We often talk about the modern challenge of work-life balance. However, long before the existence of offices, commutes, and calendars, our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers. Did they actually enjoy more leisure time than we do? And did the shift to farming mark the beginning of longer workdays and less free time? Today’s guest is the person to answer these questions, or at least some of them…
Mark Dyble is an Assistant Professor in evolutionary anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has broad interests in understanding variation in behaviour and biology across human populations. Previously, he gained his BA in Archaeology and Anthropology from Cambridge (2008-2011) and an MSc in Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology from Oxford (2011-12). Subsequently, he pursued a PhD in Anthropology at University College London (2013-16), supervised by Prof Andrea Migliano and Prof Ruth Mace, conducting empirical fieldwork with Agta foragers in the northern Philippines. After several post-doc stints, he was also a lecturer in Quantitative Anthropology at UCL for four years (2019-2023).
Credits:
Interview: Tanay Katiyar
Editing: Jay Richardson
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Artwork: Ella Bergru
Daniel Pressnitzer. Originally trained in engineering, he went on to complete a Master's degree in acoustics, signal processing, and computer science in Paris. He earned his PhD at Ircam, where he studied auditory perception, focusing on musical consonance and dissonance. He then spent several years in the UK conducting postdoctoral research at the Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing in Cambridge. In 2000, he returned to France to join the CNRS as a researcher. Now a Director of Research at CNRS, he is also a founding member and the current head of the Audition team at the École normale supérieure. His research bridges acoustics, perception, and cognition, using carefully crafted illusions and experiments to probe the mid-level processes of hearing — the ones that shape how we interpret the world without us even realizing it. His lab has also developed various tools to probe the functioning of the auditory system.
Credits:
Interview: Cindy Zhang & Marius Mercier
Editing: Jay Richardson
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Artwork: Ella Bergru
In our episode with Amy Orben, we discussed a big problem in the research on how social media potentially affects mental health. That is, a lot of studies ask really vague, broad questions. For instance, asking 'What is social media doing to our mental health?' is like asking 'How does food affect young people’s health?' To really answer the latter question, we need to get more specific—are we talking about junk food or vegetables? And what about the kid’s health history, like if they have diabetes? Some researchers think that using well-established theories from cognitive science can solve this problem by helping us ask better, more precise questions about social media. They also think it could lead to new ways of studying it (beyond self-reported screen time) and potentially offer novel policy insights. So, what are these ideas from cognitive science? What new methods can we use? And how could they change things at the policy level? Our guests today are here to help answer those questions—or at least some of them...
Georgia Turner is a third-year PhD student in the Digital Mental Health Group, supervised by Amy Orben at the University of Cambridge. In her PhD, she aims to understand why we feel we lose control of our technology use. To do so, she uses methods from computational neuroscience on real-world datasets such as Twitter and smartphone recordings. As an undergraduate at Cambridge, Georgia studied Philosophy for two years before switching to Natural Sciences. She then completed a masters in neuroscience in London (UCL) and Paris (Sorbonne and ENS).
Lukas Gunschera is a second-year PhD student in the Digital Mental Health Group, supervised by Amy Orben at the University of Cambridge. He is interested in the cognitive mechanisms linking social media use and mental health. In his research, he uses a combination of computational, longitudinal, and experimental approaches to examine the processes driving the effects of social media use. Before starting his PhD, Lukas completed an MSc in Psychological Research at the University of Amsterdam, and a BSc in Psychology at the Radboud University.
Credits:
Interview: Tanay Katiyar
Artwork: Ella Bergru
Editing: Jay Richardson
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
Humans inhabit a social world. With the march of history and the discovery of novel technologies, our ability to socialise has been in a state of constant flux to varying degrees. However, modes of human interaction have undergone a massive shift in the 21st century with the emergence of smartphones and social media platforms. According to a Pew report, almost half of US teens say that they are online ‘almost constantly’. This is understandably terrifying for the previous generation, especially parents of young people, witnessing this shift in sociality. Simultaneously, in the current public discourse, claims about the negative impact of these technologies on mental health and cognition are widespread. But what does the relevant science say? What can it say? Should we really be worried? If so, what precisely should these worries be? Today’s guest is here to answer all these questions, or at least some of them.
Amy Orben is a Programme Leader Track Scientist at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (CBU) and a Fellow at St. John's College, University of Cambridge. She leads the Digital Mental Health programme at the MRC CBU. She is a multi-award winning psychologist and a world expert on examining how digitalisation & social media use impact adolescent mental health. Prior to leading the digital mental health programme at Cambridge, she completed an MA in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge before joining the University of Oxford to obtain her DPhil in Experimental Psychology, for which she was awarded the BPS Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research 2019.
Book recommended by Amy
Credits:
Humans are curious creatures who seek out knowledge about every aspect of the world. We also value knowledge to a great degree. Having a good education is very well-perceived and is a priority of many parents. We sometimes take pride in possessing knowledge, and tend to feel embarrassed when our ignorance gets put on display. More fundamentally, many of our social interactions require tracking what others know and signaling what we ourselves know. For instance, discussing politics with a foreigner might require extra care, as our knowledge of social and economic issues might be specialized relative to the contexts in which we grew up. If I learn that my interlocutor knows as much as I do about the political landscape of my home country, the interaction will likely become a lot more fluid. There is more common ground between us. What is knowledge such that it can play this role in conversation? What underlies our obsession with it? How do we develop the capacity to attribute knowledge to others and to understand them?
Jennifer Nagel is a professor of philosophy at University of Toronto. Much of her work has been concerned with topics at the intersection of epistemology and the philosophy of mind, such as mind reading, metacognition and communication. She is the author of Knowledge, a Very Short Introduction, at Oxford University Press.
Credits:Interview: Jay RichardsonArtwork: Ella BergruEditing: Jay RichardsonMusic: Thelma Samuel and Robin BaradelCommunication: Tanay Katiyar
The relationship we sustain with non-human animals is rich and complex. We take care of them, we exploit them, we eat them, and we tell stories about them. The psychological dimensions of this multifaceted relationship are usually taken for granted, but it’s puzzling when you think about it. We don’t bat an eye upon hearing of seductive snakes, gentle, honey loving bears or mystery solving, criminal catching dogs. And yet, when pushed, many of us will readily admit that animals don’t have exactly the same psychological traits and tendencies as humans. How can this be? When we personify animals, are we grasping something real or is it all fiction? How can scientists study the minds of animals? What are the consequences of all of this?
Jacob Beck is Research Chair in the Philosophy of Visual Perception in the Department of Philosophy at York University in Toronto. He carried out his doctoral studies at Harvard before a post-doc at Washington University in St Louis and a teaching job at Texas Tech. He has written terrific articles on pre-linguistic forms of representation, and co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds with Kristin Andrews.
Links to Jacob's popular pieces on animal minds:
Can We Really Know What Animals Are Thinking?
The Conversation, September 5, 2019
Credits:
Interview: Jay Richardson
Artwork: Ella Bergru
Editing: Jay Richardson
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
In this update episode, Tanay and Jay reflect on the journey so far and some special guests crash the show...
Like many of our cognitive abilities, it is easy to take vision for granted. On a daily basis, vision seems rather simple: various objects, people, landscapes present themselves before us; and, if our eyes are open and function well, we are bestowed with a visual experience of these things. We then act on this experience in all the ways the world affords. In reality, things are much more complex than this naive experience might lead us to think. For instance, visual perception isn’t passive in the way just described. Rather, our sense organs and brain are constantly performing an enormous amount of intricate operations. Importantly, most of these operations are not directly controllable in any significant way. So, what is the nature of this impressive and somewhat autonomous machinery? Where does it start? What must our eyes do in order for us to perceive the world? How is what they do influenced by other psychological and biological factors? How is it even possible to study all of this? Today’s guest is the person to answer, if not all these questions, at least some of them.
She is Thérèse Collins. She is a professor of cognitive psychology at Université de Paris-Cité, where she is also the director of the vision team at the Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition center. She obtained her PhD in Psychology from Université Paris Descartes, post-which she did a post-doc in Hamburg, Germany. Broadly, her research group studies visual perception, eye movements and object representations.
Links to Visual Illusions recommended by Thérèse: https://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html ; http://illusionoftheyear.com/
Credits:
Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson
Artwork: Ella Bergru
Editing: Jay Richardson
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
After eight episodes where we discussed intricacies of different areas of cognitive science — reasoning, the evolution of cultures, our relationship to our bodies, public policy, how children learn language, schizophrenia, the relationship between economics and neuroscience – one can wonder, what even is cognitive science?. How can a field of scientific investigation cover such a wide array of diverse phenomena across different levels of explanation? Why even use the term ‘cognitive science’? Don’t neuroscience and psychology cover it all? Well, there are answers to this question. In today’s episode, in order to gain some clarity and a step back, we turn towards the history and foundations of cognitive science.
Pierre Jacob, is CNRS emeritus director of research. He is one of the founding members of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy and, from 2001 to 2009, was the first director of Institut Jean Nicod. Pierre has had an outstanding career as a philosopher of mind and cognitive science. He has worked on the nature of representations and explanations in psychology, on visual perception, and most recently, on our ability to understand the minds of others and its developmental roots. He is the author of multiple academic books, including, but not limited to: What Minds Can Do: Intentionality in a Non-Intentional World, in 1997, Ways of Seeing: The Scope and Limits of Visual Cognition, in 2003 with renowned neuroscientist Marc Jeannerod.
Tyler Burge's NY Times article here
Credits:
Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson
Artwork: Ella Bergru
Editing: Jay Richardson
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
Language is oftentimes viewed as a paradigmatically human capacity. Indeed, we have observed no other creature exhibit linguistic abilities with the same complexity and freedom as our own. Conversely, humans are often viewed as vitally linguistic. Our diverse societies and communities seem to be knit together by the thread of spoken, signed and written words. We tell stories, pass down documents, express our joys and grievances… all by articulating our thoughts into sequences of sounds, markings or gestures. It is therefore not surprising that the first words of a child tend to be celebrated. But what goes into the utterance of a first word? How does this develop into full-fledged linguistic communication? What role does the speech that can be heard in the child’s social environment play? How and why do we speak to children? How does all this vary from one culture to the next? Today's guests are the people to answer these questions, or at least some of them…
Camilla Scaff is a post-doctoral researcher in the Human Ecology Group, at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She is simultaneously doing post doctoral work in the Language Acquisition Across Cultures (LAAC) group, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP), here at the Ecole normale supérieure of Paris, where she also did her PhD on the influence of socioeconomic and ecological factors on language acquisition, under the supervision of Alejandrina Cristia.
Alejandrina Cristia, then, is a CNRS research director at the Laboratoire de sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique. Her work is highly integrative, ambitiously bringing together different methods in order to pinpoint the processes by which we speak and understand language. For this work, she won the CNRS bronze medal and the John S. McDonnell Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition. She received her MA and PhD in linguistics at the University of Purdue.
Links to the Con Ciencia podcast and the Kotoboo blog referenced in the episode:
Con ciencia:
https://soundcloud.com/radio-unahur/sets/con-ciencia
Kotoboo:
https://kotoboo.org/index.php/fr/
Credits:
Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson
Artwork: Ella Bergru
Editing: Rohan Chowdhury
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
Most actions humans take are social in nature. If they are not directly geared towards affecting others behaviors and thoughts, they are at least likely to have some impact on their lives. One can wonder if there is something special in one’s mind that determines the behaviors that are oriented towards others. After all, we do colloquially talk of social skills or social intelligence. So, what is so special about social behaviors? Another domain that makes the question painfully apparent is that of progress requiring collective action. Indeed, why are we so reliably capable of learning a difficult new skill, or getting a job, caring for our family – which are examples of things that require much practice and commitment – and why, at the same time, are we seeing large-scale inaction regarding climate change? How can the cognitive scientist explain this? What are the cognitive, neural and environmental determinants of our social capacities? What motivates us in our social lives? Today's guest is the person to answer these questions, or at least some of them…
Coralie Chevalier, a behavioral scientist at the Institut Jean-Nicod. After having done her PhD at University College London, she did multiple postdocs at the Center for Autism Research at the University of Pennsylvania, King’s College’s institute of psychiatry. During her career she has worked on many topics, both fundamental and applied: autism, social motivation, grit, climate change policy, and much more…
Credits:
Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson
Artwork: Ella Bergru
Editing: Matthieu Fraticelli
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
Our daily experiences (e.g. thinking, acting, talking to people etc.) give us the idea that we/our mind is a singular entity i.e. a unified inner space or soul that perceives and acts on the complex world around us. On the other hand, we tend to speak in ways that point to a relative segmentation of the mind – one often hears that some individuals are particularly talented at solving mathematical equations, that women are more empathic than men, that some children have a very rich imagination and are hence destined for a creative line of work. These ideas, although pernicious in some cases, point to an intuition that has historically been very important for the scientific study of the mind: that our mental capacities are somewhat independent from one another and that some of them come to us naturally to varying degrees. Observing patients with localized brain injuries and the development of scientific methods and technologies facilitating the study of specific capacities in relative isolation from others have allowed us to finesse this intuition, taking it out of the realm of scattered speculations into the scientific one. Which mental capacities can be isolated, and where are they localized in the brain? How can we investigate these locations? What are the consequences of this line of research for how we conceive of the mind more generally? Does it open up venues for understanding atypical cognition? Today’s guest is the person to answer all of these questions, or at least some of them…
She is Nancy Kanwisher. She is the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a founding member of the McGovern Institute. She received her B.S. and PhD from MIT. After her Ph.D. she held a MacArthur Fellowship in Peace and International Security for two years. She joined the MIT faculty in 1997, and prior to that served on the faculty at UCLA and Harvard University. Her lab has contributed to the identification and characterization of a number of regions in the human brain that conduct very specific cognitive functions. She is the recipient of numerous awards in the academy, the most recent being the Jean Nicod Prize, awarded annually in Paris to a leading empirically oriented philosopher of mind or philosophically oriented cognitive scientist.
Credits:
Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson
Artwork: Ella Bergru
Editing: Matthieu Fraticelli
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
What is normal? What is a disorder? Often, when we interact with people who behave in ways we cannot understand, the question of defining ‘normal’ and sane behaviour becomes apparent. Importantly, when we ourselves exhibit thoughts and behaviours which are viewed as deviant from the commonly accepted definition of normality, we might feel helpless, judged, and inadequate. Historically, behaviours that are diagnostic of mental disorders were viewed as irrational or disruptive. However, recent breakthroughs in cognitive science can shed new light on redefining psychiatric phenomena while erasing the stigma of irrationality. What are these breakthroughs? What goes into elucidating the nature and causes of the many psychological troubles with which one can be faced? Are delusions and other kinds of thoughts really irrational?
He is Sam Wilkinson, a senior lecturer in philosophy at the department of sociology, philosophy and anthropology at the University of Exeter in the United-Kingdom. He received his PhD at Edinburgh University and did a postdoc at Durham University on the phenomenon of hearing voices. Currently, he is visiting the Institut Jean Nicod. His work lies at the intersection of the philosophy of cognitive science and the philosophy of psychiatry. He has published papers on the topics of predictive processing approaches to studying cognition, psychosis, hallucinations, trauma, and much more.
Credits:
Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson
Artwork: Ella Bergru
Editing: Mathieu Fraticelli
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
A defining feature of us humans is that we continuously adapt to our environments in order to thrive. One key component of this process is ‘learning’ the contingencies of our environment. Since the 19th century, this phenomenon has been studied under the moniker of “conditioning”, and is usually associated with Pavlov and his famed dogs. Despite the fact that this seems trivial to many today with regard to dogs and other animals, and that we cannot assume that humans, with their complex mental lives merely act with the prospect of a reward, the basic idea behind these principles has enjoyed increasing success when applied to the study of the mind. This prompts the following questions: what influence does reward and punishment have on our behaviour? How do the decisions we make based on these principles tie into collective action and economic activity? How do they influence the ways in which we think? Today’s guest, Stefano Palminteri, is the person to answer all of these questions, or at least some of them…
He is research director (full professor) and heads the Human Reinforcement Learning team at the cognitive and computational neuroscience laboratory situated at the ENS. Alongside his research, he teaches a course on neuroeconomics. Previously, he studied Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and cognitive neuroscience before holding various post-doctoral positions in Paris, Trento and London. He is also a member of the European Laboratory of Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) Society and the Cercle FSER. He has recently wongrants to work on the dynamics of decision-making, learning and the effects of memory on these processes
Credits:
Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson
Artwork: Ella Bergru
Editing: Rohan Chowdhury
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
Our relationship with our body is extremely complex. We have a wide range of different kinds of sensations: that is, the senses, pains, pleasures, the feeling of heat, of cold and so on. We also do things with our body, we engage in athletic activities, we harm one another, we pleasure one another, we jump for joy, we frown in disbelief, we hunch over in despair… How can we disentangle this giant knot of doings and feelings that is the body? How can we study our perception of the body? What is the relationship between the body and its environment? Today's guest is the person to answer all these questions, or at least some of them.
Frédérique de Vignemont is a CNRS senior researcher in philosophy in Paris. She is the deputy director of the Institut Jean Nicod as well as a philosophy scholar in residence at NYU Paris. Her research is at the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Her major current works focus on bodily awareness, self-consciousness, and social cognition. She has published widely in philosophy and psychology journals on the first-person, body schema, agency, empathy, and more recently on pain. Her new book, Mind the Body (Oxford University Press, 2018), provides the first comprehensive treatment of bodily awareness and of the sense of bodily ownership, combining philosophical analysis with recent experimental results from cognitive science.
Credits:
Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson
Artwork: Ella Bergru
Editing: Matthieu Fraticelli
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
Culture is everywhere: it includes art, the dissemination of theories and of social norms, customs, the food we cook and eat, and so on. Culture also seems to be what distinguishes different communities, families, or entire countries and continents. Is it possible to explain such heterogeneous and complex phenomena? Can we identify the cognitive, environmental or social factors that underlie the spread of practices, norms and ideas? What is it that allows certain traditions to survive and develop, sometimes for hundreds or thousands of years?
Olivier Morin is a tenured CNRS researcher at the Jean Nicod Institute, Paris. Previously, he lead a project at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. He has published a book, How Traditions Live and Die, along with many articles on the topics of writings systems, social cognition, its evolution, its development, communication, and much more.
Credits:
Interview: Thomas Beuchot and Jay Richardson
Artwork: Ella Bergru
Editing: Rohan Chowdhury
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Communication: Guillaume Coudriet
Humans reason about many matters: from the most simple of concerns, like the planning of a weekend outing; to the most complex and intellectual topics. Given the ubiquity of reasoning, and the broad range of situations which call for it, we tend to take it for granted. But for these very same reasons, the study of reasoning is quite central to understanding the workings of the human mind. One can wonder how we came to acquire such a capacity, how our minds are so wired to make inferences, the places where reasoning breaks down, and so much more.
On this first ever episode of the Cognitations Podcast, Hugo Mercier tells us how we can answer these questions. Hugo Mercier, is a cognitive scientist at the Institut Jean Nicod (CNRS). His work has primarily focused on the function and workings of reasoning. Other research themes that he engages with are collective intelligence, the evaluation of communicated information, trust in science and interest in science. He is the author of two books: The Enigma of Reason (co-authored with Dan Sperber) & Not Born Yesterday in 2020.
Credits:
Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson
Artwork: Ella Bergru
Editing: Mathieu Fraticelli
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Communication: Guillaume Coudriet