Conversations shape nearly every aspect of our lives. We joke, argue, persuade, gossip, and comfort—all through spoken and unspoken signals we barely even notice. Yet behind every casual chat, awkward silence, or global debate is an invisible force that guides our words and meanings, silently helping us figure out exactly what to say next. How do we instinctively know what matters in a conversation? How do we effortlessly connect, even with strangers? And why do certain symbols or stories captivate us across cultures?

Dan Sperber is a renowned French cognitive anthropologist, social scientist, and philosopher whose groundbreaking work has transformed fields from linguistics and cognitive science to anthropology and philosophy. Alongside linguist Deirdre Wilson, he developed relevance theory, an influential approach to communication and cognition that has impacted linguistics, artificial intelligence, and psychology. His work on cultural evolution, notably the epidemiology of representations, introduced innovative methods for studying how ideas spread and evolve across societies.

Credits:

Interview: Thomas Beuchot and Jay Richardson

Editing: Jay Richardson

Communication: Tanay Katiyar

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Artwork: Ella Bergru

This episode is sponsored by the The European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association (EHBEA)

We often talk about the modern challenge of work-life balance. However, long before the existence of offices, commutes, and calendars, our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers. Did they actually enjoy more leisure time than we do? And did the shift to farming mark the beginning of longer workdays and less free time? Today’s guest is the person to answer these questions, or at least some of them…

Mark Dyble is an Assistant Professor in evolutionary anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has broad interests in understanding variation in behaviour and biology across human populations. Previously, he gained his BA in Archaeology and Anthropology from Cambridge (2008-2011) and an MSc in Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology from Oxford (2011-12). Subsequently, he pursued a PhD in Anthropology at University College London (2013-16), supervised by Prof Andrea Migliano and Prof Ruth Mace, conducting empirical fieldwork with Agta foragers in the northern Philippines. After several post-doc stints, he was also a lecturer in Quantitative Anthropology at UCL for four years (2019-2023).

Credits:

Interview: Tanay Katiyar

Editing: Jay Richardson

Communication: Tanay Katiyar

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Artwork: Ella Bergru

We rarely stop to think about how we make sense of the sounds around us — how we find voices in a noisy room, or why two people can hear completely different things in the same audio clip. Today’s guest explores the hidden mechanisms behind these experiences: how the brain turns raw sound into meaning, how we learn the regularities of the soundscape around us, and why people sometimes hear the world so differently. Today’s guest is the person to answer these questions, or at least some of them…

Daniel Pressnitzer. Originally trained in engineering, he went on to complete a Master's degree in acoustics, signal processing, and computer science in Paris. He earned his PhD at Ircam, where he studied auditory perception, focusing on musical consonance and dissonance. He then spent several years in the UK conducting postdoctoral research at the Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing in Cambridge. In 2000, he returned to France to join the CNRS as a researcher. Now a Director of Research at CNRS, he is also a founding member and the current head of the Audition team at the École normale supérieure. His research bridges acoustics, perception, and cognition, using carefully crafted illusions and experiments to probe the mid-level processes of hearing — the ones that shape how we interpret the world without us even realizing it. His lab has also developed various tools to probe the functioning of the auditory system.

Credits:

Interview: Cindy Zhang & Marius Mercier

Editing: Jay Richardson

Communication: Tanay Katiyar

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Artwork: Ella Bergru