All Episodes

#926 Michael Frank: Child Development and Language Acquisition

Apr 11, 2024

Dr. Michael Frank is David and Lucile Packard Professor of Human Biology and Director of the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University. He studies children's language learning and how it interacts with their developing understanding of the social world. He uses behavioral experiments, computational tools, and novel measurement methods like large-scale web-based studies, eye-tracking, and head-mounted cameras. He is the founder of the ManyBabies Consortium, a collaborative replication network for infancy research, and has led open-data projects including Wordbank and MetaLab. He was a Jacobs Foundation Fellow and has received the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the FABBS Early Career Impact Award, and the Marr Prize and Glushko Dissertation Prize from the Cognitive Science Society. He served as Chair of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society and has edited for journals including Cognition and Child Development. More»
#925 Amanda Podany: The History and Legacy of Mesopotamia

Apr 8, 2024

Dr. Amanda Podany is Professor Emeritus of History at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She specializes in the study of Syria and Mesopotamia in the Middle and Late Bronze Age. She is the author of books like The Land of Hana: Kings, Chronology, and Scribal Tradition, The Ancient Near Eastern World, Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East, The Ancient Near East: A Very Short Introduction, and the most recent one, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East. She is also the instructor in a series of video and audio lectures for The Great Courses called Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization. More»
#924 Stephanie Hare - Technology Is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics

Apr 5, 2024

Dr. Stephanie Hare is a researcher, broadcaster and author focused on technology, politics and history. Selected for the BBC Expert Women programme and the Foreign Policy Interrupted fellowship, she contributes frequently to radio and television and has published in the Financial Times, The Washington Post, the Guardian/Observer, the Harvard Business Review, and WIRED. Previously she worked at Accenture, Palantir, and Oxford Analytica and held the Alistair Horne Visiting Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford. She earned a PhD and MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, including a year at the Université de la Sorbonne (Paris IV). She is the author of Technology Is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics. More»
#923 Nicholas Brown: How to Spot Bad Science

Apr 4, 2024

Dr. Nicholas Brown is a Researcher at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He works on developing new research methods in psychology and on applying meta-scientific perspectives on psychology as a science. More»
#922 Stephen Grossberg - Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind

Apr 1, 2024

Dr. Stephen Grossberg is Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics & Statistics, Psychological & Brain Sciences, and Biomedical Engineering, Founding Chairman of the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems, and Founder and Director of the Center for Adaptive Systems at Boston University. He is the author of several books, the latest one being Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind. More»
#921 Alva Noë - The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are

Mar 29, 2024

Dr. Alva Noë is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a philosopher of mind whose research and teaching focus is perception and consciousness, and the philosophy of art. He is the author of Action in Perception; Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness; Varieties of Presence; Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature and, most recently, The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are. More»
#920 Jean-Manuel Roubineau: The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic

Mar 28, 2024

Dr. Jean-Manuel Roubineau is a Professor of Ancient History at Université Rennes 2. He is a classics scholar who specializes in Greek antiquity, the historical anthropology of sport, and the history of social inequalities. He is the author of The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic. More»
#919 Isabella Sarto-Jackson: How Social Interactions Shape the Human Mind

Mar 25, 2024

Dr. Isabella Sarto-Jackson is Lecturer in Cognitive Science at the University of Vienna, Guest Lecturer in Cognitive Biology at the University of Bratislava, executive manager of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, and president of the Austrian Neuroscience Association (ANA). She is the author of The Making and Breaking of Minds: How social interactions shape the human mind. More»
#918 Antoine Marie: The Biases of People with Strong Political and Moral Convictions

Mar 22, 2024

Dr. Antoine Marie is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is an evolutionary political psychologist with a background in philosophy, sociology, political science, and social psychology. He conducts cross-cultural psychology experiments and develops evolutionary theory to better understand, and if possible, mitigate, the cognitive biases that arise from people having strong moral convictions on controversial topics, typically in contexts of perceived intergroup conflict. More»
#917 Dale Greenwalt - Remnants of Ancient Life: The New Science of Old Fossils

Mar 21, 2024

Dr. Dale Greenwalt is Research Associate in the laboratory of Dr. Conrad Labandeira, curator of fossil arthropods, in the Paleobiology Department at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. His work centers on description of the insect fauna of the Coal Creek Member of the Middle Eocene Kishenehn Formation in northwestern Montana. He is also interested in defining the biological and geological processes that resulted in the preservation of these insects and the original biomolecular components that are found in the fossils of the Kishenehn Formation. He is the author of Remnants of Ancient Life: The New Science of Old Fossils. More»