Many Minds

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 properties? How does culture change? Why does it change? What tools and techniques should we be using to understand its vagaries? How can we illuminate this living, breathing, omnipresent, amorphous thing? 
My guest today is Dr. Jacob Foster. Jacob is a Professor of Informatics and Cognitive Science at Indiana University – Bloomington; he's also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. For more than a decade now, Jacob has been bringing together different disciplinary strands to develop a theory of culture and a toolkit for studying it.
Here, Jacob and I talk about what culture is—and whether cultural ideas are, in an important sense, alive. We discuss Jacob's path through physics to complexity science to sociology and to cognitive science. We talk about the nature and value of computational thinking. We dig into Jacob's framework for thinking about culture as a set of chains that weave from mind to world and back, across time and space. We dig into a colossal new paper of Jacob's in which he and his co-authors characterize the dynamics of culture through the case of metal music—a genre that has been evolving, splintering, growing, and withering for more than 50 years. 
Along the way, Jacob and I touch on metaphors for culture as dark matter, as amphibian, as a set of companion species, as living vines on a human trellis. We touch on foxes and hedgehogs; personal culture and public culture; how to be a wizard; ecological carrying capacity and cultural carrying; schismogenesis; the ideas of Sperber, Heidegger, Jung, and Culianu; ideal objects and morphodynamics; and how viewing culture as alive gives us a different stance toward the dead.
This is not my first chat with Jacob. As you'll hear, we overlapped in our undergraduate years, also in our postdoc years, and since 2018 have worked together at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute or DISI—which, of course, is the sponsor and incubator of this very podcast. Jacob and his wife Dr. Erica Cartmill founded DISI and are the current directors. I always have fun talking to Jacob—I always learn a bunch from him. And so I think you'll enjoy this one, friends.
Alright, without further ado: here's my conversation with Dr. Jacob Foster.
 
Notes
4:00 – For more about the Santa Fe Institute workshop on "multiple life," see here.
7:00 – For an example of work by the socio-narratologist Art Frank, see here. For Donna Haraway's idea of "companion species," see here.
9:00 – Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
10:00 – For Dr. Foster's theoretical paper on computational thinking in the study of culture, see here.
11:00 – For the paper on models in science by Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener, see here.
14:00 – For the classic 1952 treatment of the challenges of defining culture, reviewing 164 definitions of the term, see  here.
15:00 – Dr. Foster has collaborated on theoretical papers about culture in non-human animals. See here and here.
17:00 –The classic essay about "foxes" and "hedgehogs."
24:30 – For examples of Dr. Foster's work with James Evans in the science studies and science of science vein, see here and here.
30:00 – For more on how Dr. Foster defines culture, see (again) here.
32:00 – For more on the personal culture vs public culture distinction in sociology, see here.
35:00 – For more on Dan Sperber's ideas about culture, see Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach.
39:00 – Pierre Bayard's How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read.
48:00 – The still in-press paper 'The Evolutionary Dynamics of Cultural Change (As Told Through the Birth and Brutal, Blackened Death of Metal Music),' by Bernard Koch, Daniele Silvestro, and Dr. Foster. Dr. Koch's website is here.
51:00 – For the earlier study using phylogenetic analyses to understand American cars, see here.
53:00 – The Encyclopaedia Metallum.
57:30 – For a discussion of the emic/etic distinction, see here.
1:20:00 – For Dr. Koch's and Dr. Foster's work on the culture of machine learning, see here.
1:21:00 – For our earlier episode on linguistic diversity, see here. For the original discussion of "schismogenesis" by Gregory Bateson, see here.
1:25:00 – The essay by Dr. Foster—written with Phil Ford and J.F. Martel—on the care of the dead. For the episode of the Weird Studies podcast about the paper, see here.
1:31:00 – For Dr. Foster's thoughts on the work of Ioan Culianu, see the general discussion in the metal paper. For a recent talk in which Dr. Foster discusses Culianu's work (among other topics we touch on in this interview), see here.
1:32:00 – Culianu's book Tree of Gnosis.
1:39:00 – For discussion of some of these recent turns in evolutionary theory, see our episode with Dr. Kevin Lala.
 
Recommendations
The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse
Work by John Crowley
Work by James Tynion IV
Brahms: Intermezzi, Op. 117 – Klavierstücke, Opp. 188 & 119, recording by Anna Fedorova
The Final Piano Pieces, recording by Sir Stephen Hough
 
Tile art credit: Photo by Ingrid Martinussen via Unsplash
 
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.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Overcast, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the **new** Many Minds newsletter.
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

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 for termites, many new examples of animals using tools have come to light. Birds using sticks to forage for grubs. Sea otters using rocks to smash open mussels. Digger wasps using stones to close off their burrows. But as these examples mount, so do the scientific questions. What is tool use, really? What different forms does it take? Does it always imply a high degree of intelligence? And perhaps the biggest question of all: Why do some creatures use tools while so many others don't?
My guest today is Dr. Alice Auersperg. Alice is a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. She and her lab study innovation, technical cognition, and tool use in animals—especially in a species of parrot known as the Goffin's cockatoo.
Here, Alice and I talk about her lab's recent work with a certain remarkable cow. We discuss the wide variation in definitions of tool use across studies, and why some kinds of tool use are perhaps more impressive than others. We walk through some of her lab's most striking findings about tool use in the Goffin's cockatoo: for example, the finding that these birds don't just use tools but also make them—and can make the same tool out of different materials; the finding that they learn to use tools from others; and the finding that they recognize in some way the value of tools. We dig into some of Alice's ideas about the big picture—why certain species use tools, and why so many tool users seem to live on islands. Along the way, Alice and I talk about whether tool use in birds is fundamentally different from tool use in primates; we talk about play and boldness; the allure of the sea mango; intrinsic motivation to combine objects; why tool use differs in captivity, at least in Great Apes; and why Goffin's cockatoos like to dunk their noodles in blueberry soy yogurt.
Before we get to it, a brief announcement. We've been steadily expanding the ways you can engage with us. We recently revived our newsletter, in the form of a Substack. And our episodes are now up on YouTube (albeit in audio-only format, for the time being). And of course you can still find us on Spotify, LinkedIn, and on Bluesky. You are warmly encouraged to subscribe to us or follow us on any and all of these channels. And maybe this goes without saying but we do like hearing from you—so please do leave us a comment! 
Alright friends, without further ado, on to my interview with Dr. Alice Auersperg. Enjoy!
 
Notes
3:30 – The recent study by Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró and Dr. Auersperg on Veronika the cow's flexible tool use; a video about the findings. Dr. Auersperg's book on innovation in animals (in German).
9:30 – We discussed gifted word-learning dogs in a recent episode.
11:00 – A paper on tool use in digger wasps. A paper on "anting" in birds. A paper on macaques' use of human hair as dental floss.
18:00 – The chapter by Fragaszy and Mangalam in which the concept of "tooling" was introduced. For a discussion of this framework by Dr. Auersperg and colleagues, see here.
23:00 – A recent discussion by Jen Colbourne and Dr. Auersperg, which touches on the (somewhat outdated) idea that avian and primate tool use are quite different.
25:00 – For more on tool use in New Caledonian crows, see our (much) earlier episode with Alex Taylor.
30:00 – An example of Dr. Auersperg's early work with kea.
34:00 – The study by Dr. Auersperg and team describing the innovation of tool use by the cockatoo named Figaro.
38:00 – A follow-up study on social learning of tool use. A follow-up study showing that Goffin's cockatoos can make the same tool from different materials (video abstract).
47:00 – A study showing that Goffin's cockatoos will (learn to) safekeep their tools.
50:00 – The study from Dr. Auersperg's lab documenting the use of "tool sets" in wild Goffin's cockatoos (video abstract).
58:00 – For more on the origins and drivers of tool use across species, see this recent discussion by Jen Colbourne and Dr. Auersperg.
1:02:00 – A paper by Jean-Baptiste Leca and a colleague about object play and its relation to tool use.
1:04:00 – A paper discussing how tool use differs in captivity in primates.
1:05:00 – The study of noodle flavoring behavior in Goffin's cockatoos by Jeroen Stephan Zewald and Dr. Auersperg (video abstract).
1:09:00 – For an initial discussion of island ecology and its effects on tool use, by Dr. Auersperg and a colleague, see here. Dr. Auersperg's fuller treatment of the island effect remains to be published.
1:19:00 – A study of tool use in sea otters.
1:22:00 – The book Delicious by Rob Dunn (former guest) and Monica Sanchez.
 
Recommendations
A Bird's IQ, by Louis Lefebvre
Animal Tool Behavior, by Robert W. Shumaker, Kristine R. Walkup, & Benjamin Beck
'Tooling,' by Dorothy Fragaszy & Madhur Mangalam
 
Tile art credit: Photo by Alice Auersperg
 
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.
Subscribe to Many Minds on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Overcast, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the **new** Many Minds newsletter.
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

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 tallies into bone. We've invented a long series of tools to help us reason, remember, and manage information—tools like abacuses, calendars, writing systems, calculators, smartphones, and many, many more. So cognitive offloading is hardly new—but the questions around it seem newly urgent. As cognitive technologies accumulate, as opportunities for offloading tempt us at every turn, as headlines warn of "digital dementia" and "cognitive surrender," it seems like a good time to take stock. Yes, cognitive offloading can save us time and effort. But what are its other consequences?
My guest today is Dr. Sam Gilbert. Sam is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. Sam and his colleagues have been trailblazers in the study of cognitive offloading—when we do it, why we do it, what it does for us and to us. 
Here, Sam and I talk about what cognitive offloading is, how deep it goes in our species' history, and how it pervades our everyday lives. We talk about the different forms that offloading takes. We discuss why some people offload more than others, and why we offload in certain situations. We walk through three bodies of research on the consequences of cognitive offloading—research on the so-called Google effect, on the photo-taking impairment effect, and on the impact of using GPS to navigate. Of course, we also address the elephant in the room: How should we think about the possible dangers—and benefits—of cognitive offloading in the new era of AI?
Before we get to it, some news: We have re-launched the Many Minds newsletter, as a Substack! We'll be sharing each of our episodes there, as well as other morsels from time to time. We've been wanting to do this, in part, to give you a better way to engage with us—and with each other. Were there questions we should have asked? Are there connections you made that we didn't? Counterarguments we overlooked? Et cetera. All that stuff can now go in the comments for each episode. So, if you're a fan of the show, please do consider subscribing and following along with us there.
Alright friends, on to my conversation with Dr. Sam Gilbert. Enjoy!
 
Notes
4:00 – For a sampling of recent discussions of AI and its possible harms, see here, here, and here.
7:30 – For a scholarly discussion of "shifting baseline syndrome," see here.
12:30 – For an earlier influential overview of the phenomenon of cognitive offloading, see  this article by Dr. Gilbert and a colleague.
15:00 – For more on the phenomenon of tilting one's head to view a tilted image (aka "external normalization"), see here. For an example of recent work on finger counting in children, see here.
18:00 – For some of Dr. Gilbert's work on cognitive effort in cognitive offloading, see here. For another recent discussion of the construct, see here.
23:00 – For a recent review of "intention offloading" by Dr. Gilbert and colleagues, see here.
29:00 – For work by Dr. Gilbert and colleagues on the role of metacognition in offloading, see here and here.
33:00 – For recent work by Dr. Gilbert and colleagues on offloading in older and younger adults, see here. See also a recent review of cognitive offloading in children by Dr. Gilbert and a colleague.
39:00 – The original study of the "Google effect" by Sparrow and colleagues. For more on "transactive memory," see here.
45:00 – For the original demonstration of the "photo-taking impairment effect," see here. For recent work by Dr. Gilbert and colleagues exploring this effect, see here.
53:00 – A recent meta-analysis of whether GPS impairs navigation ability.
59:00 – The 'Your Brain on ChatGPT' preprint.
1:02:00 – For a meta-analysis of the effects of calculators on math education, see here.
 
Recommendations
'The Intelligent Use of Space,' by David Kirsh
Cognition in the Wild, by Edwin Hutchins
 
Tile art credit: Image by NASA via Wikipedia
 
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.
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 **new** Many Minds newsletter!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

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 then the child grows up and starts crossing that long threshold into adulthood. The transition proves—to say the least—a bit turbulent. Now when I say this story is familiar, I don't just mean familiar to us as human beings. After all, a similar story has long played out among our closest cousins, the chimpanzees.
My guest today is Dr. Rachna Reddy. Rachna co-directs the longstanding Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in Uganda and is an incoming Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. For more than a decade now, she has been closely observing the chimpanzees at Ngogo—and especially the adolescents.
Here Rachna and I talk about why adolescence—in all its intensity—is such a scientifically fascinating life-stage. We sketch the Ngogo research site, home to the largest group of chimpanzees ever studied. We unpack the different stages of chimpanzee life history. We zoom in on chimpanzee adolescence using a variety of different lenses—we talk about greetings, dominance hierarchies, grooming, social rejection, mentorship, deference, patrolling, female dispersal, and more. We discuss the so-called civil war that has taken root at Ngogo. And, finally, we talk about Rachna's in-progress novel (if that's the right word), which tells the story of one chimpanzee's coming of age in immersive detail.  
I think you'll enjoy this one, folks. Chimpanzees offer us a kind of parallel universe, a funhouse mirror version of human life—one that is deeply relatable in some ways, and totally alien to us in others. And the parallels and non-parallels are arguably all the more striking in adolescence.
But before we get to it, one humble ask: As the new season of Many Minds ramps up, this would be a great time to support the show. You could do this by rating us, writing a review on Apple Podcasts or a comment on Spotify, or by doing the old-fashioned thing of just recommending us to a friend or colleague. Your support is—as always—much appreciated. 
Alright friends, without further ado. Here's my conversation with Dr. Rachna Reddy. Enjoy!
 
Notes
4:00 – Damien and several other chimpanzees discussed in this episode feature in the Netflix documentary series Chimp Empire.
8:00 – See here for a study by Dr. Reddy and a colleague on caregiving behavior in recently orphaned chimpanzee siblings.
13:00 – See here for a comprehensive recent article by Dr. Reddy and colleagues about puberty and adolescence in chimpanzees.
16:00 – The Ngogo fission—and subsequent "civil war"—is treated in detail in Chimp Empire and was the subject of a recent, widely discussed research paper (which includes Dr. Reddy as an author).
26:00 – "Tanner stages" are a widely used scale for measuring different phases of puberty in humans.
29:00 – For more discussion of life history stages and how these differ across species, see our earlier episodes here and here. For a recent report that Ngogo females experience menopause, see here.
36:00 – For some of Dr. Reddy's work on dominance hierarchies in adolescent male chimps, see here.
39:00 – For a detailed discussion of the chimpanzee "pant grunt" and its development, see here.
47:00 – For a study of female dispersal in a different chimpanzee population, see here.
54:00 – A video of a Tai chimpanzee playing "airplane" with her baby.
1:04:00 – A classic study of boundary patrolling at Ngogo.
1:11:00 – A study by Dr. Reddy and a colleague on sociosexual behavior in chimpanzees.
1:15:00 – A study by Dr. Reddy and a colleague on relationships between chimpanzee mothers and sons.
1:17:00 – A recent study conducted by Dr. Laura Simone Lewis (former guest!), Dr. Reddy, and others on social curiosity in chimpanzees and human children.
1:26:00 – For classic work by Jane Goodall featuring chimpanzee characters, see her 1971 book, In the Shadow of Man.
 
Recommendations
Work by Kazuya Toda in bonobos (e.g., here)
Work by Caitlin A. O'Connell in orangutans (e.g., here)
Work by Ella Brown in gorillas (e.g., here)
 
Tile art credit: Image of Jarman at age 11, courtesy of Rachna Reddy
 
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.
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 **new** Many Minds newsletter!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Thousands of languages are used around the world today, and this linguistic diversity is a precious part of our human heritage. But it's also more than that. Linguistic diversity provides clues—a vast crazy quilt of clues—about how language works, about how history has unfolded, about the dynamics of culture, and about the nature of the human mind.
My guest today is Dr. Damián Blasi. Damián is an ICREA Research Professor based at the Center for Brain & Cognition at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Over the last decade or so, Damián's emerged as one of the most innovative researchers in the study of language and linguistic diversity. He's been widely recognized for this work, and most recently was awarded the 2026 FABSS Early Career Impact Award from the Cognitive Science Society.
In this conversation, Damián and I talk about why scientists should care about linguistic diversity. We do a bit of linguistic diversity 101—how many languages there are, how we can enumerate them, how they vary. We discuss a recent paper in which Damián and his colleagues reconstructed the explosive rise and precipitous fall of human linguistic diversity over the last 12,000 years. We talk about the factors that drive language change. And we discuss how cognitive science relies too much on English and English speakers—and how this may be holding the field back.
Along the way, Damián and I touch on the Tower of Babel, a golden age of linguistic diversity, the human bite configuration, scientific aesthetics, whether children shape language, polygenetic theories of language evolution, the pace of language change, schooling, linguistic inequality and behemoth languages, and why Damián thinks that the possibility space of human language might be bigger and wilder than we currently imagine.
This is a special episode of the Many Minds podcast. As I mentioned, Damián is this year's winner of an award from the Cognitive Science Society, in recognition of his outstanding early-career contributions to the field. He recently gave a keynote at the society's annual conference in Rio de Janeiro, and we've partnered with the Cognitive Science Society to feature this conversation about his work. I'll also mention that this wasn't my first time chatting with Damián—he's an alumnus of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI), the sponsor & incubator of this podcast. We met there a couple years ago, and so it was all the more fun to reconnect with him here.
Alright friends, without further ado, on to my conversation with Dr. Damián Blasi. Enjoy!
 
Notes
10:00 – The UNESCO page on multilingualism and linguistic diversity.
17:00 – The Ethnologue database.
20:00 – For examples of Dr. Blasi's work on "behemoth languages" and on how languages are not represented equally in terms of technological and development investment, see here and here.
26:00 - For the paper in which Dr. Blasi and colleagues introduced Grambank, see here. For the database itself, see here.
29:00 – For Dr. Blasi's earlier work on sound-meaning associations across languages, see here.
33:00 – For discussion of Darwin's views on monogenesis vs polygenesis and race, see our recent episode.
36:00 – For more about pronouns—and how they do and do not vary across the world's languages—see several chapters in the World Atlas of Language Structures.
39:00 – The paper—'Babies aren't persons'—by David Lancy.
41:00 - For Dr. Blasi and colleagues' recent Science paper on the rise and fall of human linguistic diversity, see here.
59:00 – For a recent study of linguistic diversification, including discussion of so-called schismogenesis, see here. For an example of Cristina Moya's work on ethnic identity in the Andes region, see here.
1:00:00 – For an example of Dr. Blasi's work on how ecology shapes language—a topic not discussed in this conversation—see here.
1:01:00 ­– For the study by Dr. Blasi and colleagues about changes in the human bite configuration and how these changes have shaped sound systems, see here.
1:14:00 – For the recent paper by Dr. Blasi and colleagues about the (non-)role of children in language change, see here.
1:22:00 – The paper by Dr. Blasi and colleagues about the over-reliance on English in the cognitive sciences (and how it hinders the field).
1:24:00 – See here for work by Aitor Egurtzegi, in collaboration with Dr. Blasi and others, on ergativity and gaze patterns across languages.
1:27:00 – For the preprint—'Which humans?'—led by Mohammad Atari (and including Dr. Blasi and others), see here.
1:30:00 – For a recent argument that psychology needs to overcome its "ahistorical" bent, see here.
 
Recommendations
A Myriad of Tongues, Caleb Everett
The Secret of Our Success, Joseph Henrich
Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time, Johanna Nichols
 
Tile art credit: Painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (detail)
 
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.
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 **new** Many Minds newsletter!
We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.
For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).