Many Minds

About the show

Latest episodes

• Cognitive offloading and its consequences

  September 25, 2026 · 1 hr 15 min

  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…

• Coming of age in Ngogo

  September 11, 2026 · 1 hr 35 min

  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…

• The natural history of linguistic diversity

  August 28, 2026 · 1 hr 33 min

  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…

• From the archive: Electric ecology

  August 17, 2026 · 1 hr 33 min

  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! ----- [originally aired September 19, 2024] There's a bit of a buzz out there…

• From the archive: Varieties of childhood

  July 31, 2026 · 1 hr 29 min

  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! ----- [originally aired July 10, 2025] Childhood is a special time, a strange time. Children are…

• From the archive: Philosophers on psychedelics

  July 17, 2026 · 1 hr 41 min

  Hi friends! We're taking a bit of a summer pause. We will be back soon—in the meanwhile, enjoy this listener favorite from our archives! ----- [originally aired May 14, 2025] Some call it the "psychedelic renaissance." In the last…

• The origins of Darwin's ideas

  July 3, 2026 · 1 hr 19 min

  No discipline, no sphere of intellectual life, has been untouched by the work of Charles Darwin. He died in 1882 but his ideas are very much alive; they're now central to how we understand the natural world, the human mind, non-human…

• The sparkling deep

  June 20, 2026 · 1 hr 20 min

  It's tempting to see bioluminescence as an oddity, one of those rare eccentricities of life on earth. And, on land, maybe that's true. But our planet is mostly water, and out in the open ocean bioluminescence is utterly commonplace…