346 | Erica Cartmill on How Human and Animal Minds Think and Play
3/9/20261 hr 28 min
Intelligence is a many splendored thing, especially when it comes to comparisons between species. Chimpanzees are better than humans at some numerical tasks, but less good at understanding what numbers actually mean. One window on the ways that species differ is how they play amongst themselves. I talk with anthropologist and cognitive scientist Erica Cartmill about modes of play and other social behaviors among various species, and what they reveal about the ways we all think.
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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/03/09/346-erica-cartmill-on-how-human-and-animal-minds-think-and-play/
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Erica Cartmill received her Ph.D. in psychology and neuroscience from the University of St. Andrews. She is Professor of Cognitive Science, Anthropology, Animal Behavior, Psychology, and Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the co-chair of the EVOLANG conferences and the co-director of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute. She is co-director of the Possible Minds lab at IU, and also manages the Observing Animals project, which asks for public input on how animals interact with each other.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Sean Carroll· Host1:04
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the topics that we've talked about frequently on the podcast is the nature of intelligence, especially, of course, because we're thinking these days about artificial intelligence. Is that a good label? At what point are AI programs counting as intelligence? But even when you put that aside, just thinking about human