Many Minds

Philosopher of mind and neuroscience Mazviita Chirimuuta of the University of Edinburgh questions the analogy of the brain as a computer. Drawing on her early work modelling cells in the visual system and her book The Brain Abstracted, she explains how neuroscience relies on simplifying strategies such as analogy, mathematisation and reductionism, traces the history and status of the computational view, and examines how it feeds ideas such as machine consciousness and mind uploading, touching on Marr’s levels, medium dependence, analog versus digital computing and neuromorphic AI.

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Cognitive biologist Alice Auersperg of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna discusses what counts as tool use in animals and why some forms are more impressive than others. She describes her lab’s findings in Goffin’s cockatoos, which make tools, build the same tool from different materials, learn tool use from others and recognise the value of tools, along with a tool-using cow, and explores why certain species use tools and why so many tool users live on islands, comparing birds with primates and captive with wild animals.

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Sam Gilbert, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, explains cognitive offloading: using tools and the environment to reason, remember and manage information. The conversation covers how deep offloading runs in human history, its different forms, why some people and situations involve more of it, and three lines of research on its consequences, the Google effect, the photo-taking impairment effect and GPS navigation, before weighing the possible costs and benefits of offloading in the era of AI.

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Rachna Reddy, co-director of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in Uganda, describes more than a decade of observing adolescent chimpanzees in the largest group ever studied. The episode examines why adolescence is a scientifically fascinating life stage, the stages of chimpanzee life history, and adolescent greetings, dominance, grooming, social rejection, mentorship, deference, patrolling and female dispersal, as well as the community split at Ngogo and her narrative account of one chimpanzee’s coming of age.

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Damián Blasi, ICREA Research Professor at the Center for Brain & Cognition, Pompeu Fabra University, explains why linguistic diversity matters for understanding language, history, culture and the mind. The conversation covers how languages are counted and how they vary, a reconstruction of the rise and fall of human linguistic diversity over the past 12,000 years, the drivers of language change, and how cognitive science’s reliance on English and English speakers may hold the field back.

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