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.

If you enjoy the show, please consider subscribing! You can follow me on Twitter @codykommers, and through my newsletter at codykommers.com/newsletter.

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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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David Pizarro is an associate professor in the department of psychology at Cornell. He is also chief science officer at BEworks and cohost of the venerable psychology/philosophy podcast Very Bad Wizards. In this episode, Cody and David talk about learning to work with your natural strengths and weaknesses, finding collaborators who make you better, how to structure your work around laziness, learning to say no, using anger as an academic motivator, getting in early on the podcast scene, and what Cody's advisor thinks about him doing this podcast. More info available on codykommers.com/podcast.

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Dorsa Amir is a postdoctoral fellow at Boston College. She took her PhD in anthropology from Yale, and has a popular Ted Talk on how the industrial revolution changed childhood. In this episode, Cody talks with Dorsa about strategic planning as a daily routine, mastering self-regulation, aiming big even when you're risk averse, ultimate goals versus proximal goals, and the most important things psychologists can learn from anthropologists. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Nick Epley is the John Templeton Keller Professor of Behavior Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is the author of the book "Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want." In this episode, Cody talks to Nick about the value of true liberal arts education, the advantages of getting married young, learning the craft of psychology, Nick's crazy proposal to his wife (which didn't go as planned), having kids during grad school, the biggest differences between working in psych departments versus business schools, and what it means to design a good life. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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My guest today is Nick Chater, a Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. Nick is an influential cognitive scientist with a wide-range of interests, which these days often tend toward public policy. But in 2018, he published a book, trying to draw some culminating insights from the disparate pieces of his own work in cognitive science as well as the field more broadly. He came to the conclusion that we have dramatically misunderstood important aspects about what the overall picture of the mind looks like. He called the book The Mind Is Flat.

And by ‘we’ Nick means essentially... everyone. His argument is that the notion of the unconscious we’ve grown accustomed to over the last century or so is fundamentally flawed. We attribute all sorts of hidden ‘beliefs’ and ‘desires’ and other psychological motivations to the murky depths of the subconscious mind. But according to Chater, they aren’t really there. They’re fictions. There is no such thing as a ‘desire’ you don’t know about. According to Chater, what you see of the mind is what you get.

It’s a strange argument. Particularly because pretty much every modern theory in psychology and cognitive science presupposes there is some sort of cognitive infrastructure supporting beliefs, goals, and intentions below the surface of conscious thought. So what evidence does he have there are no such things as hidden beliefs? It’s a good question. But another way to frame it is: what evidence do we have that makes us so confident that are minds are a kind of mental iceberg of which we can only see the very tip?

That’s not to say that there’s no structure to the mind. But we’ve never seen a belief — how can we be so sure of what one would look like? I think there’s a certain story about the depths of the unconscious mind that we’ve started to take for granted. I think it’s worth taking some time to rethink that.

Nick’s alternative is that the mind is continuously improvising, deploying behavior to maintain consistency with an on-going narrative. Instead of simple psychological causes (“She believed x and wanted y, so she did z”), we are acting in a way to stay ‘in-character’ within our own story. We are like fiction authors, not constructing behavior based on firm psychological truths, but rather seeking consistency, continuinity, and growth in the arc of our character’s development. According to Nick, to say that the rest of us are acting based on some engimatic psychological depths is no more true than to say a fictional character is doing so. The story is all there is.

Here’s Nick’s alternative model, in his own words:

An improvising mind, unmoored from stable beliefs and desires, might seem to be a recipe for mental chaos. I shall argue that the opposite is true: the very task of our improvising mind is to make our thoughts and behaviour as coherent as possible — to stay ‘in character’ as well as we are able. To do so, our brains must strive continually to think and act in the current moment in a way that aligns as well as possible with our prior thoughts and actions. We are like judges deciding each new legal case by refering to, and reinterpreting, an ever-growing body of previous cases. So the secret of our minds lies not in supposed hidden depths, but in our remarkable ability to creatively improvise our present, on the theme of our past.

Nick introduces the concept of a mental tradition as the infrastructure of the mind. We get into it a little later on in our conversation. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what he means by the term; but I like it. It takes a well-worn concept (“habit”) and articulates it with a fresh conceptual edge. At one point, I press Nick and ask him point blank whether he thinks habits exist. He says he doesn’t. I couldn’t tell you the exact difference between a habit and a mental tradition. But Nick’s position, as I’ve understood it, is that typically we believe we act according to ‘preferences’. I like coffee, so I get it first thing in the morning. No, he says. In fact, you’re acting according to a mental tradition.

In preparation for this conversation, I found myself thinking through Nick’s improvising metaphor with my own understanding of the concept — through my training as a jazz musician. If you were to ask an improvising musician about why they chose to play a specific note, they’d be able to construct a story, supported by music theory, about why that note works in the way it does. But that’s just a post-hoc story. It doesn’t describe in any meaningful sense for why that particular note was produced in the first place, as opposed to any other note which could have a music theoretical justification.

Yet that’s not to say there’s no depth. The underlying harmony does cause the note to come about in a very real sense. The musician is responding to structure. They’re not acting alone. They’re collaborating with the structure: the structure of the music, as well as the other musicians. That strikes me as a kind of depth, and one that has not just significance in the metaphor itself but also in our concept of the structure of the mind.

So what are the stakes here? Suppose this theory is true, as Nick presents it, what might the implications be? Here’s one idea:

If there are no psychological depths to be found, the only psychological "truths" are the stories we tell about ourselves and others. They are "true" by virtue of the fact that we’re telling them, in the same way there are truths about Anna Karenina simply because that’s how Tolstoy told the story. There’s something liberating about this. We’re no longer committed to defending the ‘why’ of our actions, at least from the perspective of a single motivating psychological variable. This is often what we reach for when trying to hold others to account. That may be necessary in the courtroom. But I think it’s the source of a lot of tension in our interpersonal relationships — the need to specify what caused someone to behave in a certain way. Rather, we get to look at through a different lens. We get to say okay, this is what I’ve done. How does it fit into the overall story? The theory actually gives us an explanation for why the question "why did you do that?" can be the source of so much emotional violence in a relationship. There is really no answer. Therefore any answer is necessarily wrong and inadequate. And any expectation of an adequate answer is inevitably let down.

At any rate, this argument by Nick makes me think of something said in a recent episode with Sam Gershman. The point of a model is not to be right. The point is to articulate the space of possibilities. I do think Nick is right that psychology—with the exception of 20th century Behaviorism—has for a long time taken for granted that there are some sort of depths to the mind. His argument is useful because it attempts to paint a clear and compelling version of the alternative. Whether or not he’s onto something, I’ll leave up to you.

But I think part of the exercise of thinking through his position is about gaining a better understanding of what we take for granted in the conventional ways we talk about our own mental lives. Perhaps the mind isn’t exactly flat, as Nick says, but I think it’s say to safe that we’re inclined to ascribe more depth to our minds than is merited—telling more than we can know, as Richard Nisbett called it.

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David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Emotions Group. He has published many books, including "Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride." In this episode, Cody talks to David about the difference between academic and popular writing, balancing your true interests with pragmatic considerations, how to be optimally interdisciplinary, and debating core beliefs versus trying to learn from one another. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Linda B. Smith is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Indiana University. She is a prolific cognitive scientist, specializing in child development, who has won many of the most prestigious awards in the field -- including the Rumelhart prize and the Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award. In this episode, she talks to Cody about transfering from engineering to psychology, what it means to be truly rigorous as a psychologist, going against the grain of Chomsky, getting through personal doubts and crises, being influenced by unexpected sources, and making the best local decisions in your career. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Cory Clark is a professor of quantitative social psychology at Durham University. She is the co-host of the Psyphilopod podcast, as well as the proud owner of the prestigious Twitter handle @ImHardCory. In this episode, Cody and Cory talk about the gateway drugs to psychology, getting traction in research, on being a modern psychologist (with a podcast), and what we still don't know about successful de-biasing. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Bradley Voytek is a professor of cognitive science, neuroscience, and data science at UC San Diego. He is the author of Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep? and was the first data scientist at Uber. In this episode, Cody talks to Brad about the neuroscience of zombies, community building, being an insanely good mentor, overcoming low grades or initial setbacks, the influence of Oliver Sacks, and Brad's CV of failures. You can follow him on Twitter @BradleyVoytek. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Axel Cleeremans is a professor of cognitive science in the Department of Psychology of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. He is also a Research Director for the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research. In this episode, Cody talks with Axel about his decision to move to the US for his PhD and work with pioneers in artificial intelligence like Jay McClelland and Herb Simon. They also discuss significant life changes, being at the forefront of neural network research in AI, how students mold their advisor's interests, and being in on the ground floor of scientific interest in consciousness. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Susan Fiske is a professor of psychology at Princeton University. She is a pioneer in the field of social cognition, and co-author of the famous text Social Cognition. In this episode, Cody digs into her decades of experience as a social psychologist. They discuss the biggest single thing that psychologists can contribute to society, why conservatives tend not to become social psychologists, how Professor Fiske made her mark in a male dominated field, and the trip around the world that jump-started her research career. More info at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Scott Barry Kaufman is a professor of psychology at Columbia. He is the author of several books, including Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined. He is the host of the The Psychology Podcast. Most importantly, he is a caring and compassionate human being. You can find him on Twitter @sbkaufman. In this episode, Cody talks to Scott about having a tactical plan to achieve goals in the course of plotting a unique life path. More info available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Chantel Prat is a cognitive neuroscientist, author, and general-purpose badass. She is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, where she leads the Cognition & Cortical Dynamics Lab. In this episode, Cody talks with Chantel about the magical moments of randomness that life throws at you and how a curve ball can be just what you need to hit a home run. Keep an eye out for her forthcoming book, slated for release in early 2021! More info at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Paul Bloom is a prolific author and has written books such as "Against Empathy," as well as articles in venues like the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic. He is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale. In this episode, Paul talks to Cody about his unique schedule for productivity, what it takes to write for a broader audience, and how to pick the perfect title. More information is available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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Art Markman is an accomplished author, podcaster, and psychology professor at UT Austin, as well as Founding Director of the Program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations. In this episode, Art gives Cody his perspective on how to take risks, be in the right place at the right time, and get your work out there for a broader audience. More information is available at codykommers.com/podcast.

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I believe when someone writes a perfect book, it deserves to sell a gazillion copies.

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Welcome to Cognitive Revolution. If you're new to the podcast this is a good place to start. It is an introduction to what you'll be hearing later on, in which Cody tells the story of Bertrand Russell's famous work "Principia" and the personal woes that Russell had to go through to finish it. Find out more about the show at codykommers.com/podcast.

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One of my favorite psychology papers of all time is called “Telling More than We Can Know” by Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson. The argument of the paper is that humans don’t actually know why they do what they do. But they’re more than happy to give you an explanation nonetheless.

This the reason why we need a science of human behavior. If we could all just intuit the correct answers automatically, there’d be no need for researchers to figure them out. This provides a kind of template for how psychological research works: I got the human do something, and now I’m going to tell you why they did it.

And cognitive science in particular is traditionally obsessed with explaining “why” in terms of one main concept: rationality. The human did the thing because it’s a reasonable thing to do, once you take into account all the right information. And if the story is not so straightforward, then the deviation from rationality cries out for explanation. It is an account of human behavior that prioritizes practical function: we have the mental apparatus we have because it helps us succeed in the situations we’re most likely to find ourselves.

While this may be a useful explanation for behavior in the laboratory, things get more complicated once you start observing humans in the wild. What about all the stuff that isn’t explainable by mere rational utility?

Why, for instance, do I prefer some clothes over others? Why do I have a little piece of leather on my keychain when it neither holds keys nor opens doors? Why did I listen to the Men in Blazers soccer podcast religiously for two years, then suddenly forsake it entirely? Why do I insist, simply our of principle, on never drinking French wine?

In other words: what’s the “why” behind culture?

This question is the impetus for the recent book by my guest today, W David Marx. David has lived in Japan for 19 years. His first book was Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. For most of his career he has followed and written about Japanese culture and its influence on the West. His latest book, Status and Culture, is his effort to explain the mechanisms of cultural change: why we do what we do, when we don’t need to do it.

He calls this the “Grand Mystery of Culture”: Why do humans collectively prefer certain practices, and then, years later, move on to alternatives for no practical reason?

This is where status comes in. David argues that it’s the conceptual glue that holds together the parts of human behavior that aren’t explained by rationality. How exactly it does that is the subject of our conversation.

But the thing about status is that you can always have more of it. If, as David argues, we’re all constantly chasing after status in one way or another, when does it stop? Is anyone ever satisfied with their status? Is the biggest fish in the pond happy? Or does she just want to find a bigger pond? Does status ever give us a sense of purpose or meaning? Or is it just empty calories? We get into a lot of this throughout the conversation. Yet, for me, reading David’s book raised as many questions as it answered.

Status and Culture is an entry in the genre of Epic Theory. It seeks to explain everything. Doing so requires that one leaves out quite a bit, especially when the book weighs in at a svelte 275 pages of full text. But there’s something about David’s book which makes me really love it: It is an academic book that isn’t written by an academic.

Reading it, one gets the feeling that the reader is hearing from someone who has actually been out there in the world and lived a little bit. David reads. (A lot.) But it doesn’t feel like he spends his days cooped up in a library. When he talks about culture, you know you’re hearing from someone who has participated in it—not just theorized about it. He’s not trying to explain why those other people over there are into one fashion trend and not another; he’s trying to explain the fashion trends which he’s seen in his own social circles.

Ultimately, perhaps David, like all of us, is guilty of telling more than he can know. Do the mechanics of status really explain all of culture? I don’t know. Maybe it is all about status. Maybe it’s not. But I’ll keep that little piece of leather on my keychain, just in case.

David’s new book is Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. It’s out now.

At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are David’s picks:

* One for All: The Logic of Group Conflictby Russell Hardin (1995)Little known but mind blowing; the theory also explains fashions really well.

* The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetryby Harold Bloom (1973)Art as a process of being influenced by and attempting to influence. A classic.

* For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Signby Jean Baudrillard (1972)Incisive investigation into the reason why things are valued. The denser French theory precursor to David’s Status and Culture.

Books by David:

* 2022: Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

* 2015: Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style

(I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!)

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

Two competing theories of inspiration: the 9am-ers and the lions.

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Language—who can use it, and how well—has been in the news recently. If you haven’t heard, a recent AI language model was released for public use. It’s a chatbot from the company OpenAI called ChatGPT. And its capabilities are, to use a technical term, astounding.

It can draft essays at an advanced undergraduate level on just about any topic. It can write a scene for a movie script along any premise you specify. It can plan a set of meals for you this week, provide the recipes, compile a shopping list, and tell you how what you’re eating will affect your overall health and fitness goals. And in terms of grammar and sentence construction, it makes no mistakes. Literally none. This isn’t your grandmother’s chatbot.

This episode is not about how ChatGPT works; it is about our current understanding of how language works. With advances in AI allowing us to create more sophisticated programs for using language, that understanding may change in the near future. But even with all the recent advances, the underlying logic behind how these kinds of programs work and what they can teach us about human language goes back decades in research on cognitive science and artificial intelligence. It seems like there’s something about ChatGPT that understands the words it’s using. The truth is we don’t know yet. It’s too soon to tell.

What we do know is that we humans understand the words we use, and why we’re capable of doing that is one of the great and fantastic puzzles of our species. My guest today, Gary Lupyan, is one of my favorite sources of insights about that puzzle. Gary is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies language, particularly semantics, from a cognitive science perspective.

This conversation is about Gary’s point of view on language, words, and how we use them to both construct an understanding of the world and convey it to those around us. It’s not necessarily about endorsing a big sweeping theory. But to put together some of the pieces of what we know, what we don’t know, and what we may have misunderstood about language.

For example, take the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This is the idea that language determines thought—that if you were to speak a language other than the one(s) already you do, it could potentially lead to an entirely different way of seeing the world. And really, the big picture of Sapir-Whorf has been settled. The truth, honestly, is not that exciting. Language does determine thought—but only a little, and not in any ways that can’t be worked around. As Gary describes it, language is a system of categories. The language we speak can orient us toward different delineations of those categories with the world. But no language prevents us from seeing or comprehending any category outright. What’s really fascinating here is not the broadest aspects of the overarching theory, but the implications for specific cases. There are versions of this that we touch on a lot throughout this conversation.

But in terms of grand theories, a general theme emerged in our conversation of describing ideas about language on a spectrum: from Chomsky to Tomasello. Noam Chomsky you’ve probably heard of. He’s one of the most prolific scholars of the second half of the twentieth century. He was a founding father of cognitive science, and to a large degree single-handedly determined the trajectory of linguistics for a period of almost thirty years. His most famous construction is "colorless green ideas sleep furiously." It’s a totally legitimate English sentence, but one that expresses an illegitimate concept. It is representative of Chomsky’s focus on structure: he didn’t care about whether or not anyone had ever used that sentence; he just cared that it was possible to do so.

Michael Tomasello, on the other hand, takes a usage-based approach to language. Mike has been a guest on this show and is another cognitive scientist who has had a big impact on my own thinking. He believes the way to make sense of language is as a tool, one that allows us to communicate with the other members of our species. Structure is important. But how language is used in real-life social settings is more important. Spoiler alert: both Gary and I are much more sympathetic to Tomasello’s characterization of language than we are to Chomsky’s. Nonetheless, both theoretical approaches offer important insights about language and the way we humans use it.

The way I approached this conversation was essentially to ask Gary the biggest questions I could come up with about language: What’s it for? How do words get their meanings? What was protolanguage like? What parts of language are determined by critical periods? Then just see where he takes it from there.

Overall, this conversation was really a joy to have. We cover a lot of my favorite topics in cognitive science. Language is something I can get really worked up about, and it was fun to be able to talk about it with someone who is so much more knowledgeable than I am. For anyone who has ever used words or had words used on them, I think you’ll find something to enjoy in this conversation.

At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are Gary’s picks:

* Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychologyby Valentino Braitenberg (1984)A cult classic: the perfect book for thinking about thinking.

* Consciousness Explainedby Daniel Dennett (1991)It’s not about getting all the details right; it’s about inspiring further thinking.

* 4 3 2 1: A Novelby Paul Auster (2017)The most ambitious effort by a novelist at the top of his game. For students of the epic conceptual masterpiece.

Honorable mention: My favorite book on Language, by Michael Tomasello, if you’re interested in the technical details of what we talked about:

* Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition

(I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!)

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

Why the metrics we use to evaluate decisions are not the ones we should use to make them.

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Right now, over the course of the next couple weeks, somewhere in the neighborhood of one billion people will tune in to the same event.

This event is not a geopolitical one. Governmental regimes will not be decided based on its outcome. It is not an economic one. The winner will be financially compensated, but not in any way that will meaningfully affect the people of that country. National boundaries will not be redrawn as a result of this conflict. Ultimately, it comes down to twenty-two men, a ball, and who can put it put it in the opponents net the most times. It is the World Cup.

I don’t say this as someone who thinks the World Cup isn’t important. I think it’s fantastically important, and I count down to it every four years starting approximately three days after the final match. But many people believe that because it’s a game, because it doesn’t have overt real-world implications, that the World Cup doesn’t matter. Some people believe that because it’s a certain kind of game—one in which Europeans are usually dominant, not Americans—that it doesn’t matter.

But it does matter. And the reason it matters is that there’s no other event in the world that quite so many people from quite so many walks of life get worked up about. An election, a TV show, the publication of a book, a Nobel Prize—none of these things can compete with the sheer volume of interest generated by the World Cup. It may be a fiction. But it is one that a large proportion of the planet has bought into.

I think this dynamic is useful to pay attention to because this is also the way games work more generally. The points aren’t real in any sense but the number on the scoreboard. Yet people live and die by whether their team’s number is bigger than their opponent’s. They dedicate a large portion of their leisure time to following the accumulation of these points. Arguably, these kind of games are what humanity, in aggregate, cares about most.

This makes for a paradox of sorts. Even though they don’t have meaningful stakes outside the arena, games are designed to elicit concentrated doses of meaningful engagement. When you’re into a game, nothing feels like it matters quite as much as the outcome of that match. A defensible definition of a “game” is an event or set of actions which is fundamentally meaningless to which we have assigned meaning.

More specifically, this is the process of gamification, and the downsides of gamification is the topic of a recent book by my guest today. Adrian Hon is a game developer, and CEO of gaming company Six to Start. Adrian’s best known game is Zombies, Run! an app which incites runners to move faster by overlaying a plot of apocalyptic escape on their movements in the real-world. It has been downloaded over ten million times. Adrian’s an expert on the power of gamification, and his book is all about taking a skeptical look at how gamification has infiltrated our lives.

At the heart of Adrian’s observations is a tension. I think of it as the double-edged sword of gamification. By assigning points to vocab learning, or tracking the number of steps you’ve taken every day, gamification is able to take trivial, mundane actions, which we want to engage in but don’t find particularly appealing, and imbue them with meaning. This in turns gives us the motivation to accomplish those actions at a more efficient rate than we otherwise would.

Where this goes wrong is when the game itself—the points system, the badges, the leaderboard—becomes more meaningful than the original reason for wanting to perform this action. When we care more about the fictional story in a way that starts taking away from the real things we actually care about, that’s when gamification becomes a problem.

The thrust of Adrian’s book is that more and more companies are using the powerful techniques of gamification to get us to engage in their products far longer and in different ways than we might initially intend to. In other words, it’s commonplace for products and apps to be designed to exploit the most vulnerable aspects of our psychology. The psychological dynamics of games are increasingly becoming a part of our every day life, and we need people like Adrian Hon to help us get a handle on how they work.

Adrian’s new book is You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All. It’s out now.

And if you still aren’t convinced that games matter, just look at the World Cup. Qatar spent 220 billion dollars (they could’ve bought Twitter five times over!) to host it. Why? Not because they’re going to recoup that money. Because it puts them right in the crosshairs of the world’s attention. From Ecuador, to Japan, to Germany, to Cameroon, to Serbia, to Brazil, to even a large part of the United States—everyone will be watching. And when that many people buy into the stakes of a game, there’s bound to be real-world consequences.

At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are Adrian’s picks:

* Life: A User’s Manualby Georges Perec (1978)Astonishingly good: a lesson in how to use rules to produce interesting art.

* Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near Eastby Amanda Podany (2022)A look at the past not from the “big” events, but from the lives of everyday people. Stories reconstructed from ancient cuneiform texts.

* The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem (1971)The funniest of the sci-fi writers; this book is the most insightful look at what virtual reality will ultimately look like—which is to say, crazy.

Books by Adrian:

* 2022: You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

* 2020: A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction

(I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!)

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

In a way, coming to the end of one’s PhD almost feels inappropriate. The pursuit of this degree gives a kind of structure to adult life—my life, anyway—as something on the horizon to aim for but never actually reach. I’ve always known that getting this degree is not the final goal, just one milestone of many. But nevertheless finishing it doesn’t feel like something I’m supposed to do. It is, for me, an unprecedented situation.

But nonetheless here we are. Last month, I defended my dissertation.

And so now I’m in the somewhat startling position of having done what I set out to do. I find myself faced with a familiar question, but one whose answer feels a lot less straightforward than it used to be.

Now what?

The month before I began my PhD, in October 2019, I sat down with an idea. The concept was to reach out to people I admired—mostly academics and authors—and ask them about the decisions they made when they were in my position. What did they do when they were grad students that set them up for success later on? Sure, I wanted to know about their success, in some sort of career-prestige sense. But I also wanted to understand how they thought about what it means to make a substantive contribution to their field, whatever that may have looked like to them. I envisioned it as a podcast, which I called Cognitive Revolution.

People, I was surprised to learn, were incredibly generous with their time. The project didn’t always go as well as I hoped. There’s a lot that I could’ve done better, and the pandemic actually stifled my show when it seemed to bolster this kind of project for so many others. But I got to talk to many of my heroes, a lot of whom were the ones who inspired me to pursue cognitive science and social psychology in the first place.

I started the project with the vague idea that it would be a useful exercise in “audience building.” It seemed like the kind of thing that was done by other authors who had taken a path like the one I envisioned for myself. It was clear to me since I was an undergrad that I cared at least as much about telling stories about research findings than actually doing the research itself. And I’ve always known that I wanted to write non-fiction pop-psych books as a part of my career. But I also knew that going directly into writing wasn’t the right move, either. I wanted to have something to say. And I felt that developing actual expertise in a field I cared about would give me that.

The Cognitive Revolution podcast allowed me the opportunity to explore the different versions of what that can look like, and how different people have constructed something resembling a coherent career from the disparate pieces of whatever they’ve found, in retrospect, that they’d managed to accomplish. What I thought was going to a means of building an audience was more like adding a second major to my degree. I got a lot out of it. But it was only incidental whether anyone else did as well.

Somewhere along the line, though, I began to feel I was reaching a point of diminishing returns on that project. It’s not that there was nothing left for me to learn. But it seemed like I had gotten all the information that I was going to get out of asking people how they went about doing whatever it was they did. I still am drawn to people’s personal stories, absolutely. But the original concept of Cognitive Revolution no longer represents the dimension of growth that I see myself moving along. It’s time to do something else.

And so I’m starting a new project. It’s a podcast; it’s a blog. It’s the Substack you’re reading now. I call it Meaning Lab.

In Meaning Lab, I’ll take a cognitive science perspective on the pursuit of meaning in work, life, and relationships. Each week, I’ll publish a podcast interview with an author, scientist, or academic about how their work has uncovered some interesting or unexpected aspect of meaning—where it comes from, how it works, what exactly it means to find more of it in one’s daily activities. I’ll also publish a weekly piece from my own perspective delving into what psychological research tells us about the mechanisms underlying how we make sense of the world and our place in it.

There are, above all, two reasons I want to talk about meaning.

First, I just think it’s the coolest concept in all of cognitive science. The enterprise of meaning-making is the single most interesting thing that minds can do. To take one example, we humans can take arbitrary sequences of squiggles and lines and dots and use those to represent our entire experience of the world. Human language is amazing. It’s something I’ve been interested in for a long time (for instance, my undergrad thesis was on “Computational models of jazz improvisation inspired by language”). But another example of meaning is how we reflect on our own experiences to create stories about what we’ve done, who we’ve done it with, and why it was worth doing. And meaning isn’t just important for esoteric things, like the study of linguistic semantics, or more practical things, like what research says about how to get more fulfillment out of your work—but the full range of human experience, from music, to art, to ideas, to the basic infrastructure of cognition, to what brings us all together in organized society. In a very real sense, our minds are designed for meaning-making.

The second reason is that I think the idea of meaning is able to give us a more nuanced vocabulary for talking about our experience of the world. This, in my estimation, is something we really need. I’m skeptical of the way we normally talk about some of the routine psychological concepts of work and life.

For instance, happiness. The concept just seems very flimsy to me. As if the best of all possible lives is one in which you attain a permanent state of placid appeasement. Ice cream for every meal. It’s a one-dimensional definition of what it means to be human. Feelings like heartache and profound sadness may not be especially gratifying in the moment. But they’re at least as important in giving texture to the experience of a human life. The concept that reflects that much more directly, in my opinion, is not “happiness,” but meaning.

Which leads me to another of the usual constructs that I think we’ve misunderstood: habit. So much of our discourse about work, and how to be better at it, has to do with developing an optimal habitual routine. The reason for this is that the promise of good habits is frictionless productivity. In the best case scenario, we’d be able to do the right thing without ever having to think about what exactly it is. The problem is that reliance on habit puts us on autopilot. That might be fine when you’re flying a simple route. But when life requires flexibility, contemplation, or creativity, our habits—good or bad—work against us rather than for us.

These are kinds of arguments and ideas I want to explore on this Substack. Eventually, I’ll really be trying to do this blog/podcast as a premium product. Looking forward, I think at some point I’ll do most of my posts paywalled, with the podcasts (or at least, like, the first 60 minutes of them) free. So, in the future I will be asking you to shell out some dough to support my work. For now, I want to focus on making sure the work is as high-quality as possible, as well as growing my free subscriber base before dialing in the paid content. That said, if you do want to support up front, I’d really appreciate it! This is the move I’m trying to make post-PhD, so your contribution will help me be able to solidify doing this kind of thing full-time. Even signing up for a month of paid, then cancelling makes a big difference! There’s a button below, which I believe says “subscribe now” for non-subscribers and “upgrade to paid” for free subscribers—so please do feel free to use such a button however you see fit, including leaving it completely untouched.

At any rate, I’m glad to have you here. I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun. I’m excited. New episodes of the Meaning Lab podcast will begin next week.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

Anxiety. It is the only emotion my body believes is truly necessary for me to experience at three o’clock in the morning. To be sure I’d rather be sleeping. Usually how I respond to this experience is by listening to audiobooks or podcasts until I fall back asleep. I may get through more audiobooks that way, but it’s hard for me to look at that and imagine anxiety as anything other than a burden. I’ve recently been rethinking that relationship with anxiety.

And in particular, one book has helped me start to change some of my beliefs about how anxiety works and what a healthy relationship to it might look like. That book is called Future Tense by my guest today, Tracy Dennis-Tiwary.

Tracy is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Hunter College, where she directs the Emotion Regulation Lab. She’s spent the last couple decades as a psychologist studying anxiety, particularly in clinical populations and children. In her book, Tracy argues that though anxiety is unpleasant it actually plays a crucial role in our daily lives.

What exactly is the benefit of anxiety? Well, here’s how I’d put it:

The majority of our emotional lives is concerned with the present moment. Our brains are designed to get what we want right now, not to delay gratification until some unknown future date. The tension here is that while our emotions tend to orient us toward the moment, so much of our progress as individuals—as a civilization—depends on doing hard work now so our future selves or generations can enjoy its benefits.

Anxiety is the emotional bridge between our present selves and our future outcomes.

It is the emotion that makes us care about what rewards or punishments will receive in the future and motivates us to take action now, in order to put ourselves in the best position for success later on. Without that emotional bridge, it’s a lot easier to disregard what’s going to happen in the future. Anxiety is the only part of our present selves that has a true emotional investment in how our future selves will feel.

With this in mind, the appropriate relationship to have with anxiety is not to eliminate it, but to channel it. Anxiety can be incredibly motivating. And at a certain level, it’s healthy.

Throughout this conversation, we talk about the give and take of anxiety—but we also talk about how this fits into a larger conversation about how we’re so often taught in modern life that what we should do is eliminate bad things. We should take the presence of bad things as a negative signal. We should be able to remove inefficiency, unhappiness, and all sorts of negative outcomes and emotions from our lives. (In my essay on Heart of Darkness, I call refer to this as “Being loyal to the nightmare of your choosing.”)

But this is based on false model, an inaccurate story about how life works and what it means to be human. This is the story of anxiety that we cover in this conversation. Engaging with it and not running from it is part of the larger story of what Tracy called the “hard work of being human.”

Tracy’s book is “Future Tense: Why anxiety is good for you, even though it feels bad.” It is out now.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

Denis Dutton was a philosopher of art and media. He was born in the US but moved to New Zealand when he was 40, where he became interested in Oceanic Art. This interest led him to spend time in the village of Yentchenmangua on Papua New Guinea. Over the course of his ethnographic work, he began to get to know the locals.

One day, Dutton noticed that his friends in the village seemed down. He asked why. They explained that the tourist numbers had dropped, and they were trying to figure out ways to get more people to visit. Dutton was asked if he had any ideas.

He sort of shrugged, then off the cuff suggested fire-walking. The villagers had no idea what that was. Dutton explained. They asked him if he would teach them.

Dutton had never done a fire-walk of his own before, but he understood the principle from his friends in New Zealand. Coal is a poor conductor of heat. So, in theory, one can scuttle across a bed of hot coals without getting burned if one moves with sufficient haste. The never day he gave it a shot. And it worked. The villagers soon adopted it as their own local ritual, even taking measures to jealously guard it from neighboring tribes.

Dutton later asked them, “So what if some anthropologist visits your village in the future, inquiring about the origin of the fire-walking ritual? What are you going to say?” One of them responded: “We’ll say that we’ve always done it this way. Our fathers did it, and their fathers before them, and ultimately our ancestors learned how to do it from a white god.”

This story is from Ritual, the recent book by Dimitris Xygalatas. And I think it illustrates something crucial about the way we’re used to thinking about rituals—that they’re a kind of cultural excess: there for arbitrary reasons, not serving any specific purpose. Aren’t all rituals like the one the villagers got from Dutton? At some point, someone just made them up, right? Rituals can seem antiquated, and us more-informed moderns are better off leaving them in the rearview mirror.

But Dimitris’s work shows this isn’t the case. Rituals are useful for at least three separate reasons. In this conversation, we cover how research—including Dimitris’s own—shows that rituals reduce anxiety, are crucial for social cohesion, and are an important source of meaning.

Unlike most behavior, rituals aren’t a means to an end. They aren’t about achieving a goal or desired outcome. We do them for their own sake—because that’s how things are done, how our forebears did them. And it is precisely this lack of immediate utility that makes them integral to meaning and identity. They separate our way of doing things from everyone else’s. And, as Dimitris argues, we’re probably worse off in the modern world for our willingness to shave off the trappings of life’s rituals in our relentless pursuit of increased efficiency.

[This interview has been edited and condensed. Full conversation available via the podcast.]

So to start off with: What is a ritual? Why do they matter?

If you ask 100 anthropologists, you might get 100 different definitions of ritual. As far as I’m concerned, a key aspect of ritual is that it’s either gold-demoted [that is, we don’t know why someone does it after it’s already happened] or it is causally-opaque. And what that means is that when people perform their rituals, even the most meaningful rituals, when you ask them why, very often they don’t have a ready explanation for you. They’ll say, “oh, well, we just do them.”*

But even when they do offer some reason for doing those rituals—let’s say we perform this ritual for healing purposes—there is no causal connection between the actions undertaken and the purported outcome. So if I try to heal somebody by chanting, we don’t see any physical causality between the movements of my mouth and what’s going on in that person’s body. So that is a key characteristic of ritual.

An additional characteristic is that rituals create special spaces and special events. They sort of create the domain of the sacred. And this is what differentiates ritual, for example, from habits. So habits might be the flip side of a ritual. I take my coffee every morning, I brush my teeth twice a day, and some say this is my morning ritual when I brush my teeth. But I would say no, because this has a specific purpose to clean your teeth, and the actions you undertake are connected to that outcome. But if you were to just wave your toothbrush in the air with the belief that it will cleanse your teeth, or no belief at all, now that would be a ritual.

At first glance, rituals by definition seem utterly pointless. But the fact that they are found in every human society we’ve ever known, and the fact that so many people around the world find them deeply meaningful, I would dare say all people find them deeply meaningful. Even if they don’t realize it, if they think of religious rituals. But then when we get into other things like your wedding or your birthday celebration or a funeral you attend, all of us find meaning in ritual. So this for me was the big puzzle. When you say the word “ritual,” sometimes it feels, I don’t know, maybe “antiquated” is not quite the right term—but something a primitive society would engage in. But us modern urbanites, you know, we sort of moved beyond that. We do things because they have real effects. How do you think about what it means to perform a ritual in daily life in the modern world? And perhaps what are some of the examples of rituals that you study that your average person would connect with?I think it would be tempting but misguided to think that we no longer have as many rituals as people used to have because we live in an era of technological progress and secularization.

The misconception stems from the fact that because ritual has been such a successful mental and social tool for religion—to the extent that we come to think of those two things as synonymous, but they’re not. Ritual predates religion and it extends far beyond religion. And I would argue that our lives today are just as ritualized as they’ve ever been. We have to be careful with our definitions here—but based on my definition, ritual is everywhere.

In the modern world, we engage in handshakes, and we raise our glasses to attend birthday parties, and we have college graduations, and in many parts of the world we have military parades, and in our militaries we have marching and the raising of the flag and so on and so forth. There are countless examples if we look at how people behave in sports stadiums or in political rallies or at rock concerts or in their everyday life our lives are in ritual, from birth to death.

So the way I see it, there’s a human need for ritual. Rituals provide comfort for us, they help us soothe our anxieties, they help us connect with other people, and this need is a constant. What changes are the forms. And in fact, what you see is that the more organized religion retreats in the West perhaps today, the more people seek it in other domains, and they come up with other kinds of rituals—perhaps of the kind that you find in Burning Man or other festivals or in the area of sports or other organized institutions, even the workspace.

“Those things are important in a ritual context precisely because those actions are arbitrary and have no inherent meaning. It allows them to take whatever meaning we wish.”

Let’s get into the mechanism here. What is it that makes ritual meaningful? What is going on there that takes this ostensibly useless activity and gives it this really fundamental sense of how we create meaning in our lives?This is a complicated answer, because the reason rituals are so successful is that they’re able to trigger a whole host of psychological mechanisms.

One of the ways in which rituals do things for us is that they help us soothe anxiety. And this is a very old idea that anthropologists have proposed over a century ago. For a very long time, this was simply either taken for granted or at least it went untested. But now we have evidence for it. We know, for example, from studies—including my own studies—that when we put people in a room and we stress them out, their behaviors become more ritualistic; they become more repetitive. And then when we look at what happens when they perform these behaviors, even in a decontextualized setting, when we have them engage in repetitive movements, we see that anxiety levels drop. We can see this both in their minds (their anxiety levels as being lower, they feel less stressed) and in their bodies. Their electrodermal activity decreases, their heart rate variability increases, and so on and so forth, their cortisol levels drop.

We also see it in real life rituals. We’ve done studies in Mauritius where we measured people’s stress levels as they performed rituals in a religious temple, a Hindu temple, compared to a control group, and we see that after performing those rituals, they have lower anxiety levels, both psychological and biological.

How do the rituals do that? What is the mechanism?

We have proposed that this is related to the way our brain works and the way our brain constantly seeks patterns in the world. Our brain makes predictions all of the time. Before I finish a sentence, you have a certain prediction in your mind about what my next sentence is going to be. When we drive, we make predictions about where every other car in our own car will be in a few seconds from now and so on and so forth. It’s a very efficient cognitive architecture that I think will inevitably evolve given evolutionary potential. That’s where advanced intelligence will move towards. And if we ever have true artificial intelligence, it would have to work in the same way. A byproduct of this architecture is that when we don’t have the capacity, when our environment does not allow us to make successful predictions, we get very stressed. The thing we experience as stress, perhaps more than anything else, is uncertainty. And this is why you see that those domains of life that have high stakes and high uncertainty are full of virtualization. If you go to a casino, you will see that gamblers are notorious for their superstitions rituals. If you go to a sports stadium you see the same. If you go to a war zone again you see the same. And ritual provides structure, it is predictability. When I do a ritual, because I’ve always done it the same way. I know exactly what will happen—when and how it will happen.

This gives you a sense of control of the situation. And of course this control may be illusory, but it doesn’t matter. We know that it works. We know that it helps you reduce your anxiety. So this is one piece of the puzzle. Ritualization comes naturally to us and it feels good.

Another related mechanisms is what we call “effort justification.” This idea refers to a whole host of different related theories, but they all make the same observation that our brain makes inferences about the value of things. And one of the cues it uses to make those inferences is how costly they are.

I spent some time living with a group of people called the Anastenaria in northern Greece, and they performed fire-walking rituals. What I realized there was that the meaning for their participation in those rituals was produced through participation itself. What I mean by this is when I asked the youngsters “Why do you do this ritual?” most of them will just look at me and they say they would say things like “I felt this urge to do it” or “That’s what people do around here.” When you invest so much effort into an activity, it automatically feels more meaningful. This is a fair assumption to make. Some of the best things in life come at a cost, right? You get what you pay for—in building things and so on and so forth. So our brain automatically infers value from effort. And this is why some of the things that seemingly don’t have any inherent value, things like running marathons or climbing Mount Everest or performing very painful rituals or investing a lot of time week after week after week, thousands of hours—let’s say memorizing the Torah or attending church—those things too create meaning for us.

The first time anybody goes to a temple for the vast majority of individuals as children, it’s because their parents take them. It’s not because they had some kind of an epiphany. But do this long enough and it begins to become very meaningful.

One last thing I will stress here is the ability of ritual to forge social connections. So that’s very important to us. It creates a sense of collective identity, a sense of belonging, a sense of bonding. How does it do that? Again, through multiple mechanisms.

One of those is related to what we call “phenotypic matching.” Other animals do this as well, but we also do it a lot. We make assumptions about human connections and kinship based on a variety of cues. One of those cues is similarity. We know that phenotype and genotype are closely track one another, for the most part. So people who look more like me, the more they look like me the more likely they are to be related to me. And rituals are very good at doing this. They align people’s appearances. Perhaps we wear the same clothes, the same makeup. They align people’s movements. We all march together. We chant together. They align people’s emotional responses. We have evidence from various rituals that when people perform collective rituals, even their heart rates begin to synchronize. So they feel like one. And by doing all of those things, people feel closer to each other. It is no accident that in so many ritual contexts, participants call each other their brethren. And we talk about things like fraternities and sororities and all those things invariably have in common are ritualized behaviors. So they have a rituals recruit a host of different mechanisms to provide meaningful experiences for people.

I want to talk more about effort justification. Another way of putting that is that rituals derive their meaningfulness from friction. It’s the fact that they don’t accomplish anything of themselves. They’re not instrumental. They’re not actually the thing that is getting you whatever the further reward or end that you want is.

What I like about that thesis is that it’s at odds, in many ways, with the way we typically think about meaning. I think a lot of us intuitively believe that there is such thing as “intrinsic meaning.” This was actually something I was talking about with Paul Bloom in one of my recent episodes. When we talk about things that we find meaningful, a lot of the time it’s this small list of having kids, rewarding careers—these things that have very clear goal orientation where it’s clear why you’re doing them. And instead, you’re kind of saying, “Hey, look, here’s something that by its very nature is inane in a way.” And yet this is this crucial thing that we are taking to construct our meaningful engagement with the world. Does that sound like a fair characterization of your position?Yeah, and in fact, when you think about it, some of the things that both are the most meaningful to us and are also the very things that make us human, that really distinguish us from other animals, are precisely those kinds of things that have no inherent, no intrinsic meaning. There are things like art and music and dancing and ritual and group membership. There are things like sports fandom. It’s all of those things. Those things are important in a ritual context precisely because those actions are arbitrary and have no inherent meaning. It allows them to take whatever meaning we wish.

Whatever the ideology of the group is, these rituals are a very good way of reinforcing that ideology. Whatever the group itself is, those arbitrary actions allow us to distinguish this group from what other people do. Because there’s an infinite array of things we could be doing in the context of a ritual. If I want to clean my hands as a utilitarian action, there are only a few ways of doing this. I can use water and soap or an antiseptic and so on and so forth. But if I conduct a purification ritual, then I can do any number of things. I can use blue paint, or I can use ashes, or I can use blood, or I can use dirt or water, and so on and so forth, or just symbolic gestures. And that means that we can choose an action that will be specific and unique to our own group. And that makes it special for us. It creates those associations with the most salient part of our identity, our group membership.I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of efficiency. A lot of times in modern life, what we’re striving for is increased efficiency. And when I hear theories like yours describing, “okay, let’s look at this specific instance and try and understand how we make meaning from it,” it seems like a core component of what we’re doing when we find something meaningful is that we’re identifying something inefficient about it. And it’s almost through a kind of cognitive dissonance of saying, “well, I’m not doing this because it’s the most direct way to achieve a goal. Otherwise, I would do this other thing.”

It seems to me like that impulse to streamline and to make life of an increasingly efficient nature actually takes away from a lot of the fabric of meaning that you’re describing in things like ritual, social connection, the ability of ritual to create, as you said earlier on, space, all those sort of things. Does that sound right to you?Well, one way to respond to this would be to flip it on its head and to say that in fact just because ritual don’t have direct utility does not mean that they’re less efficient. In fact sometimes they might be seen as mental shortcuts. So imagine a situation—let’s take two examples, the individual level and the collective level.

At the individual level, imagine that you’re very stressed. You’re facing a major threat, perhaps you’re concerned about illness, there are things you can do to reduce your stress. You can start working on the psychological processes, perhaps you can talk to someone, you can go out for a walk, there’s any number of things you can try to do. But if a ritual works, that might be the easiest way of dealing with this. If what is familiar already works, then it doesn’t really matter if it’s an arbitrary action as long as it works for you.

In the collective context, now think of a group that is facing very high stakes. So we know from historical evidence that groups that face higher stakes—for example, the tribes that are under constant threat of warfare—they have more painful initiation rituals. Now the problem that this group needs to solve is the problem of cooperation and trust. When you’re going out to war or hunting or any kind of high-stake activity, you want to have a very cohesive team made up of very trustworthy individuals who are really committed to this, to their group membership. Now the best way to find out, perhaps the best utilitarian way, is to go to war and who is a good, who is brave and who will defect and run away. But there’s also another way of doing this. Some high intensity initiation rituals precisely simulate those conditions in a safe space. So what they do is that they get people to pay a high price in advance and that functions as a test of their loyalty, as a test of their commitment.. If I’m willing to go through hell week and suffer for an entire week, then I’m truly committed. If I’m willing to endure a brutal beating in order to join a gang or a fraternity, then I’m truly committed to this.

And since you mentioned Paul Bloom, I’ll get to an example that he gave in his previous book. He says that he described this election for a fraternity president, and there were three candidates. So the first candidate steps up in front of the fraternity and says, if I’m elected, I’ll do X, Y, and Z. And the second candidate steps up and says, if I’m elected, I’ll do A, B, and C. And the third one steps up, takes a piece of paper with the fraternity’s insignia, and staples it to his chest.

Now this is an act that has no direct function and is completely arbitrary, but by doing this—there was no better signal of loyalty and commitment and willingness and desire to be the leader of that group. And he was elected. So that’s the kind of thing that rituals do. The more direct way might also be in the long run more effortful. So you could put in years of work or you could go out to war and then we can test your bravery. But there are ways of taking shortcuts and in this sense, perhaps rituals are not as wasteful as they seem.

So what should we do with this information? Is the implication here that we would all be slightly better off in particular on the come up with new rituals? Is that the takeaway for you on the pragmatic front from having studied all this?Yes, I think the main takeaway from this is that the things that might appear to be irrational, if they seem to work for so many people, then they’re worth investigating, exploring, and of course adopting and incorporating into our lives. It’s no accident that every human society has had rituals. Now for many of us, our lives are radically different than those of our ancestors. We’re more mobile. We have fluid social networks, so we’re not bound by tradition as much as our ancestors were. And this can sometimes create a gap in meaning. And we see levels of depression and suicide, there are spiking around the world—anxiety levels. So these kinds of practices, if they’ve worked for so long, I think it’s worth considering the possibility that they might work for us as well. In fact, as a researcher, I know that they do.

I do see myself as a very rational person. I don’t have any supernatural commitments. But I tend to see ritual as, as I said at the beginning—I see it as both predating religion and extending far beyond religion. It is not about something supernatural. If you’re willing to concede that things like art and music are deeply meaningful, too, then I don’t see why you wouldn’t concede that the rituals too are also deeply meaningful and are also not just useful but they’re a core part of leading a good and a meaningful life.

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My episode last week featured a conversation with author David McCraney about what it takes to change someone’s mind on a big, important topic like religion, or abortion, or guns. And the overriding conclusion of McRaney’s research on the topic was that facts alone don’t change minds. From emotions and feelings to social dynamics, beliefs are embedded in a complex web of factors that rationality alone can do little to unwind. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try.

My guest this week is a two time world champion of debate. He’s coached debate for Harvard, as well as the Australian national team, and he’s currently a law student at Harvard. His name is Bo Seo, and his new book is called Good Arguments.

In the book, Bo tells the story of his own trajectory through the debate world and what he’s learned about the structure of successful debate along the way. And I wanted to talk to Bo about this because debate is a kind of idealized battle of beliefs. One side gives their perspective. The other side makes the opposing case. Whichever side’s argument is more convincing is declared the winner. And it’s this kind of idealized form of debate that many of us, Bo included, envision as this core principle of a working democracy. You let two opposing sides each present the best version of their case. Then the rest of us get to decide which one to believe. But it feels less and less like these kind of good arguments are happening in our society. Sometimes they don’t even feel possible anymore.

So in this conversation, I wanted to explore the mechanisms of formal debate. Why does competitive debate work the way it does? What happens if you change the formula? What might we be overlooking by trying to over-generalize the competitive debate format to the rest of society? And is debate the right model to use if our ultimate goal is changing minds? These questions are all especially worth asking to contrast with the decidedly non-debate models of mind-changing David McCraney and I had discussed last week.

Bo’s book, Good Arguments, is out. Now you can find him on Twitter @HelloBoSeo or on his website helloboseo.com. If you enjoy this episode and want to stay up to date with the rest of my work, please consider subscribing to my Substack newsletter at againsthabit.com.

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I often say that the second best thing to happen to me was deciding to become a Christian. And the first best thing was deciding not to be a Christian.

I didn’t exactly grow up Christian, but I became a believer around age 12. I went to Christian school. Overall I took my religious beliefs really seriously. And to me, they felt like my own. A core part of my identity as a Christian was that I was explicit about my beliefs. I didn’t inherit them from my parents, nor did they feel like I was required to put them on for public appearances, like some sort of mandatory uniform.

Since my school was religious, Christian doctrine was taught in the classroom. These students were all more or less believers as well, even if they were the mandatory uniform kind. We even had a teacher who taught us that evolution was not “just a theory” as one sometimes hears the Creationist argument framed, but a totally ludicrous idea that makes little rational sense when subjected to true unindoctrinated scrutiny.

Then in college, I started to modify some beliefs, all of which traditionally are not held by Christians, but all of which I felt were compatible with a biblical world view.

The first was evolution. This one was easy. Even if you believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, if God hasn’t created the sun in the moon yet, then who’s to say that a day is only 24 hours long? These seven days of creation in Genesis could have taken place over billions of years, guided by the hand of God. So evolution was fairly easy to add into my worldview.

The second was determinism. This one is also pretty easily squared with Christianity, maybe even a more conservative interpretation of the Bible. In theology, the debate is often presented as Calvinism versus Arminianism. Calvinists believe in predestination. God, being all-knowing, knows ahead of time, who is going to heaven and who isn’t. He’s God. He can’t not know. The Arminianists, by contrast, believe in free will. God, being all loving, can’t create some people just to send them to hell and therefore shields his otherwise all-knowingness from whether or not a person’s heart will turn toward him. Arminianism sounds nice, but… come on. Calvinism is clearly the more defensible theological position. So when I came to believe that free will is an illusion, it didn’t pose any issue to my faith.

The third and most difficult to square was physicalism. This is the philosophical position that all physical events have physical causes. In other words, there’s nothing in the physical universe that needs some outside force to explain it. In particular, there is no immaterial soul that explains the essence of human behavior.

Whenever I told Christians about this belief, they were usually taken aback. But what about resurrection? How would that work without an immaterial soul — if we were all just atoms, cells, and chemistry? To which I would usually reply that the logistics of resurrection were indeed mysterious under physicalist assumptions, but it was no less mysterious than dualistic assumptions. Just less familiar. For instance, how does an immaterial soul for which there is no evidence of interaction with the human brain and is not necessary for a complete explanation of human behavior, contain the essence of a person in any meaningful way? How for that matter would such a soul migrate from our own physical universe into some alternate universe of heaven, or hell, while still retaining some resemblance to the essence of its original host? It may have been a nonstandard belief, but I didn’t view it as one that created new problems, just reframed old ones.

And so for a while, I held onto these three additional beliefs, as well as my belief in the core tenets of biblical Christianity about Jesus being our savior. The change in beliefs themselves was not enough for me to disregard Christianity as a whole. There was another piece that was necessary.

I’d always been a part of Christian groups, and throughout high school that association was pretty strong. But in college, the Christian group I joined never quite seemed to click for me. I spent a lot of time with the people in the group. I even lived on an apartment floor where everyone was a member of this group, but I always felt like I was on the outside. In fact, on a one on one level, I felt much more connected to my friends who weren’t believers.

The main exception was my girlfriend at the time who was herself close to everyone in that inner circle. Then one day she broke up with me. The reason cited was insufficient Jesus-mindedness, which really offended me at the time, because I considered myself very Jesus-minded. But it was my first major breakup and it hit me really hard. I found it difficult to let go. On two separate occasions I asked her to take me back (and I doubt her version of the story employs the verb ‘ask’ in quite the same manner). But eventually it became clear we were not getting back together.

That was January 21st, 2013. I remember that date because it was the day I decided I would no longer be a Christian.

I officially disbelieved in the Jesus narrative that I’d held as a defining core belief for so many years. At the time I figured that even if I was going to be a Christian in the long run, I’d be a more effective one knowing what it was truly like to live life as an unbeliever. Either way, it was time to take these new philosophical perspectives I had adopted as my central beliefs, rather than the teachings of the Bible.

The thing that stands out to me about that story looking back was that it wasn’t the intellectual change that ultimately flipped my religious belief. It was the social change. Most people I grew up with who remained Christian — their friends are all Christian, their parents and siblings are Christian. There’s a huge social cost to altering that belief. But after my breakup, I found myself no longer having to face that social cost. I had removed the social barriers, and I could make the decision based on my own intellectual conclusions. From this experience, I learned that, in general, people don’t form their beliefs for intellectual reasons. They form them for social reasons.

And that is one of the central themes of the latest book from my guest today, David McRaney. It is called How Minds Change. In it, David looks at the cutting scientific edge in the field of psychology as it relates to belief change. He follows some stories of belief change much more dramatic than my own. For example, ex members of the Westboro Baptist church and formerly prominent conspiracy theorists.

The book was a ton of fun to read and I highly recommend checking it out. Even as someone who reads quite a bit of non-fiction on cognitive and social psychology, there was a lot in there that I hadn’t encountered before and a handful of reframings which really put old subjects into new light for me.

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Earlier this week, my colleague Adam Mastroianni published an essay on what he called "cultural oligopoly." An increasingly smaller number of artists create an increasingly larger percentage of what we watch, read, and listen to. Mastroianni presents data showing that through the year 2000 only about twenty-five percent of a single year's highest grossing movies were spinoffs, franchises, or sequels. Now it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 75%. He has similar data for hit TV shows, books, and music. Why is this happening?

My guest today is Nick Seaver, who is a cultural anthropologist at Tufts University. And for the last decade or so, Nick has studied the social processes underlying the creation of music recommender systems, which form the algorithmic basis for companies like Spotify and Pandora. I've admired Nick's work for a long time. And as an anthropologist, he is interested not necessarily in the nitty gritty details of how these algorithms are constructed, but rather in who is constructing them and what these people believe they are doing when they make decisions about how the algorithms ought to work.

The core of Nick's work centers around taste, and how these companies and their algorithms subtly shape not only what we consume, but what we like. When Nick started this line of work in the early 2010s, it really wasn't clear how big of an impact these recommender systems would have on our society. Now, his expertise gives an evermore incisive look at the central themes of many large societal conversations around the content we consume and our everyday digital existence. But I came into this conversation with Mastroianni's question at the top of my mind, and I think Nick's research can give a crucial insight, at least into one piece of the puzzle.

One of Nick's papers relates an ethnographic study of music recommender system engineers. In the interest of protecting the identity of his informants, he gives the company a fictional name, but it bears conspicuous resemblance to Spotify. As a naive observer, one might think that the way these engineers think about their audience is in terms of demography: this kind of person likes this kind of music. If they can figure out the kind of person you are, they can recommend music that you'll probably like. But that turns out not to be the dimension of largest variance.

Instead, Nick introduces the concept of “avidity.” Essentially, how much effort is a listener willing to put in to find new music? This turns out to be the first distinction that these engineers make between listeners. And it forms a pyramid. On the bottom you have what one of his informants called the “musically indifferent.” This makes up the majority of listeners. Their ideal listening experience is “lean-back.” They want to press play, then leave the whole thing alone. It is a passive listening experience — no skipping songs, no wondering what other tracks might be on the album. From there, it goes from “casual” and “engaged” listeners to the top of the pyramid, which is “musical savant.” These are “lean-in” listeners who are taking an active role in discovering new and different kinds of music.

“The challenge,” Nick writes, “is that all of these listeners wanted different things out of a recommender system.” Quoting one of his informants, codename Peter, he says: “in any of these four sectors, it's a different ball game in how you want to engage them.” As Nick summarizes it: “what worked for one group might fail for another.”

Nick continues here: "as Peter explained to me, lean-back listeners represented the bulk of the potential market for music recommendation in spite of their relatively low status in the pyramid. There were more of them. They were more in need of the kind of assistance recommenders could offer and successfully capturing them could make 'the big bucks' for a company."

Nick relates the slightly more forthcoming perspective of another engineer, codename Oliver: "it's hard to recommend shitty music to people who want shitty music," he said, expressing the burden of a music recommendation developer caught between two competing evaluative schemes: his own idea about what makes good music and what he recognizes as the proper criteria for evaluating a recommender system.

In the course of our conversation, Nick and I cover not only his studies of music recommender systems, but also his more recent studies taking an anthropological approach to attention.

We tend to think of attention as this highly individualized process. For example, of gazing into the screen of your phone or turning your head to identify the source of an unexpected noise. But attention is also a social and cultural process. We attend collectively to certain stories, certain memes, certain ideas. What exactly the connection is between these two forms of attention is not obvious. And Nick's current line of work is an attempt to draw it out.

But the larger theme here is that music recommender systems are one battle in the larger war for our collective attention. What Spotify, Netflix, and Twitter all have in common is that their success is proportional to the extent to which they can dominate our attention. This is known in Silicon Valley as the idea of "persuasive technology." And one way to begin to understand the origins of cultural oligopolies starts with Nick's observation about avidity. The vast majority of listeners or viewers tend to go with the default option with which they're presented. Another way of putting it is that their preferred mode is habitual autopilot.

While recommender systems make up just one part of this content ecosystem. This principle remains stable across its many different layers. The more we go with our habitual default options, the more control these platforms have over us. The more we rely on these companies to define our tastes for us, the more homogenous our tastes will become.

Nick's forthcoming book is “Computing Taste.” It comes out in December 2022. Keep an eye out for it.

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Stephen Kosslyn is a foundational figure in the field of cognitive science. It is only fitting that he is the final guest in my Cognitive Revolution interview series, before I transition into a new line of content which I’m calling “Against Habit.” I remember in my introduction to my introduction to cognitive science course—which helped set me on the track I’m on today—learning about the mental imagery debate between Stephen Kosslyn and Zenon Pylyshyn. Kosslyn argued that the mental images we can conjure in our minds are indeed pictorial. Pylyshyn argued they merely felt that way; in fact, they’re closer to linguistic descriptions. It was fun to talk to Professor Kosslyn about his experience in cognitive science, how he’s used his cognitive scientific experience to do more applied work in recent years, and how cognitive scientists should think about novels and fictional rendering of human behavior. Stephen is currently president of Active Learning Sciences, Inc. and has served as chief academic officer for cutting edge educational institutions such as Foundry College and Minerva Schools. He was previously the John Lindsley Professor of Psychology in Memory of William James and Dean of Social Science at Harvard University.

Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out:

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Tom Griffiths is Professor Psychology and Computation Science at Princeton University, where he directs the Computational Cognitive Science Lab. Tom uses algorithms from AI to inform his work as a psychologist—testing the ways in which hims align with or deviate from the standards set by the AI models. He’s a central figure in this field, and in this episode we go deep on how it first occurred to Tom to use computers to study the mind—as well as where this work has taken him over the years. Tom recently released a podcast series through Audible, co-hosted with Brian Christian, called Algorithms at Work. I finished it recently and can confidently say it’s one of the best podcast series I’ll listen to all year!

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I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Leyla Isik is Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. She did her PhD at MIT with Nancy Kanwisher and Tommy Poggio. Leyla’s research uses state-of-the-art techniques in neuroimaging and computational modeling to study how people interpret real scenes. For instance, her studies have scanned the people of participants as they watch scenes from the TV show Sherlock. This is a crucial frontier of neuroscientific research, as it takes our most incisive tools for understanding the brain and liberates them from the confines of contrived experiments. Leyla and her research lab well-positioned to introduce fundamental insights about brain and behavior in the coming decades.

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I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.

Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work!

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Antonio Damasio is an eminent neuroscientist and author. Damasio is originally from Portugal. He is the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at USC. His books include Descartes’ Error and Self Comes to Mind. His latest book is Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. In this conversation, we trace the trajectory of his life and work from his early experiences to his most recent text.

Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out:

I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.

Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work!

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Tom Pettigrew is professor emeritus in the psychology department at UC Santa Cruz. He is best known as the main proponent of one of social psychology’s most prominent ideas: intergroup contact theory. In this episode, we talk about how Tom was expelled from Jr High school for standing up to a racist teacher, the formative experiences that sparked his insights into intergroup contact, the mentorship of Gordon Allport, his extended trip to apartheid South Africa, how Allport's four factors for positive intergroup contact really came from Tom himself, how Tom's thinking about intergroup contact has changed over the years, and the role of social psychological in large-scale political and societal change.

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

This week’s guest is Alan Fiske. Alan is a professor of anthropology at UCLA, who is known for his unique brand of mixing approaches from psychology and anthropology. He is the brother of Susan Fiske, a famous social psychologist and one of my first guests on this show. In this episode, we talk about growing up in an academic family, Alan joining the peace core to avoid the Vietnam draft, helping to eradicate smallpox in Congo, how travel and experiences abroad influenced decision to become an anthropologist, the tension between doing good in the work (embodied by his moither) and working with ideas (his father’s purview), how indentifying the commonalities Weber, Piaget, & Ricouer led to the development of Alan’s most influential theory, and the relationship between the fields of psychology and anthropology throughout Alan’s career.

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

My guest this week is Elizabeth Loftus. She is generally considered to be the most highly cited female psychologist of all time. She is also a controversial figure within the field. Her research has looked at the unreliability of eye witness metaphor and the nature of false memories. She’s used this compelling line of research to testify as an expert witness in court. Though she’s testified on behalf of a range of defendants, the most publicized cases she’s participated in have been high-profile men, such as Harvey Weinstein. She was the subject of a recent New Yorker profile, which delved into the legacy of this work—as well as providing detailed speculation on the root causes of why Beth is so drawn to the topic of false memories and why she’s dedicated so much of her career to bringing these topics to light in legal proceedings.

In this conversation, we talked about Beth being the only woman in her mathematical psychology PhD program at Stanford; being voted least likely to succeed as a psychologist; finding a topic she actually cared about; finding a way to apply it; her first case applying psychology to legal proceedings. I also get Beth’s take on the NYer piece about her life, the controversy that’s followed her work, and whether there are limits to role that abstract knowledge can play in societal events.

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Recently, I’ve been workshopping an idea. Basically, I don’t believe there is such thing as an activity that is intrinsically meaningful.

Sure, there are activities which people consistently endorse as meaningful pursuits: having kids, productive careers, learning a language, that sort of thing. And while there is an empirical fact about what sort of activities members of our culture consider meaningful, this is not because these activities are meaningful in some fundamental way. Rather, what this empirical fact captures is that there is a limited set of readily available cultural stories about where meaning comes from. We tend to say that’s where we, personally, derive meaning from, because that’s the default story about meaning our culture prescribes. In fact, anything that can be construed as meaningful—if you tell the story right.

Most recently I argued this point in a piece called meaning is post-hoc, where my claim was that we can’t predict ahead of time what will be meaningful and what won’t. This is because stories are always told retrospectively—and meaning depends entirely on the stories we tell. In particular, I’m skeptical of the traditional psychological narrative about meaning (“here is the set of activities people tend to derive meaning from”) because whenever academics describe someone who is engaged in canonically meaningful activities, it sounds an awful lot like an abstract version of what a university professor does. I think that really underestimates the diversity of how people conceive of meaning and how devoted they are to finding it. Anthropology and sociology are full of examples along the lines of “Here’s some society that we think of as very different from elite western society and yet here they are spending all this time developing sophisticated theories about their place in the world.” One of my personal favorites is The Dignity of Working Men by Michèle Lamont. In short, I believe—at least at present—that there are no intrinsically meaningful activities because you can look back on any activity and come up with a way of construing it as meaningful.

In this conversation, I had the privilege of honing this idea against one of the sharpest minds in the field. Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Toronto, previously based at Yale. Between these institutions and his online course, he has taught introductory psychology to millions of bright young students. This course laid the foundation for his latest book, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind.

Paul has thought a lot about the problem of meaning, both in this book and in his previous book, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. We approach the topic via entry points from his latest book (particularly Freud), and eventually I get around to pitching him my latest ideas. By no means do I immediately bring him around to my view. A lot of what we disagree on, I think, depends on what goes beyond the purview of psychology and what doesn’t. Sometimes it’s hard to know where the draw those lines.

A conversation with Paul is always enlightening, and at least from my own perspective I think this conversation strikes a nice balance between drawing out some of the highlights of Paul’s broad base of thinking with some of the problems I’ve most directly been grappling with in my own thought.

Paul’s latest book is Psych: The Story of the Human Mind. It’s available now.

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

This week’s guest is George Lakoff. George is one of the most highly cited cognitive scientists of all time, with his book Metaphors We Live By (co-authored with Mark Johnson) having been referenced in over 75,000 other scientific papers. George is best known for his work on how metaphor provides the structure of cognition, generally known as the “conceptual metaphors” framework, as well as his foundational ideas about the embodied mind. In last week’s episode, I talked with Annie Murphy Paul about her recent book, The Extended Mind, which draws heavily on the program of research of which Lakoff is a cornerstone. Lakoff is also politically very active, though we venture much into those topics in this conversation. In this episode our discussion mainly centers around George’s formative experiences—particularly in his childhood and adolescence; notable among them is the time he lived with a murder—as well as the genesis of his most famous ideas in cognitive science and linguistics (the latter starts around minute 40:00).

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

My guest today is Annie Murphy Paul. Annie is a science journalist, and she has a new book out. It’s getting a lot of press. She’s made the rounds on all the Big Idea podcasts. I listened to a bunch of them in prep for this episode. Three of my favorites were her talks with Adam Grant, Ezra Klein, and Scott Barry Kaufman (fun fact: AMP was actually SBK's very first guest on his podcast). They’re all great discussions, and so I tried to broach some new territory with Annie in our talk here.

The basic argument of her book is about fundamentally rethinking the way we talk about the mind. Her book is called The Extended Mind, and its starting point is a paper of the same title by two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers. The basic line of argument is that we tend to think of the mind as a fundamentally bounded entity, where the bounds of thought are essentially between one’s ears. These philosophers, Annie, and the relevant academic literature, are saying: No, actually when you start to scrutinize the assumptions of that idea, the position doesn’t hold up very well. Actually our minds are inextricable from the world around us. Annie’s book is all about diving into why this is the case, and how it should change the way we interact with our surroundings.

In preparation for this discussion, I revisited that original Clark and Chalmers paper from 1998. The point of the paper, as they see it, is an argument against semantic externalism. This is a philosophical position about whether the “meaning” of a word resides in our heads, or in the world. Philosophers like Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge advanced this externalist position, with the key soundbite being Putnam’s quote: “Cut the pie any way you like, meaning just ain’t in the head.” In particular, Putnam has this famous thought experiment, called Twin Earth, which him and his contemporaries use as an argument that internalism is false and externalism is true (meaning just ain’t in the head). Clark and Chalmers are kind of saying: Look, it’s not just meaning that isn’t in the head. It’s all of cognition. They call this position active externalism.

There’s a quote from the paper I really love. This is Clark and Chalmers talking about the details of Twin Earth:

“When I believe that water is wet and my twin believes that twin water is wet, the external features responsible for the difference in our beliefs are distal and historical, at the other end of a lengthy causal chain. Features of the present are not relevant: if I happen to be surrounded by XYZ right now (maybe I have teleported to Twin Earth), my beliefs still concern standard water, because of my history.”

I have only a modest notion of what the hell they’re talking about. But I just love how the more sophisticated a philosophical argument is, the deeper it gets into the finer points of just how wet water on twin earth is, and if you were doused in it would it feel equivalently wet to substance XYZ, and how do you know whether it’s really you or twin-you who feels this wetness.

At any rate, what Clark and Chalmers are saying is that our relationship to the people, objects, and tool in our external environment is not passive. We are actively thinking through the environment, as we much as are thinking through our own neurons. They give the example of Tetris and how you’re actually rotating the shapes on screen, then seeing if they fit—rather than thinking about how they might fit and then rotating accordingly.

That’s a brief primer on the philosophical origins of this concept. In my conversation with Annie, we also talk about how our minds extend into our social surroundings, why writing is a form of memory, the important ideas about the extended mind that people tend to gloss over, how this concept should affect American education, and how this concept changes the way we think about other people. We also battle it out over whether a dual monitor computer set up actually works like a second brain. It was a fun conversation, and I hope you enjoy it.

Annie’s Three Books:

* Andy Clark: Natural-Born Cyborgs

* Alva Noë: Out of Our Heads

* Mark Epistein: The Zen of Therapy

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

This is a conversation I’ve been wanting to have for a long time. I met Kevin several years ago, and it was a big moment for me. This was the first time I’d ever met a real author. Of course I said something foolish. Of course he has no recollection of such foolish statements. I’m a huge admirer of his first book, The Most Dangerous Book, which tells the story behind Ulysses—one of the most controversial manuscripts of all time. It’s got an incredible cast of characters from James Joyce to Hemingway to Ezra Pound to Sylvia Beach. That book really drew me into to Kevin’s style of writing and the way he’s able to bring social analysis to bear on literary and intellectual themes.

Kevin Birmingham has a PhD in English from Harvard. He actually studied under Louis Menand, whom I’ve also had on the show and is one of my all-time favorite authors. In this conversation, I definitely ask Kevin about Menand’s influence—a bit toward the end. Kevin has won numerous awards including the PEN New England Award and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. The occasion for our conversation today is the publication of his new book, which came out in November 2021. It’s called The Sinner and the Saint, and it tells the story of the creative process behind Dostoevsky’s masterpiece Crime and Punishment. Since it’s a Russian novel, the creative process entails a great deal of suffering. The book also ties in the true story of how Dostoevsky’s thriller was inspired by the real life crimes of a Frenchman, Pierre François Lacenaire. (I’d like to imagine that all French criminal masterminds are named Pierre François.)

Of course I’m a cognitive scientist by training, so I don’t have a lot of background in literary analysis. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve enjoyed Kevin’s books so much, helping me, as a layman, to understand books—at least aspects of books anyway—that I wouldn’t otherwise have the tools to grasp. There’s a passage I especially love from Kevin’s recent book: “One measure of Dostoevsky’s talent is that he could make something as small as a wink turn all the gears in a complex relationship. Porfiry’s tiniest movement is either an involuntary twitch or a cunning signal. Either it means nothing or it spells out Raskolnikov’s doom. He doesn’t know how to read it, and he can’t even tell if it happened. Raskolnikov wonders if all of his blinks look like winks, if the inspector’s eyes always gleam on a horizon between empty sky and unsounded fathoms. He begins to scrutinize every detail: the way the inspector positions his body, the tone of his voice, the way he emphasized the word she. In Dostoevsky’s murder story, the detective is the mystery.”

At any rate, talking to Kevin is like having a private seminar with your favorite professor. He’s able to spin some really great answers. It was a fun conversation, and I’m really looking forward to sharing it with you!

Kevin’s Three Books:

* James Baldwin: Notes of a Native Son

* James Joyce: Ulysses

* Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

My guest today is someone very special. I worked in his lab for two years, and he did a lot to form my relationship with cognitive science. It started back when I was an undergrad, and I went to the Cognitive Science Society conference in Berlin. There was this professor there, and I was totally arrested by his approach to studying the mind. He was using sophisticated computational models informed by AI to understand the cognitive processes underlying human thought. His name was Josh Tenenbaum. I became obsessed with his work.

The following year I went back to the Cognitive Science Society conference, this time in Montreal. My express purpose was to insinuate myself in Josh’s inner circle. I approached him on the first morning of the conference, and he said he had 15 minutes for us to chat. Mostly that chat consisted of his expounding upon his ideas about how the mind is structured and how this structure develops through childhood. But then at the end as we were wrapping up he paused for a moment and said: “I have this post-doc. He’s really good. He just applied to faculty jobs at Berkeley, Harvard, and Columbia and got offers at all three. He’ll be starting a lab at Harvard next fall. His name is Sam Gershman.”

From then on I made it my mission to end up in Sam’s lab. The story has a lot of twists and turns but suffice to say that I pestered Sam for two straight years, reminding him of my existence via email and inquiring if he had any available research opportunities. For two years, nothing happened. Then one day while I was living in Belgium, I was sitting in my underwear watching Old Country for No Men. I got an email. It was from Sam. The subject line: “Still looking for a job?” His lab manager had unexpectedly quit. He was looking for someone to fill the role in short order. He knew I was the kind of individual who was infrequently employed enough to be available.

And so I started working in Sam’s lab in spring 2016. I experienced a lot of ups and downs in those two years I worked for him. I learned a lot about what I liked and didn’t like about research, about what I wanted to do and didn’t want to do, what I needed from a work environment and what I could live without. But his general program of research combining Bayesian models and reinforcement learning to understand the neural and computational basis of behavior has influenced me more than any other single researcher. He also gave me a chance, one that’s done a lot to get me where I am today. For that, I owe him an awful lot.

Anyone who has spent any time around Sam (or taken a peak at his Google scholar page) can attest that he is likely the single most prolific individual in all of psychology. In his peak years of productivity at Harvard, it felt like he would publish the number of papers in a year other researchers could expect to publish in a decade. In this conversation, this is one of the things I wanted to press him on. He’s always been a little coy about this line of inquiry, preferring instead to keep discussions on the finer points of statistical distributions and inference problems. I pushed a bit more to talk about his process and the way he thinks about producing his work.

We also talked about cognitive science in general. Despite his pretty well-defined lane for formal research, he has uncommon breadth as a scholar. He is interested in a lot, and he’s worked on many different kinds of projects (including, as I allude to in the conversation, a series of video shorts which are—shall we say?—rather avant-garde in taste). So we went into a bit of cognitive science history (including Sam's favorite historical cognitive scientist), and what the enterprise of cogsci should look like in general.

Finally, Sam recently published a book. It’s called What Makes Us Smart: The Computational Logic of Human Cognition. We cover the overarching thesis of the book, about the two organizing principles of human cognition. We explore the potential counterarguments to that thesis, and I ask him about what people who are already familiar with the work (as well as those who aren’t) can get expect to get out of it.

Sam’s Three Books:

* John Cage: Silence

* Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

* Liu Cixin: The Three Body Problem

Papers we mentioned:

* The molecular memory code and synaptic plasticity

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In my conversation with Sam, we also mention the work of Randy Gallistel:

I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.

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This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

This is the second part of my conversation with Randy Gallistel. In the first part, we talk about his ideas around why the neuroscience of memory is completely inadequate to the task of understanding… memory. In this episode, we get into the backstory on those ideas, as well as Randy’s major influences. We talk about the influence of foundational experiments by Tony Deutsch, why neuroscientists “squirm” when you bring up the problem of representation, which of Randy’s research projects didn't work out the way he thought, how his academic mentor introduced him to his future wife, and what a good theory should not look like.

Randy’s Three Books:

* The Eighth Day of Creation, Horace Freeland Judson

* The Logic of Life, Francois Jacob

* Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code, Rieka et al

* Honorary mention: Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Sean B Carroll

Books we talked about:

* Randy’s Memory and the Computational Brain

* The Structural Basis of Behavior, J. Anthony Deutsch

Papers we talked about:

* Randy’s recent paper on the Physical Basis of Memory

Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out:

I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.

Also: If you’d like to unsubscribe from these weekly podcast emails, you can do so while still remaining on the email list that features my weekly writing. Thanks for following my work!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe