Many Minds

• Varieties of childhood

  Childhood is a special time, a strange time. Children are adored and catered to—they're given their own menus and bedrooms. They're considered delicate and precious, and so we cushion them from every imaginable risk. Kids are encouraged to play, of course—but very often it's under the watchful eye of anxious adults. This anyway is how childhood looks in much of the United States today. But is this they way childhood looks everywhere? Is this the way human childhoods have always been? My guests today are Dr. Dorsa Amir and Dr. Sheina Lew-Levy. Dorsa is an Assistant Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University, where she runs the Mind and Culture Lab. Sheina is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Durham University in the UK, where she co-directs the Forager Child Studies research group. Both Sheina and Dorsa have spent much of their careers thinking about how childhoods differ across cultures—and why. In this conversation, I talk with Dorsa and Sheina about their fieldwork with indigenous groups in Ecuador and the Congo, respectively. We discuss the different ways that childhood differs in these places—for instance, in terms of parents' attitudes toward risk, in terms of the social structures and activities in which kids are embedded, and in terms of the freedom that children are granted. We discuss developmental psychology's "WEIRD problem." We talk about about the quasi-autonomous cultures that children create among themselves—sometimes called "peer cultures"—and discuss how these kid-driven cultures end up shaping and benefit the larger community. Along the way, we touch on adult supremacy, adverse childhood experiences, walking the forest and climbing papaya trees, parenting norms, ding dong ditch and "nananabooboo", the pioneering work of the folklorists Iona and Peter Opie, teaching, toys, and the enduring question of what childhood is for.   Alright friends, lots to think about here. On to my conversation with Sheina Lew-Levy and Dorsa Amir. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode will be posted soon.   Notes and links 9:30 – For an overview of work on how culture shapes motor development, see here. 11:00 – The paper by Dr. Lew-Levy’s and a colleague about “walking the forest.” 16:00 – Dr. Amir’s TedX talk, ‘How the Industrial Revolution Changed Childhood.’ 17:30 – For some of Dr. Amir’s work on risk across cultures, see here. 35:00 – For a recent paper by Dr. Lew-Levy and colleagues about the evolution of childhood, see here. 39:00 – The popular article by Ann Gibbons, ‘The Birth of Childhood.’ 41:00 – For the idea of the “patriarch hypothesis,” see here. 42:00 – For more on the “WEIRD problem” in developmental psychology, see here. 48:00 – A paper by Dr. Lew-Levy and colleagues about toys in hunter-gatherer groups. For more on the material culture of childhood, see our earlier episode with Michelle Langley. 52:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Lew-Levy on the prevalence of “child-to-child” teaching. 56:00 – A paper by Dr. Amir and a colleague about the concept of “adverse childhood experiences” in cross-cultural perspective. 1:04:00 – The paper by Dr. Amir and Dr. Lew-Levy on “peer cultures” and children as agents of cultural adaptation. 1:08:00 – For more on the idea of children as the "research and development" wing of the species, see our earlier episode with Alison Gopnik. 1:10:00 – For more on the Opies, see here. 1:13:00 – For the work of (past guest) Olivier Morin on children’s culture, see here. 1:23:00 – For the paper by Dr. Camilla Morelli, ‘The River Echoes with Laughter,’ see here.   Recommendations The Lore and Language of Children, by Iona and Peter Opie The Gardener and the Carpenter, by Alison Gopnik The Anthropology of Childhood, by David Lancy Intimate Fathers, by Barry Hewlett   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].    For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

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• Science, AI, and illusions of understanding

  AI will fundamentally transform science. It will supercharge the research process, making it faster and more efficient and broader in scope. It will make scientists themselves vastly more productive, more objective, maybe more creative. It will make many human participants—and probably some human scientists—obsolete… Or at least these are some of the claims we are hearing these days. There is no question that various AI tools could radically reshape how science is done, and how much science is done. What we stand to gain in all this is pretty clear. What we stand to lose is less obvious, but no less important. My guest today is Dr. Molly Crockett. Molly is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. In a recent widely-discussed article, Molly and the anthropologist Dr. Lisa Messeri presented a framework for thinking about the different roles that are being imagined for AI in science. And they argue that, when we adopt AI in these ways, we become vulnerable to certain illusions. Here, Molly and I talk about four visions of AI in science that are currently circulating: AI as an Oracle, as a Surrogate, as a Quant, and as an Arbiter. We talk about the very real problems in the scientific process that AI promises to help us solve. We consider the ethics and challenges of using Large Language Models as experimental subjects. We talk about three illusions of understanding the crop up when we uncritically adopt AI into the research pipeline—an illusion that we understand more than we actually do; an illusion that we're covering a larger swath of a research space than we actually are; and the illusion that AI makes our work more objective. We also talk about how ideas from Science and Technology Studies (or STS) can help us make sense of this AI-driven transformation that, like it or not, is already upon us. Along the way Molly and I touch on: AI therapists and AI tutors, anthropomorphism, the culture and ideology of Silicon Valley, Amazon's Mechanical Turk, fMRI, objectivity, quantification, Molly's mid-career crisis, monocultures, and the squishy parts of human experience. Without further ado, on to my conversation with Dr. Molly Crockett. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode will be posted soon.   Notes and links 5:00 – For more on LLMs—and the question of whether we understand how they work—see our earlier episode with Murray Shanahan. 9:00 – For the paper by Dr. Crockett and colleagues about the social/behavioral sciences and the COVID-19 pandemic, see here.  11:30 – For Dr. Crockett and colleagues’ work on outrage on social media, see this recent paper.  18:00 – For a recent exchange on the prospects of using LLMs in scientific peer review, see here. 20:30 – Donna Haraway’s essay, 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, is here. See also Dr. Haraway's book, Primate Visions. 22:00 – For the recent essay by Henry Farrell and others on AI as a cultural technology, see here. 23:00 – For a recent report on chatbots driving people to mental health crises, see here. 25:30 – For the already-classic “stochastic parrots” article, see here. 33:00 – For the study by Ryan Carlson and Dr. Crockett on using crowd-workers to study altruism, see here. 34:00 – For more on the “illusion of explanatory depth,” see our episode with Tania Lombrozo. 53:00 – For more about Ohio State’s plans to incorporate AI in the classroom, see here. For a recent essay by Dr. Crockett on the idea of “techno-optimism,” see here.   Recommendations More Everything Forever, by Adam Becker Transformative Experience, by L. A. Paul Epistemic Injustice, by Miranda Fricker   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].  For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

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• The primeval soil of play

  Puppies wrestling and mock-biting each other. Toddlers playing hide and seek. Kittens pouncing—repeatedly—on a toy mouse. You've no doubt looked on at scenes like this with amusement. And you've no doubt seen some of those viral videos—of ravens sledding down hills, of bumble bees playing with balls. All these moments make us smile, maybe even giggle. But the scientific questions they raise merit serious attention. Where do we see play in the animal kingdom? Where do we not? What functions does play serve? Do we—and many other creatures—have an elemental need for play? My guest today is Dr. Gordon Burghardt. Gordon is a longtime Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee. For decades now, Gordon has been a pioneer in the study of animal play, with a particular focus on play in reptiles and other animals not usually considered playful. His 2005 book, The Genesis of Animal Play, remains a landmark in the field. Here, Gordon and I talk about the major types of play: locomotor play, object play, and social play. We discuss the five criteria he has proposed for recognizing play across animal taxa. We survey several of the functions of play that have been proposed over the decades, and discuss how—in the end—play doesn't seem to have just one function. We also talk about human play—about what sets it apart, and about the possibility that play lies at the root of many of the capacities and institutions we think of as distinctively, impressively human. Along the way, Gordon and I touch on play in bears, pythons, turtles, fruit flies, and octopuses. We consider play between members of taxonomically distant species. We talk about “self-handicapping”; the surplus resource theory of play; the importance of "risky play" and "free play"; the immersive quality of play; bodily and vocal play signals in mammals; and whether human play is increasingly endangered.  Without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Gordon Burghardt. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 3:00 – A news article on the finding of “play-like” behavior in fruit flies. The original study. 4:30 – For recent reviews of play by Dr. Burghardt and colleagues, covering the three major types of play, the five criteria for recognizing play, and many other topics, see here, here, and here. 12:00 – For more on Dr. Burghardt’s early research and hand-rearing of black bears, see here. 23:30 – For the recent study on ball play in bumble bees, see here.  26:00 – For an example of studies examining self-handicapping, see this study on belugas.  27:00 – For a video of a bull and goat butting heads, see here. For more on cross-species play, see this recent paper by Dr. Burghardt and a colleague. 31:00 – For more on the “relaxed open mouth expression” and “play face,” see our previous episode on the origins of the smile.  For a recent study about such expressions possibly attested in dolphins, see here. 44:00 – For the book by Johan Huizinga, see here. For some of Dr. Burghardt’s ideas about the connections between play and certain aspects of human culture, see here.  54:00 – For research on the value of “risky play,” see work by Dr. Ellen Sandseter. For an article connecting “free play” and children’s mental health, see here.   Recommendations Kingdom of Play, by David Toomey   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].  For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

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• The big five and beyond

  If you've heard anything about the study of human personality, you've probably heard about the “big five.” This is a framework that attempts to characterize human personality in terms of five broad factors or dimensions—neuroticism, extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. The big five framework has been enormously influential, generating heaps and heaps of data, and study after study on the stability of personality, on the factors that shape our personalities, on how our personalities predict success and satisfaction. But is the big five really the best we can do? What does it miss? What does it mask? Where should the science of human personality go next? My guest today is Dr. René Mõttus. René is Professor of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, and a leading researcher in the scientific study of human personality. He’s also one of the hosts of the Personality Psychology Podcast. Here, René and I talk about the history and colossal success of the “big five.” We consider whether personality is ultimately rooted in our biology—and, if so, how. We dwell on each of the five factors and dig into the facets and nuances within them. These are, actually, technical terms in the field for the more granular aspects of personality that sit within each of these broad dimensions. We talk about personality change across the lifespan, and what factors seem to be driving it. We talk about personality and occupation, personality and birth order, personality and gender. Along the way, René and I touch on the Myers-Briggs; an alternative to the Big 5 known as the HEXACO model; the power of explicit questionnaires over experiments; the concept of "personality age"; the social investment theory; honesty, humility, humor, jealousy; life satisfaction; gene-environment correlations; and why evolutionary stories about personality seem to fail. Alright friends, I think you'll like this one. On to my conversation with Dr. René Mõttus. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 5:30 – For a popular discussion of the Myers-Briggs and other personality tests, see here. For a book-length treatment of the history of the Myers-Briggs test, see here. 11:30 – For Dr. Mõttus’s preprint on “personality age,” see here. 17:00 – For our episode on animal personality with Dr. Kate Laskowski, see here. 18:00 – For Dr. Daniel Nettle’s book on personality, see here. 22:00 – See Dr. Mõttus’s blog post on the genetic basis of personality. 25:00 – For our episode with Dr. Eric Turkheimer about IQ, see here. For Dr. Turkheimer’s “phenotypic null hypothesis” about personality, see here. 28:00 – For a theoretical paper by Dr. Mõttus and colleagues about “carving personality at its joints” and “big few models”—among many other issues—see here. 31:00 – See here for a classic overview of the “big five.” 38:00 – For an overview of the predictive power of the “big five,” see here. 40:00 – On the topic of “nuances,” see Dr. Mõttus’s recent co-authored paper here. 43:00 – For the study by Dr. Mõttus and colleagues of the personality profiles of different occupations, see here. For an online tool that allows you to explore the data, see here. For an online tool that matches your personality with the personality profiles of different occupations, see here. 47:00 – A classic paper on the HEXACO model of personality. 51:00 – An example of a recent effort to map out the “facets” of personality. 1:11:00 – For a study on the possibility of gene-environment correlations in the area of music, see here. For the study by Dr. Mõttus and colleagues on children “becoming less alike” through adolescence, see here. 1:18:00 – For a classic statement of the “five factor theory,” see here. 1:20:00 – The Wikipedia page for the idea of the “gloomy prospect” is here. This is also the name of Dr. Turkheimer’s newsletter. 1:22:00 – The latest installment in the longstanding debate about birth order and personality. 1:27:00 – A paper comparing the “five factor” and “social investment” accounts of personality development. 1:33:00 – For a recent paper by Dr. Mõttus and colleagues on personality and gender, see here. 1:38:00 – A research article on the Estonian Biobank.   Recommendations ‘Life Events and Personality Change: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,’ by Bühler et al. ‘Personality stability and change: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies,’ by Bleidorn et al. ‘Choosing prediction over explanation in psychology: Lessons from machine learning,’ by Yarkoni & Westfall   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].  For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

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• Philosophers on psychedelics

  Some call it the "psychedelic renaissance." In the last decade or so, interest in psychedelic drugs has surged—and not just among Silicon Valley types and psychiatrists and neuroscientists. It's also surged among a stereotypically soberer crowd: academic philosophers. The reasons are clear. With their varied and sometimes transformative effects, psychedelics raise ethical questions, epistemological questions, metaphysical questions, questions about the nature of experience and the nature of the mind. My guest today is Dr. Chris Letheby. Chris is a philosopher of cognitive science at the University of Western Australia and the author of the 2021 book, Philosophy of Psychedelics. Here, Chris and I talk about the so-called classic psychedelics—LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, and others—and how interest in them has gone through three distinct waves. We discuss the effects that these substances seem to have, in particular their capacity to treat certain psychiatric conditions and their tendency to induce "mystical-like" experiences. We consider the idea that psychedelics might serve as agents of moral enhancement. And we dig into the psychological and neural mechanisms by which psychedelics seem to have their diverse—and often salutary—effects. Along the way, we talk about ontological shock, comforting delusions, brain plasticity, unselfing, microdosing, placebo effects and adverse effects, physicalism and idealism, the REBUS model, environmental virtues, plant consciousness, meditation, and much more. Maybe this is obvious but this episode is not just for the seasoned psychonauts out there. Whatever your personal experience with these substances, they offer a distinctive window into the mind—a new way of grappling with big questions. Perhaps this much is also obvious but we're not encouraging or endorsing the use of psychedelics here—just offering a little fuel for your intellectual fires! Alright friends, on to my conversation w/ Dr. Chris Letheby. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.    Notes and links 4:00 – For a brief historical overview of research into psychedelics, see this paper. 8:30 – For work by an early trailblazer in the philosophy of psychedelics, see Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One. 12:30 – For our earlier episode on the psychology and philosophy of visual illusions, see here.  18:00 – For a history of the concept of “set and setting,” see here. 19:00 – A 2024 review of “adverse events” in classic psychedelics. 26:00 – A blog post on the history of the term “psychedelic.” 27:00 – A recent review and meta-analysis of the use of psychedelic therapy for depressive symptoms. 31:00 – On mystical experience see Walter Stace’s classic work, Mysticism and Philosophy. On the measurement of mystical-type experiences, see, e.g., Walter Pahnke’s paper here. 36:00 – On the idea of “psychoplastogens,” see here. 39:00 – See our earlier audio essay on placebo effects. 41:00 – For the study using Ritalin as an active placebo, see here.  44:00 – Michael Pollan’s book on psychedelics is here. 48:00 – On the idea of “idealism,” see here. 50:30 – For the 2021 study on psychedelics’ capacity to alter metaphysical beliefs, see here. 54:00 – For Dr. Letheby and collaborators’ paper about the “mysticism wars,” see here. 1:02:00 – For a popular article on the possibility that psychedelics reduce fear of death, see here. 1:03:00 – For Dr. Letheby’s paper on psychedelics and the fear of death, see here. 1:11:00 – The phrase “comforting delusion” comes from an article by Michael Pollan. 1:15:00 – For the “REBUS model,” see here. 1:20:00 – On the idea that psychedelics could serve as agents of moral enhancement, see the paper by Brian Earp here. 1:21:00 – For Dr. Letheby’s paper on psychedelics and environmental virtues, see here. For his paper on psychedelics and forgiveness, see here. 1:23:00 – On the subfield of “virtue ethics,” see here. On the virtue of “living in place,” see the paper by Nin Kirkham here. 1:28:00 – For the New Yorker article, by Matthew Hutson, on how psychedelics led him to see trees as smart, see here. For the study, led by Sandeep Nayak, on psychedelics leading people to expand their attributions of consciousness, see here. 1:32:00 – For a first paper by Dr. Letheby on the comparison between meditation and psychedelics, see here.   Recommendations Psychedelic Experience, Aidan Lyon Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, Robert Masters & Jean Houston The Antipodes of the Mind, Benny Shanon   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.   Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].    For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

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