Many Minds copertina

Many Minds

Many Minds

Di: Kensy Cooperrider – Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute
Ascolta gratuitamente

A proposito di questo titolo

 Our world is brimming with beings—human, animal, and artificial. We explore how they think, sense, feel, and learn. Conversations and more, every two weeks.Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute 2020-2025 Scienza
Episodi
  • The aura of metaphor

    The aura of metaphor
    Jan 29 2026
    Metaphors matter. They enliven our speech and our prose; they animate our arguments and stir our passions. Some metaphors power political movements; others propel scientific revolutions. These little figures of speech delight, provoke, captivate, shock, amuse, and galvanize us. In one way or another, metaphors just seem to help us make sense of a messy world. But how do they do all this? Whence their peculiar powers? What does it say about the human mind that we just can't escape our metaphors—and frankly don't want to? My guest today is Dr. Stephen Flusberg. Steve is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Vassar College, where he directs the Framing, Reasoning, And Metaphor (FRAME) Lab. Here, Steve and I talk about what metaphors are and why we're so drawn to them. We discuss some of the misleading ideas about metaphor you may remember from middle school literature class. We consider why some metaphors work and others flop. We talk about the metaphors we use for climate change and prevalence and potency of war metaphors across different realms of public discourse. We consider how metaphor operates in science and in scientific theorizing. Finally, we talk about the question of whether there are some ideas that we simply can't grasp literally, concepts we can only approach through metaphor. Along the way, Steve and I talk about: "aura farming"; nautical metaphors and textile metaphors; the outmoded idea that metaphors are mere adornments; metaphor versus analogy; dead metaphors and how to resuscitate them; shadows and footprints; Dan Dennett's technique of metaphorical triangulation; and the brain-as-computer metaphor—and whether it is actually a metaphor. Alright, friends this is a fun one. Steve has spent his entire career exploring this fascinating terrain—and, as you'll see, he's a lively and affable guide. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Steve Flusberg. Notes 3:00 – For more on "beige flags," see here. For more on "aura farming," see here. 8:00 – For an overview of metaphor in communication and thought, see here for an article by Dr. Flusberg and co-authors. 18:00 – The "life is a journey" (or "career is a journey") metaphor—as well as other examples we discuss—are treated at length in the classic book, Metaphors We Live By. 24:00 – For a detailed academic treatment of the relationship between metaphor and analogy, see here. 32:00 – Some of the best-studied "orientational metaphors" are those found in the domain of time. See here and here. 37:00 – For more on metaphors used in discussions of environmental issues, see a paper by Dr. Flusberg and a colleague here. 42:00 – For more on the idea of the "climate shadow," see here. 46:00 – The study by Dr. Flusberg and colleagues comparing the effects of race and war metaphors for climate change. 55:00 – The article by Dr. Flusberg and colleagues on the role of war metaphors across different areas of public discourse. 1:04:00 – For an influential discussion of the role of metaphors and analogies in science, see here. For Kensy's take on Darwin's metaphors for natural selection, see here. For discussion of whether, the "brain-as-computer" metaphor is actually a metaphor, see here and here. 1:12:00 – For more on the history of metaphors in the English language—including analyses of which source domains have historically been the most fruitful—see here. 1:14:00 – For discussion of the (disputed) idea of "dead metaphors," see here and here. 1:17:00 – The idea of "theory-constitutive metaphors" in science is discussed in a chapter by Richard Boyd in this book. 1:19:00 – For a preview of Dr. Flusberg's in-progress paper on the philosopher Daniel Dennett and his technique of "metaphorical triangulation," see here. 1:33:00 – For the (extremely short) Borges' story on a maps that are too accurate to be useful, see here. Recommendations Metaphors we Live By, by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson Consciousness Explained, by Daniel Dennett Three Sheets to the Wind, by Cynthia Barrett Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    1 ora e 36 min
  • From the archive: How should we think about IQ?

    From the archive: How should we think about IQ?
    Jan 14 2026
    Hello friends, and happy new year! We're gearing up for a new run of episodes starting later in January. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives. ------ [originally aired October 16, 2024] IQ is, to say the least, a fraught concept. Psychologists have studied IQ—or g for "general cognitive ability"—maybe more than any other psychological construct. And they've learned some interesting things about it. That it's remarkably stable over the lifespan. That it really is general: people who ace one test of intellectual ability tend to ace others. And that IQs have risen markedly over the last century. At the same time, IQ seems to be met with increasing squeamishness, if not outright disdain, in many circles. It's often seen as crude, misguided, reductive—maybe a whole lot worse. There's no question, after all, that IQ has been misused—that it still gets misused—for all kinds of racist, classist, colonialist purposes. As if this wasn't all thorny enough, the study of IQ is also intimately bound up with the study of genetics. It's right there in the roiling center of debates about how genes and environment make us who we are. So, yeah, what to make of all this? How should we be thinking about IQ? My guest today is Dr. Eric Turkheimer. Eric is Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He has studied intelligence and many other complex human traits for decades, and he's a major figure in the field of "behavior genetics." Eric also has a new book out this fall—which I highly recommend—titled Understanding the Nature-Nurture Debate. In a field that has sometimes been accused of rampant optimism, Eric is—as you'll hear—a bit more measured. In this conversation, Eric and I focus on intelligence and its putatively genetic basis. We talk about why Eric doubts that we are anywhere close to an account of the biology of IQ. We discuss what makes intelligence such a formidable construct in psychology and why essentialist understandings of it are so intuitive. We talk about Francis Galton and the long shadow he's cast on the study of human behavior. We discuss the classic era of Twin Studies—an era in which researchers started to derive quantitative estimates of the heritability of complex traits. We talk about how the main takeaway from that era was that genes are quite important indeed, and about how more recent genetic techniques suggest that takeaway may have been a bit simplistic. Along the way, Eric and I touch on spelling ability, child prodigies, the chemical composition of money, the shared quirks of twins reared apart, the Flynn Effect, the Reverse Flynn Effect, birth order, the genetics of height, the problem of missing heritability, whether we should still be using IQ scores, and the role of behavior genetics in the broader social sciences. Alright folks, lots in here—let's just get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Eric Turkheimer. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available here. Notes and links 3:30 – The 1994 book The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein a Charles Murray, dealt largely with the putative social implications of IQ research. It was extremely controversial and widely discussed. For an overview of the book and controversy, see the Wikipedia article here. 6:00 – For discussion of the "all parents are environmentalists…" quip, see here. 12:00 – The notion of "multiple intelligences" was popularized by the psychologist Howard Gardner—see here for an overview. See here for an attempt to test the claims of the "multiple intelligences" framework using some of the methods of traditional IQ research. For work on EQ (or Emotional Intelligence) see here. 19:00 – Dr. Turkheimer has also laid out his spelling test analogy in a Substack post. 22:30 – Dr. Turkheimer's 1998 paper, "Heritability and Biological Explanation." 24:30 – For an in-passing treatment of the processing efficiency idea, see p. 195 of Daniel Nettle's book Personality. See also Richard Haier's book, The Neuroscience of Intelligence. 26:00 – The original study on the relationship between pupil size and intelligence. A more recent study that fails to replicate those findings. 31:00 – For an argument that child prodigies constitute an argument for "nature," see here. For a memorable narrative account of one child prodigy, see here. 32:00 – A meta-analysis of the Flynn effect. We have previously discussed the Flynn Effect in an episode with Michael Muthukrishna. 37:00 – James Flynn's book, What is Intelligence? On the reversal of the Flynn Effect, see here. 40:00 – The phrase "nature-nurture" originally comes from Shakespeare and was picked up by Francis Galton. In The Tempest, Prospero describes Caliban as "a born devil on whose nature/ Nurture can never stick." 41:00 – For a biography of Galton, see here. For an article-length account of Galton's role in the birth of eugenics, see here. 50:00 – For an account of ...
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    1 ora e 34 min
  • From 'On Humans': Can the brain understand itself?

    From 'On Humans': Can the brain understand itself?
    Dec 31 2025
    Hello there, friends! We hope you're having a restful holiday, or a lively holiday, or whatever mix of those you prefer. As the year draws to a close, we at Many Minds are taking a much needed pause ourselves. But we wanted to share with you an episode from a podcast that we've been following for some time called On Humans. It's hosted by Ilari Mäkelä. It looks at humanity from all angles to understand where we come from and where we're going. The episode we're sharing features an interview with biologist and historian of science, Matthew Cobb; he's also the author of the book, The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience. In it, Ilari and Matthew take a zoomed-out view of the human brain and of our quest to understand it. This episode is actually part of a 5-part mini-series that On Humans did all about the human brain. So if you enjoy it, you may want to check out that broader series. Alright friends, have a great close of 2025 and a great start to 2026. We'll see you in January with our first episode of the new year. In the meanwhile, enjoy this offering from our friends at On Humans. The original show notes for this On Humans episode can be viewed here. You can follow the On Humans podcast through their newsletter or on Bluesky.
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    1 ora e 1 min
Ancora nessuna recensione