Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how stoffworks
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: today we're gonna be revisiting a topic that we brought
Speaker 1: up in a recent episode that we did a little
Speaker 1: bit back. We did the episode Where Is My Mind,
Speaker 1: and we talked about the physical sensation of the mind,
Speaker 1: where it feels like you're thinking from. And one of
Speaker 1: the topics we touched on peripherally in that episode was
Speaker 1: the idea of extended cognition. And that's this framework that
Speaker 1: has emerged in psychology and in thinking about philosophy of mind,
Speaker 1: that maybe cognition, the process of thinking involves more than
Speaker 1: just the brain, and in a very real sense, not
Speaker 1: just that there are some external tools that help your
Speaker 1: brain think, but that your brain is thinking in conjunction
Speaker 1: with those external tools. And before we dive into it,
Speaker 1: I just wanted to give a shout out to the
Speaker 1: fact that this topic was inspired by a good article
Speaker 1: that I read in The Atlantic called does a spider
Speaker 1: use its web like you use your smartphone? By Joshua
Speaker 1: so called. So feel free to go ahead and check
Speaker 1: that article out. We're gonna be talking about some of
Speaker 1: the same topics today about the the idea of extended
Speaker 1: cognition and what role it might play in biology and evolution.
Speaker 1: That's right, We're gonna be talking about the spiders, but
Speaker 1: we're also going to talk about some octopuses. We're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about some mantoids. We're gonna talk about crying from
Speaker 1: teenage muntant ninja turtles. So, uh, they're gonna be a
Speaker 1: few different examples that we touch on now. Crying actually
Speaker 1: has a very interesting publishing history in the philosophy of mind. Yeah, well, well,
Speaker 1: I mean like literally crying or just things that are
Speaker 1: crying esque. Well, crying is a classic example of the
Speaker 1: brain in a vat, except, of course, in this case
Speaker 1: the vat has legs and big beefy arms and a
Speaker 1: little tiny head, which came first Daniel Dennett's paper about
Speaker 1: the brain and the jar that we referenced in the
Speaker 1: last episode, or or Crag himself. I'll under I actually
Speaker 1: do not know when Krang emerged. You know more about
Speaker 1: teenage muting ninja turtles than me. I'm sure I think
Speaker 1: he dates back to the comics, but I have to
Speaker 1: admit to not being super knowledgeable about teenage meeting Ninja Turtles.
Speaker 1: It's most most most of my expertise comes from watching
Speaker 1: some episodes of the cartoon, and of course the the
Speaker 1: the first generation of movies. Oh and and the video
Speaker 1: game to Beat Him Up video game. I pretty much
Speaker 1: just know the movies and the game. Yeah. But anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so let's let's get into the idea of extended cognition. Essentially,
Speaker 1: this can be phrased as a question, do mental processes
Speaker 1: or cognition extend beyond the brain? Yeah? And this entails
Speaker 1: the idea that our our our brains don't simply interact
Speaker 1: with symbols, you know, form, stimuli, and so forth, but
Speaker 1: that our brains interact with these external things and forces,
Speaker 1: and from this our mind emerges. So the mind is
Speaker 1: like a larger system than just what's generated by the brain.
Speaker 1: In fact, the mind is, for example, the brain plus
Speaker 1: its ability to count on the body's fingers. Yeah. Like,
Speaker 1: I don't know if this is a perfect metaphor. You
Speaker 1: can give me feedback on this one, but one way
Speaker 1: I was I was trying to think of it. It
Speaker 1: may be over overly elaborate, or overly mystical. But a
Speaker 1: bongo player. Okay, uh, there's the bongo player playing the bongo,
Speaker 1: so her hands are not the music. The drum is
Speaker 1: not the music. The music emerges from the interface of
Speaker 1: these two things. Yeah, I think that's a nice way
Speaker 1: of putting it. Now, one way in which that's not
Speaker 1: quite an apt metaphor is that it doesn't challenge our
Speaker 1: assumptions in the same way. It's it's sort of natural
Speaker 1: to think that the music is not in the player's hands.
Speaker 1: But that is not always the way we think about cognition.
Speaker 1: It is more natural, generally for people to think that
Speaker 1: cognition lives inside the brain. That's where everything happens. Right.
Speaker 1: I guess the more apt way to think of it
Speaker 1: would be the bongo player's brain, the bongo players drum,
Speaker 1: and when these things come together, this this musical form emerges. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I guess that makes sense as as an introductory kind
Speaker 1: of kind of metaphor here. No, no, no, I like it.
Speaker 1: I'm not being I'm not being critical, no no, but
Speaker 1: but I'm definitely stressing that it's it's We're gonna get
Speaker 1: more elaborate than this. Okay, Well, if you accept the
Speaker 1: idea just for the sake of argument. This idea might
Speaker 1: not be the best way to think about cognition, but
Speaker 1: let's accept it for the sake of argument and move forward.
Speaker 1: That cognition could be something that's not just what happens
Speaker 1: in the brain, but the combination of what happens in
Speaker 1: the brain or the central nervous system and things outside
Speaker 1: of it. What different symbioses of brain and external circumstances
Speaker 1: could be represented there. Well, they're at least four different
Speaker 1: variants of extended cognition. And you know this depends on
Speaker 1: which papers you're reading for the most part, and you
Speaker 1: know the original thesis statement. But there's embodied cognition, which
Speaker 1: I believe we've covered on the podcast before. An embodied cognition.
Speaker 1: Cognition is deeply dependent upon the body as an agent
Speaker 1: of the brain. This could be, um, you know, a
Speaker 1: causal role or a or it could have a greater role.
Speaker 1: A lot of embodiment theory depends on the nature of
Speaker 1: the mind body connection, which is something we've discussed your
Speaker 1: time and time again. You've probably heard me mentioned the
Speaker 1: rider on a horse versus centaur version of mind and body.
Speaker 1: We'll explain that a little bit. Okay, So with the
Speaker 1: the the rider on a horse, this idea is that
Speaker 1: we have we have our brain and we have our body,
Speaker 1: and they're basically two separate things. The brain is just
Speaker 1: riding in the body doing what needs to do. But
Speaker 1: it's it's not as interconnected. It's a separate entity that
Speaker 1: controls the body. Yeah, exactly. And it's what it's the
Speaker 1: kind of a lot of times we don't even think
Speaker 1: really closely about it. We may just fall into the
Speaker 1: trap of thinking of ourselves as a brain, and especially
Speaker 1: when it comes to how we feel, how we're in
Speaker 1: acting with the world around us, we're just thinking of
Speaker 1: ourselves as this this this mind trapped in this brain.
Speaker 1: But the center analogy here is is is more in
Speaker 1: keeping with a lot of the studies that we discussed here,
Speaker 1: and I think a lot of the research has come
Speaker 1: out in previous decades, this idea that the mind and
Speaker 1: the body are far more connected. It it's more like
Speaker 1: a centaur, the human torso grown into the horse, where
Speaker 1: it's a it's a unified body. For instance, if you
Speaker 1: were to stab the flank of the centaur, then the
Speaker 1: human portion definitely feels it whereas if you were to
Speaker 1: stab the horse in the flank, then the rider is
Speaker 1: only going to feel the uh you know the effects
Speaker 1: of the horse suddenly jumping, leaping, maybe trying to throw
Speaker 1: him or her from the horse. Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 1: So if you want to go back to Teenage Mutant
Speaker 1: Ninja Turtles, where does which one is krank the rider
Speaker 1: on the horse? Right? Yes, to to refresh. If you're
Speaker 1: not familiar with kran Um. Kran is like an alien
Speaker 1: brain creature in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He's kind of irritable.
Speaker 1: He's an irritable villain, yes, uh. And he just looks
Speaker 1: like a squishy pink brain with two little tentacles and
Speaker 1: left to his own, he just kind of like crawls
Speaker 1: and slugs about. But he's He's frequently seen in two
Speaker 1: different devices. One and this is more of what you
Speaker 1: see in the cartoon. A full android body, arms, legs, humanoid.
Speaker 1: It seems to have skin, It has a head and
Speaker 1: a face, and and it enables him to like fight
Speaker 1: Ninja turtles and push things over and move around our
Speaker 1: world like a physical humanoid. If you've actually never seen this,
Speaker 1: the guy is shirtless, wearing like a red speedo and
Speaker 1: gray suspenders. It's pretty weird. Yeah, it has kind of
Speaker 1: this punk kind of a punk field, but also kind
Speaker 1: of like a pro wrestling field. It feels like the
Speaker 1: fitting vessel for an alien trying to appear as a human. Now,
Speaker 1: Krane also has another sort of robot body. Anybody who
Speaker 1: had the figures as a kid probably remember the US
Speaker 1: If you bought Krang is just uh, I don't know
Speaker 1: what costs like six or seven bucks. I guess uh,
Speaker 1: it would have been the little brain guy, little brain
Speaker 1: dude with his tentacles in this little canopy walker contraption
Speaker 1: like basically at a walking vehicle for it, sort of
Speaker 1: like the A T S. T S and Star Wars
Speaker 1: the Little Walkers. Yeah, So on one hand, I feel
Speaker 1: like we can we can apply this, uh this this
Speaker 1: brain body scenario, the centaur and the ride around a
Speaker 1: horse to cringe. Like a lot of times we're trying
Speaker 1: to think as if we are craying, as if we
Speaker 1: are essentially this brain creature and this body is just
Speaker 1: the vessel that we're using. But we're not crying. We're splinter.
Speaker 1: That's what the T shirt says. That's that's the good
Speaker 1: one for the bumper sticker. You're not crying, you're splinter. Okay,
Speaker 1: so I'm gonna come back to crying in a minute.
Speaker 1: But but let's talk about just some other examples or
Speaker 1: possible examples of extended cognition. Okay, are we still unembodied cognition? Okay,
Speaker 1: so maybe you count with your fingers classic example than
Speaker 1: an rather overt example. Right, I do this all the time.
Speaker 1: It's it's frankly a little embarrassing, um, but it's a
Speaker 1: good trick, right is. Yeah, that's why my brain refuses
Speaker 1: to learn more complicated methods of calculating things, because the
Speaker 1: fingers are always there, even if I have to do
Speaker 1: it below the table so that the gaming group doesn't
Speaker 1: know that I'm doing it to, you know, figure out
Speaker 1: hit points. They're they're they're always available, and they always help. Now,
Speaker 1: one thing I noticed about counting on my fingers I
Speaker 1: assume it's the same for everybody else, is that it's
Speaker 1: it's even more helpful when you're trying to manage two
Speaker 1: cognitive tasks at once, meaning you're not just counting something,
Speaker 1: but for example, you're trying to remember the names of
Speaker 1: something at the same time that you're counting them. Like
Speaker 1: if somebody asks you, like, um, how many people from
Speaker 1: your office we're at the meeting the other day, and
Speaker 1: you're trying to remember them, so you go through their
Speaker 1: faces and names and and list them off. So you're
Speaker 1: trying to remember who you've already listed and who was there,
Speaker 1: and trying to count them at the same time. So
Speaker 1: you're juggling multiple different cognitive tasks and having the fingers
Speaker 1: there to store the counting number while you're also trying
Speaker 1: to call up faces and remember who you've already listed,
Speaker 1: helps you get through the task without your brain catching
Speaker 1: on fire. Yeah, I mean that's how I feel running
Speaker 1: a role playing game, because that you'll be in a
Speaker 1: combat scenario essentially trying to communally tell a story. You're
Speaker 1: trying to manage pieces on a board, so there's a
Speaker 1: spatial element, and then you're having to continually do math.
Speaker 1: You know, granted not particularly complex math at all, but
Speaker 1: you're still you're having to constantly adding some track things
Speaker 1: to keep up with with hit points and damage. And
Speaker 1: it's very obvious the role that our fingers and our
Speaker 1: toes even may have played in the evolution of number
Speaker 1: and counting systems, right, I mean it's right there in
Speaker 1: the types of counting systems we use exactly based in
Speaker 1: or decimal systems stem from the use of both hands,
Speaker 1: while based twenty or vegesimal systems are based on the
Speaker 1: use of fingers and toes. And you can point to
Speaker 1: to any number of statements about posture and our body
Speaker 1: positioning and how it relates to innate or learned cognition. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, not to get into arguments over the validity
Speaker 1: of each of these, but you know, meditation, superhero pose
Speaker 1: the kindly brontosaurus. Wait wait, wait, wait, wait, explain this
Speaker 1: kindly brontosaurus. Oh yeah, kindly brontosaurus. I forget whose whose
Speaker 1: brain child this is, But it's the idea that I say, say,
Speaker 1: you're you're in an airport and you you know that
Speaker 1: the individual behind the counter can really help you, but
Speaker 1: they don't necessarily have to. You're in you're in a
Speaker 1: situation where you really don't want to offend, but you
Speaker 1: also know that if you try and charm your way,
Speaker 1: if you try to intimidate your way, it's just you're
Speaker 1: just gonna fall flat on your face. Right, So there's
Speaker 1: this idea that you just kind of you assume this
Speaker 1: posture like imagine you have a long uh brontosaurus or
Speaker 1: I guess the potosaurus would be more correct. You have
Speaker 1: this long sauropod neck at any rate ultimately doesn't matter
Speaker 1: something you have the school book idea of a brontosaurs.
Speaker 1: You kind of assume this posture where you sort of
Speaker 1: crane your neck out and uh, and you have your
Speaker 1: your your your arms folded. So you take on this
Speaker 1: very um humble appearance, this very meat humble appearance, and
Speaker 1: then you ask for help or you inquire with the
Speaker 1: front desk for something that they don't have to give you.
Speaker 1: And it's supposedly generates results, So it's like a it's
Speaker 1: like a mercy generator. Yeah, but I could also see
Speaker 1: how if you assume this posture, you are you know,
Speaker 1: you're you're also adjusting your demeanor as well. Oh okay,
Speaker 1: so you're saying that it could be a self feedback
Speaker 1: mechanism that could be aiding in cognition like that you
Speaker 1: could be for example, if you're in a situation and
Speaker 1: you know you need to maintain a certain state of mind,
Speaker 1: but it can be cognitively taxing to try to force
Speaker 1: yourself to maintain that state of mind while you're doing
Speaker 1: things in that situation, that maybe assuming a certain posture
Speaker 1: automatically keeps your brain in that state of mind. Right.
Speaker 1: The superhero post is probably a better example of this.
Speaker 1: This was this was popular in some of the science
Speaker 1: headlines for a little bit. You know, the idea that
Speaker 1: you you roll your shoulders back, you extend your chest,
Speaker 1: and this will give you a sort of a burst
Speaker 1: of confidence. I think I saw people seriously questioned as
Speaker 1: that result. It was. But but but it does raise
Speaker 1: the question like if I do that and I feel better,
Speaker 1: is that is there something innately enabling about taking on
Speaker 1: that pose? Or am I just priming myself and I
Speaker 1: sort of getting into superhero mode so that I'm pumping
Speaker 1: myself up making myself feel a little braver by doing
Speaker 1: this exercise. Yeah, well, I would say in that case,
Speaker 1: it's possible that you could think of that as extended
Speaker 1: or embodied cognition, right if it's doing some of the work,
Speaker 1: so your brain doesn't have to continue to do that work.
Speaker 1: Right now, there's also embedded cognition Sian. This is an
Speaker 1: external environment um playing a role. So like the idea
Speaker 1: that The interpretation of this, it came to my mind,
Speaker 1: is like the beach makes me creative. Uh. There's also
Speaker 1: enacted cognition. I think an example of this might be
Speaker 1: yoga makes me relaxed. And as well as as as
Speaker 1: a variant referred to as in clothes cognition, This idea
Speaker 1: that a uniform or your style of dress changes the
Speaker 1: way you think. Uh, and and in closed cognition was
Speaker 1: coined by cognitive psychologist Hajo Adam and Adam Glansky from
Speaker 1: Northwestern University several years back. I believe there's an older
Speaker 1: episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind that gets into that.
Speaker 1: There's some interesting studies about individuals holding clipboards or wearing um, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, doctor's long lab coats, and how that affects
Speaker 1: the way you think. Now, it's important to be clear
Speaker 1: about the distinction we're making here between just all the
Speaker 1: ways things beyond our brain normally affect us versus the
Speaker 1: idea of cognition taking place in conjunction with them. So,
Speaker 1: if you you're working on this idea of embodied cognition,
Speaker 1: embedded cognition, enacted cognition, in all of these cases, you're
Speaker 1: either talking about you know, your body or your environment
Speaker 1: or activities that you're doing are literally taking the place
Speaker 1: of information processing or information storage that would need to
Speaker 1: happen in the brain otherwise, or in the central nervous
Speaker 1: system in the case of a smaller animal. Yeah. Now
Speaker 1: to bring it back to crying though, I just want to, Okay,
Speaker 1: just so everyone can continue to to ponder this question
Speaker 1: as we continue on with the episode. So you have
Speaker 1: craying just naked, craying on the floor in a pool
Speaker 1: of his brain juice, if crying in the big humanoid
Speaker 1: android body, and you have craying in the sort of
Speaker 1: simplistic six dollar walker. Okay, So to what extent or
Speaker 1: each of these cases altering his cognition? Is craying on
Speaker 1: the floor, crying the humanoid body and crying in the walker?
Speaker 1: Are are they distinct cognitive situations? Is that android body
Speaker 1: changing the way that Kring thinks? I mean, I could
Speaker 1: see that it possibly could be like if Krang needs
Speaker 1: to count on his fingers, but he doesn't have fingers,
Speaker 1: he just has little like reachie tentacles that would be
Speaker 1: difficult to count to numbers much higher than two. Now,
Speaker 1: if he's working in his big body that has ten fingers.
Speaker 1: He could maybe count on his fingers. I don't know
Speaker 1: how much crying needs to count on his fingers. Well,
Speaker 1: it raises the point if he's a if he is
Speaker 1: an involved, intelligent creature that has these two tentacles, then
Speaker 1: perhaps he has some sort of I can't remember he
Speaker 1: has segments on those tentacles or their suckers. But maybe,
Speaker 1: but maybe there is some sort of number system based
Speaker 1: in his anatomy that he would otherwise use. And so
Speaker 1: maybe when he is an android body, he's either handicapped
Speaker 1: from a mathematical standpoint, or he is brilliant. I mean,
Speaker 1: he created like a giant drilling superstructure. So maybe he's
Speaker 1: smart enough that he can switch over to a decimal system.
Speaker 1: When we talk about extended cognition in biology, one of
Speaker 1: the hypotheses is going to be that extended cognition is
Speaker 1: especially useful to animals that have less resources to spend
Speaker 1: on building big brains. Obviously, in Krank's case, he has
Speaker 1: gone all in evolutionarily speaking in big brains, right literally
Speaker 1: all in all right, Well, on that note, let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break, and when we come back we will
Speaker 1: get into these studies, into the science and we will
Speaker 1: see how some natural world animals stack up against well
Speaker 1: against the human condition as well as the crane condition.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back, all right. Before we get into
Speaker 1: looking at extended cognition and biological research, I thought it
Speaker 1: would be important to look at one classic paper in
Speaker 1: the history of the idea of extended cognition, and this
Speaker 1: is The Extended Mind. I think it's published by Oxford
Speaker 1: University Press by the author's Andy Clark and David Chalmers.
Speaker 1: Now it's worth noting this paper does include a reference determinator,
Speaker 1: so Schwarzenegger's making it into classic philosophy papers. But in
Speaker 1: addition to the other stuff we've talked about, one thing
Speaker 1: they argue that I think is interesting is that beliefs
Speaker 1: can be external to the brain. And they use the
Speaker 1: example of a man with a memory disorder who carries
Speaker 1: a notebook full of reminders about everyday facts. So the
Speaker 1: way they set up the scenario, he's got a notebook
Speaker 1: and if he needs to go to a location, he
Speaker 1: can look up in the notebook how to get there
Speaker 1: or where it is. And in a normal person's brain
Speaker 1: who has the ability to store mental images and navigation ideas,
Speaker 1: you would say these these ideas are beliefs. Right, You
Speaker 1: believe the post office is located at the corner of
Speaker 1: this street in that street, and you, based on that belief,
Speaker 1: navigate to that location. In what since is a man
Speaker 1: with a notebook full of reminders different from somebody who
Speaker 1: stores that information in long term memory. Mhm. It's an
Speaker 1: interesting question. And it also of course ties into our
Speaker 1: our dependence on smartphones these days for their note taking ability,
Speaker 1: their information storage ability, and their their navigational abilities totally.
Speaker 1: And of course this also makes me think, now, this
Speaker 1: might not be exactly as applicable, because a lot of
Speaker 1: the people writing on the subject of extended cognition seem
Speaker 1: very concerned about this idea of coupling or sort of
Speaker 1: the ready availability of the external object to the mind.
Speaker 1: But anyway, it makes me think about the way we
Speaker 1: outsource many beliefs to the pronouncements of other people, people
Speaker 1: in whom we vest expertise and authority. Right, So could
Speaker 1: it be said that if I'm trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what to believe, and I just trust that whatever doctor
Speaker 1: expert over here believes is correct, have I extended my
Speaker 1: cognition to include doctor experts? Biological cognition. Mm hmm, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would think so to a certain extent. I mean
Speaker 1: it gets into this similar way that we we have
Speaker 1: trouble remembering things if we know that our significant other
Speaker 1: is more likely to remember it, or that there are
Speaker 1: certain things that we we we only really remember when
Speaker 1: talking to each other. Yeah. I think that's absolutely right,
Speaker 1: And that would be an interesting thing you mentioned there,
Speaker 1: because you're using the other person's brain as a tool.
Speaker 1: But you could also consider that a form of enacted cognition,
Speaker 1: where it's the process of talking. So it's not just
Speaker 1: that it's stored in their brain, but that by talking
Speaker 1: to each other, that act or process can call up
Speaker 1: a memory that otherwise you wouldn't need to store in
Speaker 1: your mind. Yeah. Like, here's an example from from my life.
Speaker 1: My wife and I have trouble remembering what year it
Speaker 1: was that we met, like when when we started dating,
Speaker 1: and one of the reasons is it's always easy to
Speaker 1: look up and see when the first Saw movie came out,
Speaker 1: because we know that that that we met around the
Speaker 1: same time that the first Saw movie hit theaters. Did
Speaker 1: you all go on your first date together to see
Speaker 1: sauw Uh? I don't know if it was the first
Speaker 1: date technically, but early on we did end up going
Speaker 1: to see the movie. So it's the Saw movie is
Speaker 1: not special to us in any other way other than
Speaker 1: it's a you know, just a marker on the timeline.
Speaker 1: But since the marker is there, there's like a reluctance
Speaker 1: in our brains to actually record the date or the
Speaker 1: month or the year, because we can always just pull
Speaker 1: up our phone, go to IMDb and see what your
Speaker 1: saw came out. So every time you hear like a
Speaker 1: chainsaw going through some splattery liquid sounds you think made
Speaker 1: for each other, yeah, and with with lots of really
Speaker 1: herky jerky editing thrown in there, and uh yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean for a while there was a Saw movie every year.
Speaker 1: Like most people don't appreciate how how helpful that was,
Speaker 1: but we would say we would see, oh it Saw
Speaker 1: five or whatever the right. So here's another way of
Speaker 1: following up on this, the idea of like maybe talking
Speaker 1: to your significant other that act could generate information that
Speaker 1: offsets cognitive deficits. Could language itself have evolved to provide
Speaker 1: an extension of our cognitive resources. Now go with me
Speaker 1: for a second. We generally assume language is for the
Speaker 1: purpose of communication. Right when you ask people what languages for,
Speaker 1: it's so we can share ideas between one another. That's
Speaker 1: obviously a big feature of it. I mean, that's what
Speaker 1: I generally think of it for. But think about it
Speaker 1: this way, Isn't it also sometimes the case that you
Speaker 1: can think more clearly about something once you put it
Speaker 1: into words. So what if words themselves act like a
Speaker 1: calculator for causal reasoning. They're allowing cloudy, nonverbal thought to
Speaker 1: be organized into something lucid, and in that way, they
Speaker 1: are actually a way of extending your mind. There an
Speaker 1: external tool that sort of stores and organizes information that
Speaker 1: would be harder to manage internally without those words. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: like one thing that comes to mind that you know,
Speaker 1: I have to think, like, what's what's the process that
Speaker 1: I regularly engage in writing? So if you think of
Speaker 1: something like, say, say a lead paragraph or a or yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's go with lead paragraph or even a the first
Speaker 1: chapter of a longer work, the first page of a
Speaker 1: short story, like that's a good catch. I'll just referring
Speaker 1: to the segment of the thing you were you were creating.
Speaker 1: But there are a lot of there are a lot
Speaker 1: of things that that intro paragraph has to accomplish. There's
Speaker 1: like a whole checklist of things you want to you
Speaker 1: you want to achieve in doing that, and it's easier
Speaker 1: to just sort of wrap it all up in a
Speaker 1: in a basket and then consider that, uh in relation
Speaker 1: to the rest of the piece, Right. But I mean,
Speaker 1: i'd say at an even simpler level, I don't know
Speaker 1: if this is often true for you, but it's very
Speaker 1: often true for me. I don't know what I really
Speaker 1: think about something until I write about it. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I definitely, I definitely feel that way. Yeah, like writing
Speaker 1: writing about something is I mean, that's how I approached
Speaker 1: the podcast. Many times, I have to write out my
Speaker 1: thoughts and that's where it begins to solidify a bit
Speaker 1: so that I can then tear it apart to a
Speaker 1: certain extent when I try and speak it. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: it's the words themselves and the sentences as abstract symbols
Speaker 1: and and bits of encoding and the process of writing,
Speaker 1: both of those things that help you clear up cognitive cloudiness. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would. I would agree. One more thing I think
Speaker 1: is interesting that Clark and Chalmers bring up before we
Speaker 1: go into extended cognition and animals. They say, you know,
Speaker 1: if we discover that people use their environments for cognition,
Speaker 1: that cognition isn't just in the brain, but that you're
Speaker 1: literally thinking with the things around you, does that mean
Speaker 1: that interfering with somebody's environment is the same as interfering
Speaker 1: with themselves as a person. Yeah, I would, I would
Speaker 1: think so, you know. I mean when it when you
Speaker 1: think of so you're working space, they're like the careful
Speaker 1: positioning of the things around you. Oh yeah, Like if
Speaker 1: somebody moves the things around on your desk, I think
Speaker 1: how violated that makes you feel? Yeah? Yeah, I mean it.
Speaker 1: And it holds true whether you're talking about a messy
Speaker 1: desk or you know, a meticulously clean desk. Things go
Speaker 1: in a certain place and if they're moved, then that
Speaker 1: throws you off. Yeah. I can totally see that. And
Speaker 1: I mean we all have particulars like I work with
Speaker 1: the window open or I work with the window closed.
Speaker 1: I need this amount of sunlight, uh in my work environment,
Speaker 1: or like if I go to yoga class, I need
Speaker 1: my my yoga equipment in a certain spot. My water
Speaker 1: goes here, my yoga blocks go here, and if they're
Speaker 1: out of position, that's going to it's gonna put me
Speaker 1: out of position cognitively to a certain extent. All right, Robert, well,
Speaker 1: are you ready to go to the animal kingdom. Let's
Speaker 1: do it. Let's let's pull in the animals. Well. Now, actually,
Speaker 1: of course we are members of the animal kingdom. But
Speaker 1: it is helpful when talking about cognition, when trying to
Speaker 1: understand what it really is, to look at animals other
Speaker 1: than humans. So you can get a more objective point
Speaker 1: of view, and you can peel off a lot of
Speaker 1: the human complexity, of most of the human complexity of
Speaker 1: culture and whatnot that we have on top. So it's
Speaker 1: kind of like getting down to more of the bedrock ideas. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so let's look at animals and try to apply this
Speaker 1: same principle. Some animals have brains, yet nevertheless use other
Speaker 1: parts of their body or things outside their body apparently
Speaker 1: to perform cognition. That's right. I mean, like I said,
Speaker 1: we tend to fall back on our rider horse crane
Speaker 1: in a can view of cognition because that's more combatible
Speaker 1: with how we've come to view the bio mechanical human.
Speaker 1: But this vision doesn't work as well with many animal models,
Speaker 1: particularly smaller organisms, that essence really offload aspects of their
Speaker 1: cognition to other parts of their neural system or outside
Speaker 1: their neural system entirely. Yeah. One example I remember talking
Speaker 1: about in past episodes is cockroaches, where so you know,
Speaker 1: cockroaches have a central nervous system, but they've also got
Speaker 1: things throughout their bodies that you almost want to call
Speaker 1: separate little brains and their legs and body parts, but
Speaker 1: they're not really brains. They're neural tissue that appears to
Speaker 1: do some kind of independent information processing. Yeah. Like, another
Speaker 1: example that comes up is crickets that hear through quote
Speaker 1: unquote ears on their knees. One example that I always
Speaker 1: love is the male praying mantis who continues to mate
Speaker 1: after his mate has decapitated him. So in these cases,
Speaker 1: copula tory movements in mantids are controlled by masses of
Speaker 1: nerve tissue in the abdomen rather than the brain. So
Speaker 1: what what that makes you want to say, is like, oh,
Speaker 1: so they've got a second brain their abdomen, right, And
Speaker 1: that's what some of the science headlines I remember they
Speaker 1: went with that. They're like the male praying man as
Speaker 1: has a brain and it's uh, and it's genitals. But
Speaker 1: the truth is more interesting than that. Yeah, because it's
Speaker 1: not the brain. It's it's not a second brain. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's just nerve tissues beyond the brain. And in fact,
Speaker 1: with the with the praying mantis, in any cases, the
Speaker 1: the head is gone, the head is eaten away, and
Speaker 1: it's going to copulate more ferociously. It's in a sense
Speaker 1: the it's like the dead man switch or the dead
Speaker 1: mantis switch has been hit on mating. Now you might
Speaker 1: think like, well, I mean, come on, how much cognitive
Speaker 1: capacity is really involved in mating? Like do you really
Speaker 1: need to do that much information processing to mate? I
Speaker 1: don't know what mantis mating exactly looks like. I'm not
Speaker 1: imagining something incredibly complex. Well, they're they're videos, but videos
Speaker 1: you can look up at work, or yeah, they're, well
Speaker 1: they're It depends where you're your employers fall on a
Speaker 1: mantoid intercourse. But yeah, I mean, uh, I think I
Speaker 1: think we're we have a we have a relaxed policy
Speaker 1: on it here if I'm remembering her handbook correctly. But
Speaker 1: of course it goes way beyond just activities like mating.
Speaker 1: You can say that cognition in many ways extends to
Speaker 1: all parts of the body and even much more complex animals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's take take octopi, octopuses, octopods. I think, I think
Speaker 1: I like octopods. I know we've debated this in the past.
Speaker 1: What's the plural of octopus. I'm going with octopods, not octopusies,
Speaker 1: despite the James Bond film. Maybe that's the British Uh,
Speaker 1: that's the metric thing. Maybe that is the plural for
Speaker 1: talking about multiple copies of the movie. There you go.
Speaker 1: If you've got like fourteen blue rays of octopusy on
Speaker 1: your on your kitchen counter for some reason, it's just like, hey,
Speaker 1: can you move the octopuses out of the way. I
Speaker 1: need to chop some celery. There we go. So octopuses
Speaker 1: are smart critters, though they have they have a rather
Speaker 1: different brain from us, but they've been observed to pass
Speaker 1: modified tests of consciousness. Even it's one of the reasons
Speaker 1: that I make it a point not to eat octopi. Uh.
Speaker 1: They certainly don't follow the big brain model of cognition, however,
Speaker 1: with their central brain composing only a small part of
Speaker 1: a greater nervous system, so by by most estimates two
Speaker 1: thirds of their roughly five hundred million neurons are located
Speaker 1: in their arms. Wow, that makes sense, right, I mean
Speaker 1: octopi are you see them moving around there? Mostly a
Speaker 1: creature of arms. It's it's that's their whole thing. That's
Speaker 1: how they navigate their world. That's how they they capture
Speaker 1: their prey. Uh, it's in the title of the organism.
Speaker 1: So on our model of cognition, that would seem to
Speaker 1: make us think that what the octopus must have in
Speaker 1: its brain is a sort of picture of the environment
Speaker 1: around it in its brain mental representation of its environment,
Speaker 1: and then also some sort of appropriate receptive sense of
Speaker 1: where all of its arms are in relation to the
Speaker 1: features of that environment. Right, Like, it's got a room
Speaker 1: in its mind that's the ocean floor around it, and
Speaker 1: it knows where all of its limbs are in that room,
Speaker 1: and the mental representation is that what's going on? Well,
Speaker 1: according to Macquarie University's kin Ching, the octopus does not
Speaker 1: seem to require centralized mental image, or I'm assuming this
Speaker 1: is in line with the idea of body schema, right,
Speaker 1: it doesn't need the centralized mental image of what its
Speaker 1: body is doing in order to do it. The arms,
Speaker 1: it would seem to put it, you know, loosely know
Speaker 1: how to move. So the arms do their own thinking
Speaker 1: in a way. Yeah. So a sucker on a tentacle touches, say,
Speaker 1: a piece of crap meat. Yea, it sends a wave
Speaker 1: of impulses up the arm. Now by most you know,
Speaker 1: examples you would expect that, you know, are sort of
Speaker 1: grade school understanding of nerve impulses. A human touches something,
Speaker 1: the holse to travel up the arm through the nervous
Speaker 1: system to the brain. The brain, Yeah, well, what happens
Speaker 1: here is seems to be a little different. The base
Speaker 1: of the arm sends another impulse down the arm. The
Speaker 1: two signals meet and an elbow or bend forms. It's
Speaker 1: not a real elbow, but a bind essentially forms to
Speaker 1: allow the grass crab morsel to then reach the mouth
Speaker 1: of the octopus. Now that is interesting now that this
Speaker 1: is one of the facts that was mentioned in that
Speaker 1: Atlantic article I mentioned at the top of the episode
Speaker 1: that but this was very interesting to me. So it
Speaker 1: knows how to bring a piece of food up to
Speaker 1: its beak by bisecting the distance between the place where
Speaker 1: it has grasped the food and the base of the
Speaker 1: arm up at the up at the head by just
Speaker 1: calculating that within the arm itself. Yeah, it essentially has
Speaker 1: a cheat built into its its neural system so that
Speaker 1: it doesn't have to make those computations with the brain.
Speaker 1: That's my readA on it anyway, brilliant. It's also I
Speaker 1: can't help but it sort of go wild with this
Speaker 1: and and think, all right, well, we're talking about about
Speaker 1: how external things change cognition. Uh, it's interesting to think
Speaker 1: about in terms of other things was we've observed or
Speaker 1: in one case hypothesized um octopus is doing. For instance,
Speaker 1: consider the coconut octopus or veined octopus that uses coconuts
Speaker 1: or seashells for shelter. Essentially, you know, basic tool use.
Speaker 1: To what extent is that altering its cognition. Well, that's
Speaker 1: a good question, and we might be able to apply
Speaker 1: a criterion from the next study we look at too,
Speaker 1: to judge that this criterion that's going to come up
Speaker 1: in a minute is the idea of mutual manipulability. In
Speaker 1: then a horrible word, manipulability, I practice saying it before
Speaker 1: we got going here. But it's the idea that really
Speaker 1: if something external is part of your cognitive system, then
Speaker 1: your brain should be able to manipulate it, and it
Speaker 1: should be able to manipulate your brain in return. So
Speaker 1: there's a manipul relation feedback between the two. Now, I
Speaker 1: wonder if that would apply to things like like these
Speaker 1: coconut fragments or sea shells that would be used by
Speaker 1: the octopus. Well, one more advanced but also controversial idea
Speaker 1: would be how would this play into the crack and
Speaker 1: hypothesis of paleontologist Mark mcminimon of Mount Holyoke College in
Speaker 1: Massachusetts to be familiar with this, No, I hadn't, I
Speaker 1: mean not until you were you put this in here,
Speaker 1: so tell me about it, Robert, Okay, So there hasn't
Speaker 1: been any recent movement on this. My understanding is that
Speaker 1: is that he's still working on this and hopes to
Speaker 1: publish more about it. It was it was rather controversial
Speaker 1: when it came out. I criticized this as being far fetched.
Speaker 1: But he's not a quag by any and by any extent.
Speaker 1: He's he's an established paleontologists here. His argument is that
Speaker 1: you have what we have, our fossil remains of a
Speaker 1: prehistoric cephalopod, beak, and we have a curious arrangement of
Speaker 1: dead Ichtheosaurus is Ichtheosaurus. Of course, it's the the kind
Speaker 1: of weird looking dolphin reptile that we discussed in a
Speaker 1: previous episode. I believe Fossie. You're saying, like they're discovered together.
Speaker 1: You've brought a place where there's a fossil and there's
Speaker 1: a strange arrangement of dead I theosaur fossils, and in
Speaker 1: the middle of it you've got this beak right, And
Speaker 1: as we discussed in our our fossil episode, fossil action scenes,
Speaker 1: uh palion tottos have to interpret these findings and try
Speaker 1: and figure out in what cases you're just looking at
Speaker 1: a chance coupling of remains, and in which cases you're
Speaker 1: dealing with fossil evidence of an interaction. In this case,
Speaker 1: in this triascic cracking hypothesis, the idea is that the
Speaker 1: bones are arranged in an unnatural pattern to resemble the
Speaker 1: pattern of tentacle sucker discs on the the cephalopod itself.
Speaker 1: Whoa so hold on this hypothesis is that this ancients
Speaker 1: affle of pod made art. Essentially, yeah, that it's an
Speaker 1: ancient self portrait and a glimpse into a two d
Speaker 1: million year old inhuman uh and arguably creative mind. Well
Speaker 1: I love that, but I can definitely see why people
Speaker 1: were very skeptical of Yeah, so don't don't take this
Speaker 1: one to the bank. But I really do hope that
Speaker 1: that Mark mcmanimmon puts out another paper on this and
Speaker 1: offer some more some more proof and some more thoughts.
Speaker 1: Even if it doesn't turn out to have, you know,
Speaker 1: any provable validity to it, I still love the idea,
Speaker 1: sort of an octoponymous bosh, yeah exactly. Okay, Well, I
Speaker 1: think we should take a quick break and when we
Speaker 1: come back, we will get into spiders and their cognitive webs. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, okay. So I want to finish by looking
Speaker 1: at this one really interesting paper that was one of
Speaker 1: the centerpieces of of the article I mentioned at the
Speaker 1: beginning of the episode. So I went and looked up
Speaker 1: this paper in Animal Cognition by Hilton Yapiasu and Kevin
Speaker 1: in Lalande. And the paper is called Extended Spider Cognition
Speaker 1: in the Journal of Animal Cognition, published in So this
Speaker 1: is new stuff and this paper was very interesting. So
Speaker 1: it starts with the idea of extended cognition. You've got
Speaker 1: these two different models of cognition, cognition as a process
Speaker 1: within the central nervous system and then cognition extending out
Speaker 1: into other parts of the body or even other features
Speaker 1: of the environment. And the question is which of these
Speaker 1: ideas is a better system for understanding cognition in biology,
Speaker 1: Which is better for cognitive biologists to use in their
Speaker 1: research and to avoid controversy with basic terms, the authors
Speaker 1: of the study except a common definition of cognition, which
Speaker 1: is the acquisition, processing, storage, and use of information. Now,
Speaker 1: while there are these different models of cognition beyond the
Speaker 1: central nervous system, the authors don't really commit to any
Speaker 1: one of them in particular, So they're not going down
Speaker 1: the enacted cognition or embodied cognition path. They're just saying
Speaker 1: anything that takes place beyond the central nervous system will
Speaker 1: be considered extended cognition. Um. So one of the ways
Speaker 1: to get out of the realm of philosophy is to
Speaker 1: just test the extended cognition hypothesis and animals. So this
Speaker 1: is what this study sets out to do, and they
Speaker 1: want to test it in spiders. Now, in thinking about
Speaker 1: where extended cognition could come from. In biology, the author's
Speaker 1: cite a cybernetics principle known as Ashby's law of requisite variety,
Speaker 1: and this states that if a system is going to
Speaker 1: be stable, quote, the number of states of the control
Speaker 1: mechanism of a system must be greater than or equal
Speaker 1: to the number of states in the system being controlled.
Speaker 1: Now that's really abstract language, but it actually is pretty
Speaker 1: simple in biology. This just means that if an organism
Speaker 1: like an animal is going to be successful in a
Speaker 1: variable environment, it needs variable behavior. It needs to itself
Speaker 1: be able to meet all of the different circumstances that
Speaker 1: could come up in its natural environment. Complex threat environments
Speaker 1: demand complex behaviors, right, yeah, I mean this reminds me
Speaker 1: of some of the more cognitively advanced species. You look
Speaker 1: at them and instantly thinking of birds. Uh pause, that
Speaker 1: the new Caledonian crowing to employ various strategies to to
Speaker 1: to to to earn its food. Yeah. Yeah, And you
Speaker 1: see complex cognition in the bird that has fairly complex
Speaker 1: challenges to face in the wild. So, of course it's
Speaker 1: taken as a given that neural complexity usually underlies behavioral complexity.
Speaker 1: Right If you see an organism doing a wide variety
Speaker 1: of different things instead of the same few things over
Speaker 1: and over again, it's usually a sign of cognitive power. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think of a tiger, for instance, in
Speaker 1: comparison to a new Caledonian crow. The Caledonian crow again
Speaker 1: is having to employ various strategies to to earn that meal.
Speaker 1: The tiger has basically one strategy, and it's really good
Speaker 1: at that one strategy, but it doesn't diversify. It is
Speaker 1: not a generalist. Well, I wouldn't. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't undersell the cognitive capabilities of a tiger. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think compared to like a primate, a tiger is
Speaker 1: probably pretty low on the cognitive scale, but compared to
Speaker 1: a lot of organisms, especially a lot of herbivorous organisms,
Speaker 1: it's probably pretty high. I mean, one thing you do
Speaker 1: generally see, and this comes up in the paper, is
Speaker 1: that predators tend to be higher in cognitive capabilities than
Speaker 1: their prey. Oh. Yes, I mean I definitely put a
Speaker 1: tiger above you know, a cow. I mean, clearly it
Speaker 1: was framed by an immortal hand er. I I'm not
Speaker 1: taken that away from it, right If it must roam
Speaker 1: the forest of the night, and it's got to have
Speaker 1: some tricks up its sleeve. But but you're right that
Speaker 1: it might have a more specially adapted niche than some
Speaker 1: other animals that have to be incredibly diverse generalists. Um.
Speaker 1: But anyway, and with this in mind, it should be
Speaker 1: clear that organisms inhabiting more challenging and unstable environments, and
Speaker 1: one challenge they give is unpredictable fluctuations and resources, those
Speaker 1: types of organisms need to require more powerful brains or
Speaker 1: central nervous systems to deal with those challenges. So one
Speaker 1: example of a hypothesis along these lines is the social
Speaker 1: brain hypothesis. Now, Robert, I know you've encountered this before, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: In fact, at the World Science Festival that I just
Speaker 1: came back from, there was a there was an entire
Speaker 1: panel discussion on about the social synapps, about the social
Speaker 1: brain and and how we think it evolved, especially in
Speaker 1: terms of the creation of tools and then communication over
Speaker 1: the over the creation of tools. Oh cool, is that
Speaker 1: one of the ones they've put online? Uh? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: believe that one is available online. Yeah, I'd like to
Speaker 1: watch that. Yeah, yeah, maybe we'll revisit the topic for
Speaker 1: a future episode. Well, anyway, just to give you the
Speaker 1: quick gist here, living in groups is a complex and
Speaker 1: challenging environment, putting great demands on your cognition. You've got
Speaker 1: to remember who everybody around you is, what their personalities
Speaker 1: are like, what their status is relative to you and
Speaker 1: to each other. This is this is really demanding and
Speaker 1: I mean and also as far as status goes, you've
Speaker 1: got to figure out how you can potitionally move up. Yes.
Speaker 1: One of the things that came up in the social
Speaker 1: synaps talk is you have examples of primates. I can't believe,
Speaker 1: I can't remember off hand if we're talking chimpanzees are
Speaker 1: macaques where you will have a female that's low in
Speaker 1: the totem pole, so to speak, but then she has
Speaker 1: a child, and in the social environment, the young primate
Speaker 1: is a means for her to rise up because all
Speaker 1: the other animals want to touch it, they want to
Speaker 1: interact with you know, the baby is valued by by
Speaker 1: the group and this enabled this particular individual in the
Speaker 1: study to rise up to to to near the very
Speaker 1: top of the social order. Interesting. Yeah, and the fact
Speaker 1: that there is always this variability and social hierarchy in
Speaker 1: these animals with big social groups means that that's even
Speaker 1: another like there, there's not just benefits, but there are
Speaker 1: threats too. If somebody else can move up, you can
Speaker 1: be moved down the hierarchy. So you've got to constantly
Speaker 1: maintain all these social relationships. And this is hard work
Speaker 1: for a brain. Yeah, even if you don't live in
Speaker 1: a vicious working environment. Uh, your mind is still sort
Speaker 1: of calculating, all right, where am I and what's the
Speaker 1: status quo. So the authors state that this has been
Speaker 1: somewhat borne out in research into primate brains. For example,
Speaker 1: macOS living in groups to have increases in gray matter
Speaker 1: in mid superior temporal sulcus and in rostral prefrontal cortex.
Speaker 1: But of course, on the other hand, if extended cognition
Speaker 1: is true, we should be able to find evidence of
Speaker 1: biological systems where the size and energy consumption of the
Speaker 1: central nervous system does not directly track with the cognitive
Speaker 1: power of the organism. If you can think with things
Speaker 1: outside your body, you should be able to find evidence
Speaker 1: of organisms meeting the information processing requirements of their environments
Speaker 1: or their survival niche without necessarily having the gray matter
Speaker 1: to do so. Right, So, but I guess this brings
Speaker 1: you to the question of like, why wouldn't you just
Speaker 1: invest in a bigger brain If you need more cognitive
Speaker 1: processing done, why don't you just make a bigger brain
Speaker 1: that gets more work done. Well, this isn't easy either.
Speaker 1: I mean, most animals live on the edge of survival
Speaker 1: as far as as far as energy resources go. And
Speaker 1: a central nervous system that does lots of computation on
Speaker 1: its own needs lots of processing power, which means spending
Speaker 1: energy building that neural tissue and keeping it active and maintained. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's an economy to maintain here. We see
Speaker 1: time and time again and an evolution that the antlers
Speaker 1: are only going to be as big as they need
Speaker 1: to be. Yeah. Otherwise that that that lineage is going
Speaker 1: to perish and and small antlers are going to be
Speaker 1: the the the adaptation that survives. Yeah. And so we
Speaker 1: can forget about this because I don't know, as comfortable
Speaker 1: humans like you, you might not be constantly concerned about
Speaker 1: survival and starvation, but most animals are living at the
Speaker 1: edge of starvation. It's just right on the horizon for them. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of the things that came up in that world
Speaker 1: Science Festival panel discussion was just basic tools you see
Speaker 1: other hominid species where they created a basic tool, you know,
Speaker 1: like a stone implement for chipping away at things and
Speaker 1: and and processing meat, and that tool did not change
Speaker 1: it didn't They didn't evolve it beyond that point and
Speaker 1: it remained the same for a thousand years or more. Uh.
Speaker 1: That's rather different than the from the ascension of tool
Speaker 1: us we see for the most part in human history. Right.
Speaker 1: But yeah, for the most part, evolution is I hate
Speaker 1: to anthromomorphize it, but evolution is is perfectly happy to
Speaker 1: remain just at that threshold of starvation, like say, as
Speaker 1: long as it works. So, the more cognition is limited
Speaker 1: to the workings of a central nervous system, the more
Speaker 1: energy is required to invest in that central nervous system. Thus,
Speaker 1: extended cognition really could be viewed as an energy efficient
Speaker 1: shortcut for giving an organism more information processing power with
Speaker 1: less energy investment less resources going in. Also, this is interesting,
Speaker 1: the authors pointed out central cognition relies very much on
Speaker 1: powers of perception. Cognition, if you're going to yield accurate results,
Speaker 1: is informationally greedy. Right. Think about the resolution of our
Speaker 1: eyes and our hearing acuity, and how much of an
Speaker 1: organism's resources go into sampling the outside world to make
Speaker 1: sure it's getting a good internal representation of its surroundings.
Speaker 1: So to plan for a future action, you need a
Speaker 1: representational model of the world in your head. And if
Speaker 1: your plan is to mean anything, that model needs to
Speaker 1: be accurate, which means you need to take pictures of
Speaker 1: the world around you that are information rich. And if
Speaker 1: you offload some of that same cognition into the environment,
Speaker 1: you might not have to do as much mental representation,
Speaker 1: you might not require as much perceptual information. So that
Speaker 1: brings us to what type of animals are going to
Speaker 1: be the most favored for extended cognition. Obviously all kinds
Speaker 1: of animals might use it to some extent, but which
Speaker 1: ones are going to really go hard and on extended cognition?
Speaker 1: If this is a fact of biology, the author's hypothesized
Speaker 1: that the evolution of extended cognition should be especially favored
Speaker 1: among small generalist predators. Now why is that, Well, first
Speaker 1: you've got the small creatures. There's there's general what's known
Speaker 1: as alimentary between brain size and body size, and that
Speaker 1: means they track one another um, the bigger your body,
Speaker 1: the bigger your brain. And one take away from this
Speaker 1: is that if you want a more powerful brain, it's
Speaker 1: much easier if you're a larger animal. Especially tiny animals
Speaker 1: are going to have real difficulty recruiting sufficient information processing
Speaker 1: power within the small collections of central nervous tissue that
Speaker 1: their tiny bodies will support. The smaller you are, the
Speaker 1: harder it is to energetically justify complex cognition within your
Speaker 1: economy of survival. Yeah, because, as we said, cognition is
Speaker 1: already pricey, right, uh So, so if you're small, you
Speaker 1: might be really looking for a way to offload some
Speaker 1: of that cognitive capacity into your environment, into other parts
Speaker 1: of your body or in any of these extended areas. Now,
Speaker 1: the next thing is predators. Why would predators especially need this, Well,
Speaker 1: predators generally need more information and processing power than other organisms. Why.
Speaker 1: It's that they quote tend to be large and mobile
Speaker 1: so as to track diverse, changeable, and spatially distinct prey
Speaker 1: distributions and thus require the information processing capability to detect
Speaker 1: and respond to changes in these distributions. And this is
Speaker 1: supported by observing that in mammals, predators tend to have
Speaker 1: larger brains. You can also see this even in some
Speaker 1: fishes like teleost fishes. Fish higher up the food chain
Speaker 1: have bigger brains. You need them because of the work
Speaker 1: you've got to do to survive. So you've got small
Speaker 1: you've got predators. The other thing was general predators. Generalists
Speaker 1: are animals that specialize in more than one particular environmental
Speaker 1: niche they deal with more variability. Uh. The more general
Speaker 1: and animals foraging landscape, the more variability it needs to
Speaker 1: deal with, and thus the more processing power it needs.
Speaker 1: And uh, the one this is not a pure predator
Speaker 1: by any means that I always think of the raccoon, Like,
Speaker 1: the raccoon is a is a pretty intelligent little critter
Speaker 1: because because it is that it is such a generalist,
Speaker 1: it is ranging, you know, a pretty far and wide
Speaker 1: and within its its environmental ranging ground to to acquire
Speaker 1: its food. Yeah, and you can really see raccoons getting
Speaker 1: pretty crafty, yeah with your garbage. I mean yeah, I
Speaker 1: even helping each other at times. I've I haven't read
Speaker 1: a study about this, but I've heard accounts of of
Speaker 1: raccoons they standing upon each other's shoulders to achieve some
Speaker 1: sort of a goal such as drinking the nectar from
Speaker 1: a hummingbird feeder, or to get the garbage can lid
Speaker 1: off anyway. So this leads them to their main hypothesis
Speaker 1: and the subject of of the study portion of their
Speaker 1: literature reviews. So the authors say, quote, these considerations lead
Speaker 1: us to expect, other things being equal, that predators of
Speaker 1: a relatively small size with generalist habits are prime candidates
Speaker 1: for extended cognition because they should be under particularly strong
Speaker 1: selection to reduce their relative brain size but maintain their
Speaker 1: behavioral richness. And one means by which this could be
Speaker 1: achieved just through offloading brain processing to the body or
Speaker 1: the environment. So who's a good candidate for meeting this spiders? Yes,
Speaker 1: because spiders have been at it for a long time.
Speaker 1: They have been there. There's some pretty old predators, pretty
Speaker 1: successful predators found on every continent except Antarctica. They've been
Speaker 1: on Earth for some four hundred million years, and while
Speaker 1: the number keeps going up, I believe the most recent
Speaker 1: species count was an excess of forty five thousand spider species. Now,
Speaker 1: we've covered aspects of spider anatomy and behavior on the
Speaker 1: show over the years. What was the most recent one.
Speaker 1: We we did one on we did what it would
Speaker 1: be like to get eaten by a Giant Spider. We
Speaker 1: did that last October for our Halloween season because with
Speaker 1: the giant spider movies they always cut away right before
Speaker 1: the spider gets to the part where it eats you,
Speaker 1: and we were like, well, what would that look like?
Speaker 1: Does it stick the fangs in and drain your blood
Speaker 1: like a vampire? And the answer spoiler alert, No, They
Speaker 1: mostly like drool all over you and inject you with
Speaker 1: with dissolving enzymes and turn you into mush and then
Speaker 1: they turn you into bull list and we'll just go
Speaker 1: listen to the episode. Yeah, now I think everyone knows
Speaker 1: what a spider is. The basics are eight legs, venomon
Speaker 1: things spinnerets that produce highly specialized strands of silk. Some
Speaker 1: spiders use these to hunt or maneuver in their environments,
Speaker 1: but a great many of them build traps webs, and
Speaker 1: there are several types of webs. You have uh triangle webs,
Speaker 1: funnel webs and mesh webs, cobwebs, sheet webs, and of
Speaker 1: course traditional orb webs. Some three thousand plus species of
Speaker 1: orbs spiders exist in the orb part. It's easy to
Speaker 1: kind of get tripped up of this and imagine a
Speaker 1: three dimensional orb. But basically we're talking about a circular web,
Speaker 1: the classic spider web, the sort of thing that you
Speaker 1: see in a giant spider movie, a haunted house, or
Speaker 1: a burlesque show. It's the round spider web. And these
Speaker 1: are incredible structures, engineered down to minute weaving in each
Speaker 1: specialized strand. I always stress that a spider webbing is
Speaker 1: not a silly string scenario. They are they're true weavers.
Speaker 1: They're manipulating the substance of the silk strands and the
Speaker 1: manner by which they're woven together. And this is just
Speaker 1: into the line they're using, because they're then using that
Speaker 1: spider silk line, which is strong and flexible. Uh, some
Speaker 1: varieties are five times as strong as an equal mass
Speaker 1: of steel and twice as strong as an equal mass
Speaker 1: of kevlar. They're using that then to create this web structure.
Speaker 1: And the web structure itself is far more than just
Speaker 1: a sticky trap, because we see that in the movies,
Speaker 1: the monster movies, the damsel is caught in against the web.
Speaker 1: Usually like generally it just looks like she's leaning against
Speaker 1: some rope web and then the big spider puppet comes.
Speaker 1: But it's it's far more than that for starters. It's
Speaker 1: a killing room, it's a killing floor. It's the home
Speaker 1: turf uh for the predator uh. And it provides the
Speaker 1: predator with a strong advantage over appropriately sized prey that
Speaker 1: tumble into the web. And it's also a communication array.
Speaker 1: You land on the webbing and the spider knows, now
Speaker 1: this is going to be important. Yeah, that you land
Speaker 1: on that web, but you fall into that web. The
Speaker 1: spider knows, the spider feels. And it's no great leap
Speaker 1: to say that the orb spider web is a vital
Speaker 1: extension of the creature that built it and occupies it
Speaker 1: waiting for the signals of the snared prey. Right. So,
Speaker 1: the prediction that these authors given their paper is that
Speaker 1: because spiders have the cognitive needs of generalist predators but
Speaker 1: the neural limitations of tiny organisms, the authors think that
Speaker 1: spiders should show signs of evolution favoring extended cognition if
Speaker 1: such a thing as possible. And the special feature of
Speaker 1: spider biology they're gonna look to is those webs, that
Speaker 1: amazing silk, those threads. So we definitely used to think
Speaker 1: of spiders as purely insta driven stimulus response machines with
Speaker 1: no real cognitive capacity, but that isn't the case anymore.
Speaker 1: Spider research has yielded a lot of interesting signs of cognition,
Speaker 1: allowing them to learn new things. So some examples given
Speaker 1: by the authors or that, for example, spiders appear to
Speaker 1: plan routes of movement in advance, like there are these
Speaker 1: cannibal jumping spiders that prey on orb weavers and uh.
Speaker 1: When they prey on orb weavers, they'll watch them from
Speaker 1: a distance first, then plan a route of approach that
Speaker 1: loses sight of the prey animal en route, then drops
Speaker 1: down from above to attack the orb weaver at the
Speaker 1: hub of its web. There are signs that they actually
Speaker 1: have the capability to display numerosity, like they can understand
Speaker 1: some number distinctions, that they learn conditional tactics of aggressive mimicry.
Speaker 1: In One example of this would be the these cannibalistic
Speaker 1: jumping spiders. Again, they prey on orb weavers, uh, and
Speaker 1: what they will do is they'll go up to the
Speaker 1: edge of the web and generate false vibratory signals to
Speaker 1: manipulate the behavior of their prey, so they learn what
Speaker 1: signals to use for a particular spider by trial and
Speaker 1: error to get the spider to come out to a
Speaker 1: place where it can be attacked. There's at least one
Speaker 1: variety of I believe it's an orb spider that will
Speaker 1: essentially build a decoy of itself in the web. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I've heard of that. But the authors also
Speaker 1: say that they can generally like they can unlearn imprinted associations,
Speaker 1: and they can generally display adaptability to changing conditions. So
Speaker 1: they're not mere machines repeating a program. No, spiders appear
Speaker 1: to have some real cognitive capacity that they can that
Speaker 1: they can plan, that they can essentially think. Now, obviously
Speaker 1: they're thinking is not going to be exactly the same
Speaker 1: kind of thinking that you would identify with like a mammal,
Speaker 1: like a primate, But they are spider philosophers. No, they
Speaker 1: are doing some kind end of complex information processing. Now,
Speaker 1: the experimental method that these researchers apply in their paper
Speaker 1: is that this is a literature review, so they're not
Speaker 1: doing direct new research or experiments in this they're reviewing
Speaker 1: a lot of the existing spider research and what they're
Speaker 1: trying to look for to see if something can count
Speaker 1: as cognition is something I mentioned earlier, the mutual manipulability criterion.
Speaker 1: They explain this by saying, quote, two entities that can
Speaker 1: reciprocally alter the state of each other pertain to one
Speaker 1: and the same system. Does that make sense? So if
Speaker 1: if the external object and the spider's brain can both
Speaker 1: change each other reciprocally, then you might consider this a
Speaker 1: mutually manipulable system. So a couple of cases they look
Speaker 1: out of the paper. One is how attention is managed
Speaker 1: by web threads. So Robert, imagine you are a web
Speaker 1: spinning spider. You want information and about your environment. Is
Speaker 1: there something walking on my web? Is it something I
Speaker 1: could eat or something that could eat me? But you've
Speaker 1: got these neural limitations. You've got a tiny, tiny brain,
Speaker 1: So how do you selectively apply your limited cognitive resources
Speaker 1: to get the best info about what's going on around you?
Speaker 1: What if you use your web itself? That's right, I
Speaker 1: mean I'm depending on the web for the sensations anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you're not just statically using the web. So it
Speaker 1: would be one thing if you felt vibrations in the
Speaker 1: web and that told you something about your environment. That
Speaker 1: would be just kind of like, you know, seeing the
Speaker 1: light reflecting off of something coming towards you. That'd just
Speaker 1: be sensing something from your environment. But the spiders don't
Speaker 1: just have their brains manipulated by info from the web.
Speaker 1: They manipulate the web in return to to fine tune
Speaker 1: their attentional systems. So web building spiders, for example, have
Speaker 1: been shown to use web tension as an attentional mechanism.
Speaker 1: And the same way we would focus our eyes on
Speaker 1: a particular site if we wanted to pay attention to it,
Speaker 1: they can pull certain web threads tight to focus a
Speaker 1: vibrational attention on those areas of their webs. Okay, I
Speaker 1: mean very very much like tightening the strings on a
Speaker 1: guitar exactly. Yeah, And so it works. When you pull
Speaker 1: the threads tight, you increase the resolution of the information
Speaker 1: that you get through them. It's like focusing with a
Speaker 1: telescope on something. And when researchers artificially tense one part
Speaker 1: of a web, spiders are more attentive to that region
Speaker 1: of the web, and hungrier spiders will adapt. For example,
Speaker 1: normally you might have a fruit fly land in the
Speaker 1: spider web, and the spider doesn't even care because there's
Speaker 1: so little nutrition in it. Why does it even bother.
Speaker 1: It's so tiny, right, and it's not gonna it's not
Speaker 1: gonna damage the web. Right. But if a spider is
Speaker 1: a very hungry, if it's on the verge of starvation,
Speaker 1: it will pull the threads of its web tighter to
Speaker 1: sense higher resolution information, including smaller insects landing on it,
Speaker 1: like fruit flies. So if it's starving, a fruit fly
Speaker 1: lands on the web, it's got the threads pulled tight,
Speaker 1: so it can sense tiny stuff like fruit flies, and
Speaker 1: it will go out and eat that meager meal because
Speaker 1: it's starving. Now, when experiment or selectively placed prey on
Speaker 1: horizontal threads in a web, spiders learn to favor horizontal tension.
Speaker 1: That's an interesting thing too. So it looks like you're
Speaker 1: seeing this reciprocal causation here, mutual manipulability. The web changes
Speaker 1: the spider's brain, but the spider's brain also changes how
Speaker 1: it uses the web. It can pull the threads taught,
Speaker 1: or it can relax them, and it can adapt to
Speaker 1: the needs of the spider at the general time it's
Speaker 1: occupying the web. But there there's another interesting thing about
Speaker 1: what they do with webs, uh their web building algorithm them.
Speaker 1: So spiders appear to use the structures of their own
Speaker 1: webs to offload some of the cognitive requirements of web building.
Speaker 1: Think about how you build a house. When you build
Speaker 1: a house, you have to use a lot of cognition.
Speaker 1: You've got to measure the space available to you. You've
Speaker 1: got to plan out the size of walls and rooms.
Speaker 1: You've got to keep everything within your budget, and make
Speaker 1: sure all the math works out, and make sure you've
Speaker 1: got all the resources. Spiders build complex structures like webs
Speaker 1: with tiny brains. How do they do it? The answer
Speaker 1: is algorithmically using the web itself to store information about
Speaker 1: the building process. So instead of constantly having to keep
Speaker 1: all aspects of web construction and working memory, they can
Speaker 1: start building a web and work from simple algorithmic rules
Speaker 1: based on their sensory apprehension of the web characteristics that
Speaker 1: already exist. So web construction is also judged by the
Speaker 1: researchers to be mutually manipulable. Changes in the web during construction.
Speaker 1: For example, if you go in while a spider's building
Speaker 1: a web and clip certain threads. This change the behavior
Speaker 1: of the spider. This changes the spiders thought processes about
Speaker 1: how it's building because it affects this algorithm, but changes
Speaker 1: to the behavior of the spider, changes to the spider's
Speaker 1: brain rather also change the construction process. Robert, I bet
Speaker 1: you've seen this classic example of what happens when you
Speaker 1: give spiders drugs and try them to build webs. So
Speaker 1: you give a spider LSD or caffeine. I think the
Speaker 1: caffeine web was like the worst web, but all these
Speaker 1: various drugs, and it changes their algorithm for how they
Speaker 1: build the web. But also this occurs in their natural habitats.
Speaker 1: Spiders build different kinds of webs based on changing environmental needs.
Speaker 1: The example that comes to mind hears of, of course,
Speaker 1: when we've taken spiders into space. Yeah, and observe their
Speaker 1: attempts to to build webs there. Yeah, exactly. Here's one
Speaker 1: more example from the paper that I thought was really
Speaker 1: into thing. What about spatial memory substitution. So we exist
Speaker 1: in the world that's got three spatial dimensions, and it
Speaker 1: can be rough trying to build models of that world
Speaker 1: and represent it correctly. Your spatial memory is probably not
Speaker 1: as good as you think it is. And if you
Speaker 1: want to be shocked, here's an experiment. Draw a picture
Speaker 1: of a room that you go in frequently, indicating where
Speaker 1: you think all the objects in the room are and
Speaker 1: how far apart from each other they are. Now, go
Speaker 1: check your drawing against reality. I think you're probably going
Speaker 1: to be surprised how much you get wrong. All right,
Speaker 1: that would be an interesting exercise. I'm very tempted to
Speaker 1: go with like the smallest room in my house, like
Speaker 1: a like a secondary bathroom. Uh, just sort of limit
Speaker 1: the scope of the exercise. But even then, Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: betting I'm gonna get I'm gonna get my measurements wrong.
Speaker 1: I mean, you'll probably get the general gist of the room, right,
Speaker 1: you'll know the main things in it, basically what shape
Speaker 1: it is, But where exactly the corners or position in
Speaker 1: relation to each each other, Where exactly the pieces of furniture,
Speaker 1: how far apart they are? I think you're going to
Speaker 1: get stuff like that wrong. But spiders can use silk
Speaker 1: a drag line to reduce a three D spatial environment
Speaker 1: to a one D spatial environment, So that that might
Speaker 1: sound kind of weird, but think about it like this.
Speaker 1: You're an orb weaving spider and you get threatened in
Speaker 1: your web. Maybe some kid comes along and says, oh,
Speaker 1: cool spider, I want to squish it. It can drop
Speaker 1: out of the web and hide among leaves. Say, but
Speaker 1: it leaves a trail of drag line silk when it goes,
Speaker 1: which it can later follow back to the web, And
Speaker 1: this totally shortcuts the cognition that would be devoted to
Speaker 1: three D modeling of the world for spatial navigation. If
Speaker 1: you just have to follow the drag line silk back
Speaker 1: to the web, you have reduced navigation to a one
Speaker 1: dimensional activity, totally short circuiting all that need for cognitive navigation.
Speaker 1: Now there are other There are plenty of things that
Speaker 1: don't fit the criteria of mutual manipul ability, so they
Speaker 1: probably wouldn't be considered extended cognition. One thing would be
Speaker 1: something they looked at called matched filters. This is basically
Speaker 1: the it's sensory filters. They provide adaptive information, but the
Speaker 1: spider must simply accept the information they provide. The filters
Speaker 1: themselves can't be manipulated for cognitive feedback. So uh. The
Speaker 1: conclusion they come to is that web threads and structures
Speaker 1: are part of a spider's information processing system, and that
Speaker 1: spiders use their webs to think. The cognition of a
Speaker 1: spider isn't just in the spiders central nervous system, but
Speaker 1: it's thinking partially with its central nervous system and partially
Speaker 1: with its web. Yeah, I mean, I mean it makes
Speaker 1: sense again when you when you think of the web
Speaker 1: as not just this thing it builds, but this thing
Speaker 1: that it inhabits, this this in this artificial environment that
Speaker 1: it has evolved to create, that is that is tailored
Speaker 1: to its needs that it manipulates in order to help
Speaker 1: sneer its ray. Yeah. Resource wise, it's a two for
Speaker 1: one deal. You would need the web anyway to kill
Speaker 1: and eat, so why not use it for cognition? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And and as we we've we've shown the evolution is
Speaker 1: an economist. It has to. It's it's not going to
Speaker 1: spend any more any any more cash on the project
Speaker 1: than it has to. Therefore, make use of the web
Speaker 1: it's setting there. Let's let's let's let's use it to
Speaker 1: enhance our cognition. In fact, the authors of the paper
Speaker 1: observe something about this. They say, quote, it may be
Speaker 1: no coincidence that some of the most cognitively sophisticated invertebrates,
Speaker 1: and they give the example of social bees, wasps, and
Speaker 1: ants are renowned for their niche construction e g. Nest building. Thus,
Speaker 1: we have a double prediction that miniaturization will select for
Speaker 1: extended cognition and that niche construction will facilitate the process
Speaker 1: of outsourcing information processing. So animals like this, they tend
Speaker 1: to build niches. But these niches, in turn, the animals
Speaker 1: find a way to use them to offload some cognitive processing. Interesting. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm instantly thinking about about bees and wasps and termites
Speaker 1: other social insects and trying to to work out how
Speaker 1: they would be manipulating this as well. I don't know. Listen,
Speaker 1: maybe we'll come back to it in the future. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we got anything else for Robert? I don't know. I guess.
Speaker 1: I mean we can come back to Kran and say, well,
Speaker 1: what what does this tell us about Crank? I don't know.
Speaker 1: Would you consider Krang's human suit not human suit, it's
Speaker 1: android suit, the guy with the suspenders? Would you consider
Speaker 1: that his relationship with Krang mutually manipulable? I have I'm
Speaker 1: I tend to. I mean, I don't I'm I don't
Speaker 1: have a lot of like hard geek knowledge about about
Speaker 1: teenage meeting ninja turtles. I don't know to what extent
Speaker 1: this has been fleshed out within the franchise over the years.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, I mean, he's he's in this this
Speaker 1: suit he's in he's fighting ninja turtles with it, like
Speaker 1: he's grappling turtles, He's climbing on stuff, he's blasting things
Speaker 1: like it seems to be a vital way in which,
Speaker 1: especially in the cartoon series, is a vital way in
Speaker 1: which he interacts with the world. And that's a true
Speaker 1: interaction with the with with the with with the going
Speaker 1: both ways. He punches them, they punch him back. Is
Speaker 1: a crying without a body really a crying? I guess
Speaker 1: it's a different type of crying. Like it kind of
Speaker 1: comes back to uh to. It's how it's processing numbers.
Speaker 1: Is the process numbers differently with it with an android
Speaker 1: hands in front of it versus just its two tentacles. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good question. Yeah. And then in terms of
Speaker 1: the simple Walker device that that makes me think about
Speaker 1: humans and automobiles. We had an off Mike discussion on
Speaker 1: this earlier. To what extent could you possibly make an argument, uh,
Speaker 1: for some sort of extended cognition occurring for the driver
Speaker 1: of a modern automobile. Yeah, I mean that's a good question. Uh,
Speaker 1: I I don't know. I mean what once you start
Speaker 1: building in other things like a GPS device, that's obviously
Speaker 1: something that you're offloading some cognitive capacity to. But there's
Speaker 1: probably genuinely a question about to what extent you mutually
Speaker 1: manipulate the GPS device in return. I don't know. That's
Speaker 1: a case where the answer might be maybe you need
Speaker 1: to think more about it. That would be something to
Speaker 1: potentially come back and explore in the future because it
Speaker 1: does get into this this basically it comes down to
Speaker 1: the relationship we have with our smartphones and how that
Speaker 1: is changing us from a cognitive perspective. Yeah, we're totally adapting.
Speaker 1: We're learning that we don't need to remember stuff anymore.
Speaker 1: We can look it up man, right, New World All right?
Speaker 1: So there you have it, um praying spiders, octopuses, smartphones. Uh.
Speaker 1: You can definitely check out the landing page for this
Speaker 1: episode is Stuff to Blow your Mind dot Com. I'll
Speaker 1: try to remember to include a link to that Atlantic
Speaker 1: paper on there, so that you can know you can
Speaker 1: read it if you wish, and uh hey, that's also
Speaker 1: where you find all the other podcast episodes, videos, blog
Speaker 1: post links out to our various social media accounts, and
Speaker 1: if you want to get in touch with this directly,
Speaker 1: you can email us as always at blow the Mind
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com. For more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com