Meaning Lab – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Ludwik Zamenhof was born in 1859 in a small city in Poland. His family was Jewish, and the area he grew up in also had factions of Germans, Russians, and Poles, all of whom mutually distrusted one another. During his childhood, Zamenhof developed a theory: these groups would never get along without a common, neutral language to communicate with people in the other groups. Zamenhof considered the possibility of using existing languages for this purpose—such as Latin and Greek—but decided that the cost to learn them was too high. So he invented his own.

Esperanto, as Zamenhof’s language came to be known, sought to take familiar Indo-European root words and cast them in a language without verb conjugations, cases, gender, or any of the elements which make a language like German or Russian so difficult to learn. He was nineteen when he first unveiled the language to the public. Zamenhof’s goal was not just to create a language that was easy to learn, but to create a language that would put the different peoples of Europe on a footing of mutual disadvantage—and therefore, he hoped, equality.

As far as invented languages go, Esperanto has enjoyed more success than most. You can study it on Duolingo. It’s a staple of popular culture; for example, I recently saw in an episode of the TV show Billions, where it is being learned by the character Michael Wagner. But mostly, this success has been on the linguistic front. People find the language interesting. But it hasn’t been especially useful as a basis for utopia.

In a way, Zamenhof’s Esperanto is a microcosm of the system of values more generally known as “humanism.” There are many shades of humanism, but at their core lies a belief that understanding, connection, and even mutual admiration among different kinds of people is not only possible but paramount to a meaningful life. If we could all converse with one another, understand one another—then maybe we’d stand a chance of constructing the kind of society we all want to live in.

But while Esperanto embodies the aspirations of humanism, it also is emblematic of its tensions. In theory, getting people to celebrate the many ways of being human is an ideal worth striving for. In practice, it is a difficult one to achieve. When it comes to the ways of being humans, what all humans have in common is that they prefer their own.

The fundamental impulse of humanism is to grapple with this tension, and it is the subject of the latest book by author Sarah Bakewell. In it, she surveys 700 years of humanist thought—with each thinker bringing a personal perspective to the shared problem of what it means to value human life and society in an abstract sense. The experience of reading Bakewell’s book is to hear the echoing conversation of the ages. One of the ways of reading humanism is to see it as a means of participating in this conversation. It’s a notion I think is rather beautiful.

Her book is Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope. It’s available now.

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The Person and the Situation is a book by social psychologists Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, originally published in 1991. The argument made by Ross and Nisbett was that context matters. Human beings don’t behave in a vacuum, unaffected by the circumstances of society, history, and culture. The job of the social psychologist is to understand both the person and the situation. Without a proper appreciation of the larger context, it’s impossible to know what to make of any given observation about human behavior.

But a limitation of the project set out by Ross and Nisbett is that social psychology has always had a limited ability to study “situations.” It is, after all, psychology—not anthropology. Psychologists tend not to study humans in their natural situations; they try to recreate paired down versions of them in the lab. It’s not the same thing.

This is something Ross and Nisbett, I think, appreciated. Nisbett went on to publish a book called The Geography of Thought, about how people from the West think differently from people in Asia. But another way to approach this problem is not from the psychology side, at least not directly—to start not with the person, but the situation itself. This is what I like about really good travel writing.

The job of a travel writer is similar to the job of the anthropologist. It is to go to a place and get a feel for what people are up to there. Then to come back and report to the rest of us what it is you observed. But the problem with ethnographies by anthropologists is that they’re usually not that fun to read, obsessed as they are with kinship structures and long-standing epistemological debates within their field. Good travel writing has the same incisive edge as an informal ethnography—and has the benefit of being much more engaging. Good travel writing is an exploration of the person via the situation.

For my money, the best author doing this kind of travel writing today is Erika Fatland. Erika is the author of three travel books, including Sovietistan, about the post-Soviet states of central Asia; The Border, about the countries bordering Russia from North Korea and Mongolia to Finland and Norway; and High, about the countries of the Himalayas. She speaks six languages, including Russian, and is currently adding more. She also trained as a social anthropologist for her master’s degree, which probably goes a ways toward explaining where that incisive edge came from.

Erika’s approach to travel writing incorporates her own travel experiences with deep readings of a country’s historical, cultural, and economic circumstances. More than other travel writers I’ve read, she relies on her conversations with people she meets in the places she goes—usually finding at least one common tongue between them—and uses these interview as a foundation for her own observations. In this conversation, we talk about the point of travel, Erika’s formative experiences and how she became a travel writer, her approach to writing, how her relationship with Russia has changed through the years, and some of her favorite (and least favorite) countries she’s visited.

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And a minor resolution about friendship.

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In this crazy times characterized by the chaos of a worldwide pandemic, I've decided to do something a little different on the pod. It's a series I'm calling "Lab Lockdown." The idea is to talk to other grad students about how they're getting through all this while trying to maintain a semblance of sanity and productivity. It's also an opportunity to talk about their current research projects. My first guest in this series is Jaclyn A. Siegel. She's a PhD student at Western Ontario, and she has such a powerful story that connects her personal experiences to her academic interests. We talk about gratitude, using self-isolation as an opportunity for connecting with others, feminism, and adopting cats. You can follow her on Twitter @jaclynasiegel. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Christof Koch is a one man symphony of passion. The only thing he has to offer is an unrelenting, indissoluble, incandescent fascination with the subjects that he's drawn to and develop a profound expertise on their every aspect. And oh my, what a thing it is to behold. The primary objects of his interest are consciousness and the brain -- what is the physical basis of existence and our experience of it? Christof is the director of the Paul Allen Brain Institute -- which, to give you an idea of what that means, billionaire Paul Allen was hanging out in his office one day, and asked himself, "If I could have one neuroscientist in the world run my institute, who would I choose?" Christof was the obvious answer. He was mentored by Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. I can only imagine what it was like to be in a room with those two, in a swirling discussion of the physical basis of consciousness that would have surely convinced you of the truth of determinism because once it got started there was no stopping it. In this conversation we talk about many things, but probably none of them are as eminently worth mentioning as our discussion of Christof's experience of 5 MeO DMT -- which is a psychedelic compound secreted on the back of a species of toad inhabiting the Colorado Road that, so I hear, makes psilocybin seem like an aspirin. Christof's new book is "The Feeling of Life Itself." Make sure to check it out! More info at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Michael Tomasello is one of the most influential cognitive scientists of the twenty-first century. And yet I would still argue that he is still somehow under-appreciated. He's a truly independent thinker and throughout his career he has pursued ideas that don't fit neatly into any particular intellectual silo but make their presence felt across many of them. In this episode, we talk about the influence of Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, and Jean Piaget on Mike's thought, where anthropology went after the Cognitive Revolution, how he wrote his first book because he had nothing else going on, writing to shape the minds of young people, the role of outlines in writing, being "problem centered," and the intellectual freedom that comes with being outside of the establishment. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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If you haven't recently, go look up a picture of actor Paul Rudd. Now, Ben Affleck. My guest for the show this week looks like their love child (go ahead, look it up for yourself). It's uncanny. At any rate, Sander is also a professor of psychology at Cambridge and directs the Social Decision Making lab there. In this episode, we talk about being a night owl in a morning person's world, lucid dreaming, his short-lived career getting umbrellas for bankers, increasing motivation by tying tasks into a larger goal, doing research that's meaningful for society, balancing scientific research and public outreach, "Why not just reach out to people?", perseverance ("Just send them another email"), improving as a mentor, and tackling big research questions. Hope you enjoy! More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Dr Heather Berlin is one of the purest science communicators I've ever come across. Pure in the sense that she is, above all, a scientist; her dedication to the craft is obvious. But she also clearly believes that it's important those results don't stop at a handful of specialists. Because she values in the insights of science so deeply, she can't help but make sure as many people as possible can benefit from them! Her day job is as a professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her other day job is as a TV doctor, in which she cohosts shows like Star Talk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson or the documentary "Bill Nye: Science Guy." In this episode, we talk about writing and performing off-broadway shows with her husband (who is a rapper), her re-specialization into clinical work, choosing a PhD over med school, strategies for putting yourself out there, and increasing representation of women in science communication. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Have you ever wondered what it's like to be a bird? Not just to fly, but to really, truly understand the world from a bird's perspective. I don't think I have. At least not to the extent that Nicky Clayton has. She is a joyous human being full of unique perspective on corvids, animals, humans, babies, magicians, artists, and scientists. Her official title is professor of comparative cognition at Cambridge, and you can find her on twitter @nickyclayton22. In this episode we talk about her work in China, the phenomenology of bird existence, how to make your own luck, combining science and art to explore memory, letting ideas grow organically, how to encourage others to be more sensitive to the world around them, the connection between magic and cognition, and informal fieldwork in everyday life. As always you can find more info at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Weiji Ma is an associate professor of neural science and psychology at NYU. He is the co-founder of the Growing Up in Science seminar series in New York (you can find more about those seminars online), as well as the Rural China Education Foundation. In this episode, Weiji and I talk about making friends when you're different than your peers, living up to expectations, how we dealt with an "addiction" to online chess and other pathological cases of distraction, finding the right "tough love" mentors, surviving the post-doc phase to get running your own lab, setting the tone of a lab as a PI, managing friction between lab members, why working with Christof Koch didn't go well for him, and how to make the academy a better place to work in. More info at codykommers.com/podcast.

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