Podcast Episodes

From the archive: The octopus and the android

Happy holidays, friends! We will be back with a new episode in January 2025. In the meantime, enjoy this favorite from our archives!

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[originally aired Jun 14, 2023]

Have you heard of Octopolis?…

Published on 8 months, 4 weeks ago

Your brain on language

Using language is a complex business. Let's say you want to understand a sentence. You first need to parse a sequence of sounds—if the sentence is spoken—or images—if it's signed or written. You nee…

Published on 9 months, 1 week ago

Nestcraft

How do birds build their nests? By instinct, of course—at least that's what the conventional wisdom tells us. A swallow builds a swallow's nest; a robin builds a robin's nest. Every bird just follows…

Published on 9 months, 4 weeks ago

Animal, heal thyself

What happens to animals when they get sick? If they’re pets or livestock, we probably call the vet. And the vet may give them drugs or perform a procedure. But what about wild animals? Do they just l…

Published on 10 months, 1 week ago

The rise of machine culture

The machines are coming. Scratch that—they're already here: AIs that propose new combinations of ideas; chatbots that help us summarize texts or write code; algorithms that tell us who to friend or f…

Published on 10 months, 3 weeks ago

How should we think about IQ?

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 …

Published on 11 months, 1 week ago

Rethinking the "wood wide web"

Forests have always been magical places. But in the last couple decades, they seem to have gotten a little more magical. We've learned that trees are connected to each other through a vast undergroun…

Published on 11 months, 3 weeks ago

Electric ecology

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 mi…

Published on 1 year ago

The nature of nurture

The idea of a "maternal instinct"—the notion that mothers are wired for nurturing and care—is a familiar one in our culture. And it has a flipside, a corollary—what you might call “paternal aloofness…

Published on 1 year ago

The space of (possibly) sentient beings

We may not know what it's like to be a bat, but we're pretty confident that it's like something—that bats (and other mammals) are sentient creatures. They feel pleasure and pain, cold and warmth, agi…

Published on 1 year, 1 month ago