Many Minds

For thousands of years—maybe for as long as we've been human—we've offloaded our thinking. We've counted on our fingers. We've carved tallies into bone. We've invented a long series of tools to help us reason, remember, and manage information—tools like abacuses, calendars, writing systems, calculators, smartphones, and many, many more. So cognitive offloading is hardly new—but the questions around it seem newly urgent. As cognitive technologies accumulate, as opportunities for offloading tempt us at every turn, as headlines warn of "digital dementia" and "cognitive surrender," it seems like a good time to take stock. Yes, cognitive offloading can save us time and effort. But what are its other consequences?
My guest today is Dr. Sam Gilbert. Sam is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. Sam and his colleagues have been trailblazers in the study of cognitive offloading—when we do it, why we do it, what it does for us and to us. 
Here, Sam and I talk about what cognitive offloading is, how deep it goes in our species' history, and how it pervades our everyday lives. We talk about the different forms that offloading takes. We discuss why some people offload more than others, and why we offload in certain situations. We walk through three bodies of research on the consequences of cognitive offloading—research on the so-called Google effect, on the photo-taking impairment effect, and on the impact of using GPS to navigate. Of course, we also address the elephant in the room: How should we think about the possible dangers—and benefits—of cognitive offloading in the new era of AI?
Before we get to it, some news: We have re-launched the Many Minds newsletter, as a Substack! We'll be sharing each of our episodes there, as well as other morsels from time to time. We've been wanting to do this, in part, to give you a better way to engage with us—and with each other. Were there questions we should have asked? Are there connections you made that we didn't? Counterarguments we overlooked? Et cetera. All that stuff can now go in the comments for each episode. So, if you're a fan of the show, please do consider subscribing and following along with us there.
Alright friends, on to my conversation with Dr. Sam Gilbert. Enjoy!
 
Notes
4:00 – For a sampling of recent discussions of AI and its possible harms, see here, here, and here.
7:30 – For a scholarly discussion of "shifting baseline syndrome," see here.
12:30 – For an earlier, influential overview of the phenomenon of cognitive offloading, see this article by Dr. Gilbert and a colleague.
15:00 – For more on the phenomenon of tilting one's head to view a tilted image (aka "external normalization"), see here. For an example of recent work on finger counting in children, see here.
18:00 – For some of Dr. Gilbert's work on cognitive effort in cognitive offloading, see here. For another recent discussion of the construct, see here.
23:00 – For a recent review of "intention offloading" by Dr. Gilbert and colleagues, see here.
29:00 – For work by Dr. Gilbert and colleagues on the role of metacognition in offloading, see here and here.
33:00 – For recent work by Dr. Gilbert and colleagues on offloading in older and younger adults, see here. See also a recent review of cognitive offloading in children by Dr. Gilbert and a colleague.
39:00 – The original study of the "Google effect" by Sparrow and colleagues. For more on "transactive memory," see here.
45:00 – For the original demonstration of the "photo-taking impairment effect," see here. For recent work by Dr. Gilbert and colleagues exploring this effect, see here.
53:00 – A recent meta-analysis of whether GPS impairs navigation ability.
59:00 – The 'Your Brain on ChatGPT' preprint.
1:02:00 – For a meta-analysis of the effects of calculators on math education, see here.
 
Recommendations
'The Intelligence Use of Space,' by David Kirsh
Cognition in the Wild, by Edwin Hutchins
 
Tile art credit: Image by NASA via Wikipedia
 
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).

It's a familiar story in many ways. A child is born, and for years afterward is adored and indulged and anchored to home and family. But then the child grows up and starts crossing that long threshold into adulthood. The transition proves—to say the least—a bit turbulent. Now when I say this story is familiar, I don't just mean familiar to us as human beings. After all, a similar story has long played out among our closest cousins, the chimpanzees.
My guest today is Dr. Rachna Reddy. Rachna co-directs the longstanding Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in Uganda and is an incoming Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. For more than a decade now, she has been closely observing the chimpanzees at Ngogo—and especially the adolescents.
Here Rachna and I talk about why adolescence—in all its intensity—is such a scientifically fascinating life-stage. We sketch the Ngogo research site, home to the largest group of chimpanzees ever studied. We unpack the different stages of chimpanzee life history. We zoom in on chimpanzee adolescence using a variety of different lenses—we talk about greetings, dominance hierarchies, grooming, social rejection, mentorship, deference, patrolling, female dispersal, and more. We discuss the so-called civil war that has taken root at Ngogo. And, finally, we talk about Rachna's in-progress novel (if that's the right word), which tells the story of one chimpanzee's coming of age in immersive detail.  
I think you'll enjoy this one, folks. Chimpanzees offer us a kind of parallel universe, a funhouse mirror version of human life—one that is deeply relatable in some ways, and totally alien to us in others. And the parallels and non-parallels are arguably all the more striking in adolescence.
But before we get to it, one humble ask: As the new season of Many Minds ramps up, this would be a great time to support the show. You could do this by rating us, writing a review on Apple Podcasts or a comment on Spotify, or by doing the old-fashioned thing of just recommending us to a friend or colleague. Your support is—as always—much appreciated. 
Alright friends, without further ado. Here's my conversation with Dr. Rachna Reddy. Enjoy!
 
Notes
4:00 – Damien and several other chimpanzees discussed in this episode feature in the Netflix documentary series Chimp Empire.
8:00 – See here for a study by Dr. Reddy and a colleague on caregiving behavior in recently orphaned chimpanzee siblings.
13:00 – See here for a comprehensive recent article by Dr. Reddy and colleagues about puberty and adolescence in chimpanzees.
16:00 – The Ngogo fission—and subsequent "civil war"—is treated in detail in Chimp Empire and was the subject of a recent, widely discussed research paper (which includes Dr. Reddy as an author).
26:00 – "Tanner stages" are a widely used scale for measuring different phases of puberty in humans.
29:00 – For more discussion of life history stages and how these differ across species, see our earlier episodes here and here. For a recent report that Ngogo females experience menopause, see here.
36:00 – For some of Dr. Reddy's work on dominance hierarchies in adolescent male chimps, see here.
39:00 – For a detailed discussion of the chimpanzee "pant grunt" and its development, see here.
47:00 – For a study of female dispersal in a different chimpanzee population, see here.
54:00 – A video of a Tai chimpanzee playing "airplane" with her baby.
1:04:00 – A classic study of boundary patrolling at Ngogo.
1:11:00 – A study by Dr. Reddy and a colleague on sociosexual behavior in chimpanzees.
1:15:00 – A study by Dr. Reddy and a colleague on relationships between chimpanzee mothers and sons.
1:17:00 – A recent study conducted by Dr. Laura Simone Lewis (former guest!), Dr. Reddy, and others on social curiosity in chimpanzees and human children.
1:26:00 – For classic work by Jane Goodall featuring chimpanzee characters, see her 1971 book, In the Shadow of Man.
 
Recommendations
Work by Kazuya Toda in bonobos (e.g., here)
Work by Caitlin A. O'Connell in orangutans (e.g., here)
Work by Ella Brown in gorillas (e.g., here)
 
Tile art credit: Image of Jarman at age 11, courtesy of Rachna Reddy
 
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 **new** Many Minds newsletter!
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).

Thousands of languages are used around the world today, and this linguistic diversity is a precious part of our human heritage. But it's also more than that. Linguistic diversity provides clues—a vast crazy quilt of clues—about how language works, about how history has unfolded, about the dynamics of culture, and about the nature of the human mind.
My guest today is Dr. Damián Blasi. Damián is an ICREA Research Professor based at the Center for Brain & Cognition at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Over the last decade or so, Damián's emerged as one of the most innovative researchers in the study of language and linguistic diversity. He's been widely recognized for this work, and most recently was awarded the 2026 FABSS Early Career Impact Award from the Cognitive Science Society.
In this conversation, Damián and I talk about why scientists should care about linguistic diversity. We do a bit of linguistic diversity 101—how many languages there are, how we can enumerate them, how they vary. We discuss a recent paper in which Damián and his colleagues reconstructed the explosive rise and precipitous fall of human linguistic diversity over the last 12,000 years. We talk about the factors that drive language change. And we discuss how cognitive science relies too much on English and English speakers—and how this may be holding the field back.
Along the way, Damián and I touch on the Tower of Babel, a golden age of linguistic diversity, the human bite configuration, scientific aesthetics, whether children shape language, polygenetic theories of language evolution, the pace of language change, schooling, linguistic inequality and behemoth languages, and why Damián thinks that the possibility space of human language might be bigger and wilder than we currently imagine.
This is a special episode of the Many Minds podcast. As I mentioned, Damián is this year's winner of an award from the Cognitive Science Society, in recognition of his outstanding early-career contributions to the field. He recently gave a keynote at the society's annual conference in Rio de Janeiro, and we've partnered with the Cognitive Science Society to feature this conversation about his work. I'll also mention that this wasn't my first time chatting with Damián—he's an alumnus of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI), the sponsor & incubator of this podcast. We met there a couple years ago, and so it was all the more fun to reconnect with him here.
Alright friends, without further ado, on to my conversation with Dr. Damián Blasi. Enjoy!
 
Notes
10:00 – The UNESCO page on multilingualism and linguistic diversity.
17:00 – The Ethnologue database.
20:00 – For examples of Dr. Blasi's work on "behemoth languages" and on how languages are not represented equally in terms of technological and development investment, see here and here.
26:00 - For the paper in which Dr. Blasi and colleagues introduced Grambank, see here. For the database itself, see here.
29:00 – For Dr. Blasi's earlier work on sound-meaning associations across languages, see here.
33:00 – For discussion of Darwin's views on monogenesis vs polygenesis and race, see our recent episode.
36:00 – For more about pronouns—and how they do and do not vary across the world's languages—see several chapters in the World Atlas of Language Structures.
39:00 – The paper—'Babies aren't persons'—by David Lancy.
41:00 - For Dr. Blasi and colleagues' recent Science paper on the rise and fall of human linguistic diversity, see here.
59:00 – For a recent study of linguistic diversification, including discussion of so-called schismogenesis, see here. For an example of Cristina Moya's work on ethnic identity in the Andes region, see here.
1:00:00 – For an example of Dr. Blasi's work on how ecology shapes language—a topic not discussed in this conversation—see here.
1:01:00 ­– For the study by Dr. Blasi and colleagues about changes in the human bite configuration and how these changes have shaped sound systems, see here.
1:14:00 – For the recent paper by Dr. Blasi and colleagues about the (non-)role of children in language change, see here.
1:22:00 – The paper by Dr. Blasi and colleagues about the over-reliance on English in the cognitive sciences (and how it hinders the field).
1:24:00 – See here for work by Aitor Egurtzegi, in collaboration with Dr. Blasi and others, on ergativity and gaze patterns across languages.
1:27:00 – For the preprint—'Which humans?'—led by Mohammad Atari (and including Dr. Blasi and others), see here.
1:30:00 – For a recent argument that psychology needs to overcome its "ahistorical" bent, see here.
 
Recommendations
A Myriad of Tongues, Caleb Everett
The Secret of Our Success, Joseph Henrich
Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time, Johanna Nichols
 
Tile art credit: Painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (detail)
 
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 **new** Many Minds newsletter!
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).

Hi friends! We're still taking a bit of a summer pause. We'll be back at the end of August—in the meanwhile, enjoy this listener favorite from our archives!
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[originally aired September 19, 2024]
There's a bit of a buzz out there, right now, but maybe you haven't noticed. It's in the water, it's in the air. It's electricity—and it's all around us, all the time, including in some places you might not have expected to find it. We humans, after all, are not super tuned in to this layer of reality. But many other creatures are—and scientists are starting to take note.
My guest today is Dr. Sam England. Sam is a sensory ecologist at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, and one of a handful of scientists uncovering some shocking things about the role of electricity in the natural world.
Here, Sam and I have a wide-ranging conversation about electroreception—which is the perception of electrical stimuli—and electric ecology—which is the study of the ecological roles of electricity. We talk about how an interest in electroreception first got started, and why it's recently resurged. We discuss aquatic electroreception versus aerial electroreception, active electroreception versus passive electroreception. We talk about how electroreception is actually kind of easy to evolve. Along the way, we consider electrolocation and, its analog in sound, echolocation. We touch on dolphins, sharks, echidnas, ticks, caterpillars, bees, and spiders. We zoom in on electrostatic pollination, and what is inarguably the coolest sounding anatomical structure known to biology: the ampullae of Lorenzini.
I think you'll enjoy this one, friends. As Sam describes here, electroreception is one of those "alien senses"—it really challenges the imagination. And electric ecology is one of those frontiers in our understanding of the natural world. So without further ado, here's my chat with Dr. Sam England. Enjoy!
 
A transcript of this episode is available here.
 
Notes and links
3:00 – For many of the topics discussed in this episode, see this comprehensive recent review of electroreception and electric ecology by Dr. England and a colleague.
7:30 – A paper reviewing the (contested) phenomenon of electromagnetic hypersensitivity in humans.
9:30 – An encyclopedia article on electroreception in monotremes.
13:00 – An early study of electrolocation in "weakly electric" fish.
17:00 – A popular article about the discovery of electroreception in sharks.
20:30 – A 2013 study showing that bumblebees detect the electric fields around flowers.
23:30 – A recent review of electroreception and its evolution in fish.  
25:00 – A study demonstrating electroreception in the Guiana dolphin.
34:00 – A recent study by Dr. England and colleagues showing that static electricity pulls ticks onto hosts.
43:00 – For more on echolocation, see our earlier episode on bats.
47:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Ryan Palmer, examining the theoretical possibilities of electroreception in air.
52:30 – A (controversial) 2022 paper on possibly language-like communication in fungi via electricity.
55:00 – Another 2013 study on electroreception in bees, this one in honeybees.
56:30 – An animated video describing the role that electricity plays in spider ballooning.
1:00:00 – Dr. England's recent study showing that caterpillars can detect the electric fields around wasps.
1:03:00 – A discussion of triboelectric effects.
1:11:00 – Dr. England's recent study of electrostatic pollination in butterflies and moths.
1:19:00 – A study arguing that the sexual organs of flowers may have evolved to take advantage of electrostatic pollination.
1:25:00 ­– For more on spider eyes, see our recent episode all about spiders.
 
Recommendations
'Electroreception, electrogenesis and electric signal evolution,' William Crampton
An Immense World, Ed Yong (a previous guest!)
 
Tile image credit: Francisco Jesús Navarro Hernández via Unsplash
 
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. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
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 Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Hi friends! We're taking a bit of a summer pause. We'll be back soon—in the meanwhile, enjoy this listener favorite from our archives!
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[originally aired July 10, 2025]
Childhood is a special time, a strange time. Children are adored and catered to—they're given their own menus and bedrooms. They're considered delicate and precious, and so we cushion them from every imaginable risk. Kids are encouraged to play, of course—but very often it's under the watchful eye of anxious adults. This, anyway, is how childhood looks in much of the United States today. But is this the way childhood looks everywhere? Is this the way human childhoods have always been?
My guests today are Dr. Dorsa Amir and Dr. Sheina Lew-Levy. Dorsa is an Assistant Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University, where she runs the Mind and Culture Lab. Sheina is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Durham University in the UK, where she co-directs the Forager Child Studies research group. Both Sheina and Dorsa have spent much of their careers thinking about how childhoods differ across cultures—and why.
In this conversation, I talk with Dorsa and Sheina about their fieldwork with indigenous groups in Ecuador and the Congo, respectively. We discuss the different ways that childhood differs in these places—for instance, in terms of parents' attitudes toward risk, in terms of the social structures and activities in which kids are embedded, and in terms of the freedom that children are granted. We discuss developmental psychology's "WEIRD problem." We talk about the quasi-autonomous cultures that children create among themselves—sometimes called "peer cultures"—and discuss how these kid-driven cultures end up shaping and benefit the larger community. Along the way, we touch on adult supremacy, adverse childhood experiences, walking the forest and climbing papaya trees, parenting norms, ding dong ditch and "nananabooboo", the pioneering work of the folklorists Iona and Peter Opie, teaching, toys, and the enduring question of what childhood is for.
 
Alright friends, lots to think about here. On to my conversation with Sheina Lew-Levy and Dorsa Amir. Enjoy!
 
A transcript of this episode is available here.
 
Notes and links
9:30 – For an overview of work on how culture shapes motor development, see here.
11:00 – The paper by Dr. Lew-Levy's and a colleague about "walking the forest."
16:00 – Dr. Amir's TedX talk, 'How the Industrial Revolution Changed Childhood.'
17:30 – For some of Dr. Amir's work on risk across cultures, see here.
35:00 – For a recent paper by Dr. Lew-Levy and colleagues about the evolution of childhood, see here.
39:00 – The popular article by Ann Gibbons, 'The Birth of Childhood.'
41:00 – For the idea of the "patriarch hypothesis," see here.
42:00 – For more on the "WEIRD problem" in developmental psychology, see here.
48:00 – A paper by Dr. Lew-Levy and colleagues about toys in hunter-gatherer groups. For more on the material culture of childhood, see our earlier episode with Michelle Langley.
52:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Lew-Levy on the prevalence of "child-to-child" teaching.
56:00 – A paper by Dr. Amir and a colleague about the concept of "adverse childhood experiences" in cross-cultural perspective.
1:04:00 – The paper by Dr. Amir and Dr. Lew-Levy on "peer cultures" and children as agents of cultural adaptation.
1:08:00 – For more on the idea of children as the "research and development" wing of the species, see our earlier episode with Alison Gopnik.
1:10:00 – For more on the Opies, see here.
1:13:00 – For the work of (past guest) Olivier Morin on children's culture, see here.
1:23:00 – For the paper by Dr. Camilla Morelli, 'The River Echoes with Laughter,' see here.
 
Recommendations
The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, by Iona and Peter Opie
The Gardener and the Carpenter, by Alison Gopnik
The Anthropology of Childhood, by David Lancy
Intimate Fathers, by Barry Hewlett
 
Tile image credit: Image by Lora Moore-Kakaletris via Unsplash
 
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. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
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 Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).