Kensy Cooperrider

My reaction to social AI had always been one of dismay, disgust, fatalism, maybe even grief for our species.

I won't say this conversation left me feeling optimistic, exactly, but it certainly broadened my imagination.

A fun one! In which we discuss...

- the deep evolutionary history of birds
- sci-fi-sounding structures in bird brains
- the perennial puzzle of magnetoreception
- seasonal changes in bird (and some mammal) brains
- unihemispheric sleep
- gynandromophry
- the extractive foraging hypothesis

etc.!

Other volumes of letters folks would recommend? I may be easing into that "mature" stage of reading life...

This was as good as I hoped—surprised I haven't been hearing more buzz about it!

Why do we smile?

What makes pulling back the lip corners a fundamentally positive act? Why don’t we beam out good vibes by blinking our eyes or wrinkling our noses?

From our archive, @kensycoop.bsky.social's essay about the (murky) origins of the smile: disi.org/dawn-of-the-...

Super fun having @manvir.bsky.social on the podcast (again)!

I strongly recommend his new book—especially if you like your non-fiction laced with personal narrative, quirky characters, & history of ideas.

Thank you, @kensycoop.bsky.social, for having me on! We had a great conversation about shamanism—its cognitive foundations, place in Paleolithic societies, role in Abrahamic religions, manifestations in industrialized societies (including hedge wizards), and much more.

Varieties of childhood Podcast Episode · Many Minds · 07/10/2025 · 1h 29m

A fascinating podcast with Sheina Lew-Levy and Dorsa Amir about childhood across cultures, very insightful ideas about how contemporary Western parents could learn from forager childhoods, especially the importance of peer culture (read the Opies!).
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/v...

This was such a fun conversation about childhood, play, and agency across cultures. Thanks for having @sheinalew.bsky.social & I on the show!

This was such a fun conversation - grateful for Kensy's excellent questions and a space to share my ongoing project with @lmesseri.bsky.social!

Thanks, Molly — it was great having you on the show!

In which we discuss...
- the Big Five and other "Big Few" models
- the Myer's Briggs
- how personality reliably changes with age
- how personality *doesn't* really change with life events
- the (putative) biological basis of personality
- how personality varies by gender, birth order (?), occupation

On the straight-up history side of things, always fun to spend some time browsing the vast History of Cartography—6 volumes all available in PDF form: press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/in...

When Maps Become the World Map making and, ultimately, map thinking is ubiquitous across literature, cosmology, mathematics, psychology, and genetics. We partition, summarize, organize, and clarify our world via spatialized rep...

I've been meaning to check out this one: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

(Mentioned by @kevinlala.bsky.social in our recent podcast interview)

More colorful example of a coordination device: the Jivaro "banana clock."

Every guest invited to a feast gets a green banana from the same stalk. When the bananas are just about ripe, the guests know the event is due.

(hat tip to William Buckner; reported in Harner, 1973)

Lots in this one! We touch on:

- ontological shock
- mysticism
- "comforting delusions"
- "unselfing"
- microdosing
- placebo effects & adverse effects
- physicalism and idealism
- belief change
- environmental virtues
- meditation
- psychedelics as "agents of moral enhancement"

I did write the @publicdomainrev.bsky.social piece on hand mnemonics!

“Handy Mnemonics: The Five-Fingered Memory Machine” — @kensycoop explores the history of storing knowledge on the surface of fingers and palms: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/handy-mnemonics

Thanks, Jamie!

I'm on board!

Ha, love it!

Time Tools Humans understand time in a way no other animal does. This is not because of our evolved biology, however—it is because we have developed a diverse and powerful toolkit of ideas, practices, and artif...

11/

Just a sampling from the paper. The key idea is that these tools all help humans "do time"—coordinate, predict, reason, measure, etc. My bigger claim, though, is that these tools ultimately changed our very concept of what time is.

For that, read on…

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

10/

Naturally, I also discuss calendars that are a bit closer to contemporary ones. But even within this more familiar genre, there fun texture—e.g., the calendar sticks once common in parts of Scandinavia, or early versions of graphic calendars.

9/

Cultures often associated larger time chunks (years, eras) with animals or other vivid figures—presumably making the chunks more memorable. This is seen, of course, in the Chinese zodiac. Also found in the Aztec system—the four figures around the central face correspond to four major epochs.

8.1/

These elaborated day series seem to have been quite common in indigenous languages. I suspect that, with the adoption/universalization of weekday names & calendar dates, they fell into disuse in 'Standard Average European' languages. English used to have "overmorrow" after all.

8/

Time words are also a kind of “cognitive tool” that aids in memory and reasoning. English, e.g., has "yesterday," "today," & "tomorrow." Many indigenous languages have far more words in this days-from-today series. Here are tables showing the relevant series in Yucatec Maya and Yeli Dnye:

7/

A favorite example of a powerful but near-invisible time tool is queuing——discussed by Ed Hutchins (image source). When people form a queue, their spatial position preserves the order of the whole group—no individual needs to remember it, or remember anything at all, really.

6/

The hands are a flexible time tool. Over the centuries they have housed numerous time-related mnemonics. They are also sometimes used in time estimation—as in a bushcraft trick used to estimate time remaining until sunset.

5/

The blooming of flowers has figured in time reckoning in other ways. A calendar system in the Andaman islands was structured around the succession of scents produced by blooms. (Also, not in paper but Linnaeus devised a “flower clock” based on the circadian movements of different plants).

4/

Many cultures tracked dozens (?) of “phenological correspondences”—correlations between events in the natural world—to aid in planning and prediction. As a case study, this paper describes 111 “calendar plants” used in this way in Southern Vanuatu. link.springer.com/article/10.1...