Steve Fleming is a professor in psychology at University College London. I invited Steve to talk about his work on meta-cognition, but we ended up spending the entire episode talking about lab culture, starting a lab, applying for funding, Steve's background in music, and what drew him to do cognitive neuroscience. There's even a tiny discussion about consciousness research at the end.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.

Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon

Timestamps

0:00:00: Steve ran his lab in London from Croatia for a few years

0:23:57: Lessons as a PI: students and postdocs are adults and will figure it out

0:28:45: Learning more skills as a postdoc vs. starting a lab

0:41:13: Contacting departments to apply for grants

0:52:19: Steve's background in music

1:07:13: What drew Steve to cognitive science? A brief discussion of the future of consciousness research

1:27:23: A book or paper more people should read

1:33:02: Something Steve wishes he'd learnt sooner

1:38:16: Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Podcast links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
• BlueSky: https://geni.us/pod-bsky

Steve's links

• Website: https://geni.us/sfleming-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/fleming-scholar
• BlueSky: https://geni.us/fleming-bsky

Ben's links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
• BlueSky: https://geni.us/bjks-bsky

References and links

FIL at UCL: https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/

ERC Starting Grant: https://erc.europa.eu/apply-grant/starting-grant

Wellcome Trust Early-Career Award (without strict time restrictions): https://wellcome.org/research-funding/schemes/wellcome-early-career-awards

Example paper by Josh Mcdermott on music: McDermott, Schultz, Undurraga & Godoy (2016). Indifference to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception. Nature.

Carter (2002). Consciousness.

Chalmers (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of consciousness studies.

Isaacson (2021). The code breaker.

Marr (1982). Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information.

Pinker (1997). How the mind works.

Tononi (2004). An information integration theory of consciousness. BMC neuroscience.

Damian Blasi is a professor at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. We talk about his article 'Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science', linguistic diversity, how to study across the world's languages, his career path, and much more.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.

Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon

Timestamps

0:00:00: Why Damian studied physics

0:06:31: How to deal with small, sparse, incomplete, imbalanced, noisy, and non-independent observational data

0:09:38: Evolutionary advantages of different languages

0:14:01: How Damian started doing research on linguistics

0:20:09: How to study a language you don't speak

0:28:58: Start discussing Damian's paper 'Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science'

0:48:25: What can experimental scientists do about the vast differences between cultures, especially of difficult to reach peoples? And how different are languages and cultures really?

1:10:15: Why is New Guinea so (linguistically) diverse?

1:17:34: Should I learn a common or a rare language? And where?

1:29:09: A book or paper more people should read

1:32:31: Something Damian wishes he'd learnt sooner

1:33:56: Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Podcast links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
• BlueSky: https://geni.us/pod-bsky

Damian's links

• Website: https://geni.us/blasi-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/blasi-scholar
• BlueSky: https://geni.us/blasi-bsky

Ben's links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
• BlueSky: https://geni.us/bjks-bsky

References

World Atlas of Languages: https://en.wal.unesco.org/world-atlas-languages

The Andamanese group that's hostile to strangers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese

"the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirohito_surrender_broadcast

Bakker (2022). The sounds of life.

Blasi ... Neubig (2021). Systematic inequalities in language technology performance across the world's languages. arXiv.

Blasi ... Bickel (2019). Human sound systems are shaped by post-Neolithic changes in bite configuration. Science.

Blasi ... Majid (2022). Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science. Trends in cognitive sciences.

Everett (2023). A myriad of tongues.

Floyd ... Enfield (2018). Universals and cultural diversity in the expression of gratitude. Royal Society Open Science.

Gordon (2004). Numerical cognition without words: Evidence from Amazonia. Science.

Hossenfelder (2018). Lost in math.

Koyama & Rubin (2022). How the world became rich.

Nettle (1998). Explaining global patterns of language diversity. Journal of anthropological archaeology.

Pica ... Dehaene (2004). Exact and approximate arithmetic in an Amazonian indigene group. Science.

Skirgård ... Gray (2023). Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss. Science Advances.

Gordon Pennycook is an Associate Professor at Cornell University. We talk about his upbringing in rural Northern Canada, how he got into academia, and his work on misinformation: why people share it and what can be done about it.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.

Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon

Timestamps

0:00:00: Straight outta Carrot River: From Northern Canada to publishing in Nature

0:37:01: Exploration vs focusing on one topic: finding your research topic

0:48:57: A sense of having made it

0:54:17: Why apply reasoning research to religion?

0:59:45: Starting working on misinformation

1:08:20: Defining misinformation, disinformation, and fake news

1:15:52: Social media, the consumption of news, and Bayesian updating

1:24:48: Reasons for why people share misinformation

1:35:57: Are social media companies listening to Pennycook et al?

1:38:19: Using AI to change conspiracy beliefs

1:44:59: A book or paper more people should read

1:46:33: Something Gordon wishes he'd learnt sooner

1:48:12: Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Podcast links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
• BlueSky: https://geni.us/pod-bsky

Gordon's links

• Website: https://geni.us/pennycook_web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/pennycook-scholar
• BlueSky: https://geni.us/pennycook-bsky

Ben's links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar

References

Costello, Pennycook & Rand (2024). Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI. Science.

Dawkins (2006). The God Delusion.

MacLeod, ... & Ozubko (2010). The production effect: delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Nowak & Highfield (2012). Supercooperators: Altruism, evolution, and why we need each other to succeed.

Pennycook, ... & Fugelsang (2012). Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief. Cognition.

Pennycook, Fugelsang & Koehler (2015). What makes us think? A three-stage dual-process model of analytic engagement. Cognitive Psychology.

Pennycook, Cheyne, Barr, Koehler & Fugelsang (2015). On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit. Judgment and Decision making.

Pennycook & Rand (2019). Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning. Cognition.

Pennycook & Rand (2021). The psychology of fake news. Trends in cognitive sciences.

Rand (2016). Cooperation, fast and slow: Meta-analytic evidence for a theory of social heuristics and self-interested deliberation. Psychological Science.

Stanovich (2005). The robot's rebellion: Finding meaning in the age of Darwin.

Tappin, Pennycook & Rand (2020). Thinking clearly about causal inferences of politically motivated reasoning: Why paradigmatic study designs often undermine causal inference. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences.

Thompson, Turner & Pennycook (2011). Intuition, reason, and metacognition. Cognitive Psychology.