Cognitations

Our appearance is very important to us. This is evident when we look at advertisements, online trends such as what the youth call “looksmaxxing”, or simply reflect on the amount of time we spend looking at a mirror in the morning. For decades, theories in evolutionary psychology state that humans are attracted to specific physical features: think of symmetrical faces. The story goes, that humans everywhere should share these appearance/attractiveness preferences as they are signals of health and fertility? Is this really the case? Are these universal preferences? Our guest today, Lynda Boothroyd, has long questioned the universality of these preferences by studying them in communities in Nicaragua.Lynda Boothroyd is a Professor of Psychology at Durham University. Her research focuses on Evolutionary and Cross-Cultural understandings of interpersonal attraction and sexual selection. She has recently focused on body ideals in rural Nicaragua alongside experimental work both in the laboratory and in the field on the impacts of visual experience on body size preferences. She has a multidisciplinary approach to her research, incorporating perspectives from Evolutionary Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Social Psychology and Biological Anthropology, and has incorporated a mixed-methods component in her current work.

Media Recommendations:1. Heartstopper (TV Show)Credits:Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay RichardsonEditing: Jay RichardsonCommunication: Tanay KatiyarMusic: Thelma Samuel and Robin BaradelArtwork: Ella Bergru

For ages, we've pictured our ancestors as living in small, equal societies, sharing everything around campfires without bosses. Think of popular ideas like the "noble savage" or "primitive communism." But what if that picture is wrong? New research in this century challenges these old ideas, suggesting our deep past was far more diverse than we ever imagined. So, what was social life really like for our ancestors? How does this new understanding reshape what we know about human cognition and culture? Are there any true human universals? Today’s guest is the person to answer these questions, or at least some of them..

He is Manvir Singh. Manvir is an assistant professor at the department of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. His research program investigates human behavior, focusing on the origins and nature of widespread sociocultural traditions like shamanism, witchcraft, storytelling, and music. He achieves this by integrating evolutionary, cognitive, and sociocultural methods and theories within his research group. Previously, he pursued a PhD in Human Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University, post-which he was a research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Toulouse. He's also a contributor to The New Yorker and has just had a book come out: Shamanism - The Timeless Religion.

Media Recommendations:
Shamanism: The Timeless Religion
Boiling Energy: Community Healing Among the Kalahari !Kung
The Falling Sky
The Catalpa Bow
The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum

Credits:
Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson
Editing: Tanay Katiyar
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Artwork: Ella Bergru

This episode is sponsored by the ⁠The European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association (EHBEA)

Conversations shape nearly every aspect of our lives. We joke, argue, persuade, gossip, and comfort—all through spoken and unspoken signals we barely even notice. Yet behind every casual chat, awkward silence, or global debate is an invisible force that guides our words and meanings, silently helping us figure out exactly what to say next. How do we instinctively know what matters in a conversation? How do we effortlessly connect, even with strangers? And why do certain symbols or stories captivate us across cultures?

Dan Sperber is a renowned French cognitive anthropologist, social scientist, and philosopher whose groundbreaking work has transformed fields from linguistics and cognitive science to anthropology and philosophy. Alongside linguist Deirdre Wilson, he developed relevance theory, an influential approach to communication and cognition that has impacted linguistics, artificial intelligence, and psychology. His work on cultural evolution, notably the epidemiology of representations, introduced innovative methods for studying how ideas spread and evolve across societies.

Credits:
Interview: Thomas Beuchot and Jay Richardson
Editing: Jay Richardson
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Artwork: Ella Bergru

This episode is sponsored by the The European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association (EHBEA)

We often talk about the modern challenge of work-life balance. However, long before the existence of offices, commutes, and calendars, our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers. Did they actually enjoy more leisure time than we do? And did the shift to farming mark the beginning of longer workdays and less free time? Today’s guest is the person to answer these questions, or at least some of them…

Mark Dyble is an Assistant Professor in evolutionary anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He has broad interests in understanding variation in behaviour and biology across human populations. Previously, he gained his BA in Archaeology and Anthropology from Cambridge (2008-2011) and an MSc in Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology from Oxford (2011-12). Subsequently, he pursued a PhD in Anthropology at University College London (2013-16), supervised by Prof Andrea Migliano and Prof Ruth Mace, conducting empirical fieldwork with Agta foragers in the northern Philippines. After several post-doc stints, he was also a lecturer in Quantitative Anthropology at UCL for four years (2019-2023).

Credits:
Interview: Tanay Katiyar
Editing: Jay Richardson
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Artwork: Ella Bergru

We rarely stop to think about how we make sense of the sounds around us — how we find voices in a noisy room, or why two people can hear completely different things in the same audio clip. Today’s guest explores the hidden mechanisms behind these experiences: how the brain turns raw sound into meaning, how we learn the regularities of the soundscape around us, and why people sometimes hear the world so differently. Today’s guest is the person to answer these questions, or at least some of them…

Daniel Pressnitzer. Originally trained in engineering, he went on to complete a Master's degree in acoustics, signal processing, and computer science in Paris. He earned his PhD at Ircam, where he studied auditory perception, focusing on musical consonance and dissonance. He then spent several years in the UK conducting postdoctoral research at the Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing in Cambridge. In 2000, he returned to France to join the CNRS as a researcher. Now a Director of Research at CNRS, he is also a founding member and the current head of the Audition team at the École normale supérieure. His research bridges acoustics, perception, and cognition, using carefully crafted illusions and experiments to probe the mid-level processes of hearing — the ones that shape how we interpret the world without us even realizing it. His lab has also developed various tools to probe the functioning of the auditory system.

Credits:
Interview: Cindy Zhang & Marius Mercier
Editing: Jay Richardson
Communication: Tanay Katiyar
Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel
Artwork: Ella Bergru