pointing, emblems, time gestures, body count systems, and facial expressions. The region remains woefully under-documented, but there are still plenty of intriguing observations. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Had fun with this one—and learned a bunch!

New Research Article: Emblems: Meaning at the interface of language and gesture All about gestures like: 👍✌️👌🤷 With @kensycoop in @glossa_oa. I'm so proud of this one.

One of my favorite episodes of late. Not to be missed!