Culture, from birth to death (metal)
Culture can be a little hard to wrap our minds around. It's seemingly everywhere, enveloping us—but where is it exactly? What are its core p...
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Science & Medicine
Many Minds
Our world is brimming with beings—human, animal, and artificial. We explore how they think, sense, feel, and learn. Conversations and more, every two weeks.
Episodes
20 of 173 episodes
Island of the tool users
Tool use is rare in the animal kingdom—but maybe not as rare as we once thought. Since Jane Goodall famously observed a chimpanzee fishing f...
Cognitive offloading and its consequences
For thousands of years—maybe for as long as we've been human—we've offloaded our thinking. We've counted on our fingers. We've carved tallie...
Coming of age in Ngogo
It's a familiar story in many ways. A child is born, and for years afterward is adored and indulged and anchored to home and family. But the...
The natural history of linguistic diversity
Thousands of languages are used around the world today, and this linguistic diversity is a precious part of our human heritage. But it's als...
From the archive: Electric ecology
Hi friends! We're still taking a bit of a summer pause. We'll be back at the end of August—in the meanwhile, enjoy this listener favorite fr...
From the archive: Varieties of childhood
Hi friends! We're taking a bit of a summer pause. We'll be back soon—in the meanwhile, enjoy this listener favorite from our archives! -----...
From the archive: Philosophers on psychedelics
Hi friends! We're taking a bit of a summer pause. We will be back soon—in the meanwhile, enjoy this listener favorite from our archives! ---...
The origins of Darwin's ideas
No discipline, no sphere of intellectual life, has been untouched by the work of Charles Darwin. He died in 1882 but his ideas are very much...
The sparkling deep
It's tempting to see bioluminescence as an oddity, one of those rare eccentricities of life on earth. And, on land, maybe that's true. But o...
Is Man the Hunter just a myth?
There's a story about of our past that you know well. It goes like this: At some point earlier in human evolution, we started to hunt. Men i...
Babies, dogs, and the riddles of word learning
It's kind of astonishing, really, that kids ever learn words. Each one poses a little riddle. Does this sound string refer to a person? A ca...
The inner life of the hand
Newton saw in the human hand proof of the divine; Darwin saw a key to our species' success. Many others, too, have described the hand in hyp...
From the archive: The cuttlefish and its coat of many colors
Hi friends! We're skipping a beat to take care of some spring housekeeping tasks. We will be back in May! In the meanwhile, enjoy this liste...
Illuminating cave art
Deep in our past, in the dark depths of caves, our ancestors did something strange and beautiful. Working by firelight, some doodled little...
What can AI teach us about the mind?
Everyone is talking about AI these days. Often these conversations are about how AI might upend education, or work, or social life, or maybe...
Mutualisms all the way down
No one is an island. We all depend on each other in critical, often tangled ways. And when I say "we" and "each other" I don't just mean hum...
Seven metaphors for AI
If you wanted a petri dish for understanding metaphors—how they emerge and evolve and jostle with each other—it would be hard to do better t...
Origins of the kiss
Humans do some pretty weird things. Some of us will sit in searingly hot rooms or jump into icy ponds. Others risk their lives trying to cli...
The aura of metaphor
Metaphors matter. They enliven our speech and our prose; they animate our arguments and stir our passions. Some metaphors power political mo...