Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas14 Joulu 2020

127 | Erich Jarvis on Language, Birds, and People

Many characteristics go into making human beings special — brain size, opposable thumbs, etc. Surely one of the most important is language, and in particular the ability to learn new sounds and use them for communication. Many other species communicate through sound, but only a very few — humans, elephants, bats, cetaceans, and a handful of bird species — learn new sounds in order to do so. Erich Jarvis has been shedding enormous light on the process of vocal learning, by studying birds and comparing them to humans. He argues that there is a particular mental circuit in the brains of parrots (for example) responsible for vocal learning, and that it corresponds to similar circuits in the human brain. This has implications for the development of intelligence and other important human characteristics.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Erich Jarvis received his Ph.D. in Animal Behavior and Molecular Neurobehavior from Rockefeller University. He is currently a professor in the Laboratory of Neurogenetics of Language at Rockefeller and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Among his many awards are the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation, an American Philosophical Society Award, a Packard Foundation fellowship, an NIH Director's Pioneer award, Northwestern University's Distinguished Role Model in Science award, and the Summit Award from the American Society for Association Executives.

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(427)

342 | Rachell Powell on Evolutionary Convergence, Morality, and Mind

Evolution with natural selection involves an intricate mix of the random and the driven. Mutations are essentially random, while selection pressures work to prefer certain outcomes over others. There ...

26 Tammi 1h 37min

341 | Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold," wrote W.B. Yeats. I don't know about the centre, but the tendency of things to fall apart is pretty universal, ultimately due to the Second Law of Thermody...

19 Tammi 1h 12min

340 | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on What Matters and Why It Matters

At any given moment, an uncountable number of events are happening, but only some of them matter to us. What does it mean for something to matter, and more importantly, what does it mean for us to mat...

12 Tammi 1h 18min

339 | Ned Block on Whether Consciousness Requires Biology

It's become increasingly clear that the Turing Test -- determining whether human interlocutors can tell whether a conversation is being carried out by a human or a machine -- is not a good way to thin...

5 Tammi 1h 11min

Holiday Message 2025 | The Romance of the University

Time for the holiday message! Rounding off the year with a brief and casual reflection on some issue that doesn't quite rise to the level of a full solo podcast. And hopefully something uplifting. Thi...

22 Joulu 202542min

AMA | December 2025

Welcome to the December 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...

15 Joulu 20253h 36min

338 | Ryan Patterson on the Physics of Neutrinos

The story goes that Wolfgang Pauli, who first proposed the existence of neutrinos, was embarrassed to have done so, as it was considered uncouth to hypothesize new particles that could not be detected...

8 Joulu 20251h 26min

337 | Kevin Zollman on Game Theory, Signals, and Meaning

Game theory is a way of quantitatively describing what happens any time one thing interacts with another thing, when both things have goals and potential rewards. That's a pretty broad class of intere...

1 Joulu 20251h 17min