Cognitive Revolution

Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He's best known as the developer of the theory of multiple intelligences, the idea that being smart is more complex than just an IQ score. That theory was introduced in his 1983 book Frames of Mind. In this conversation we talk about his interdisciplinary...

Yael Niv is a professor in Princeton department of psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. She is also a discernibly high-quality human being. I have been an admirer of her and her work for many years now. But she's been in the fore of my mind of late because of a couple papers she recently published: on "The Primacy of Behavioral Research in Understanding the Brain" and "The Case Aga...

Barry Wellman was instrumental in developing the modern understanding of social networks. Barry co-founded the International Network for Social Network Analysis in 1977, with Bev Wellman. The original ideas surrounding social networks began with sociologists -- especially Harrison White, of Harvard, with whom Barry studied -- who were changing the understanding of how people related in society. Ba...

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the 2021 recipient for the Rumelhart prize, the highest award in cognitive science. She has amassed an amazing body of research throughout her career. It centers on gesture, and how our bodies integrate into our linguistic communication. We touch on a lot of her greatest research hits in this episode. Something she said that stood out to me was about how she mentors her many...

In this episode I talk to Richard Shweder, one of the founders of the field of cultural psychology. He has had a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary career. We talk about his roots, early education, biggest influences, his experience as a grad student at the Department of Social Relations, the origins of cultural psychology, and his recent work on pluralism. Ultimately the conversation reflects Ric...

One thing that's immediately clear about Annie Duke is that her best self is pretty damn awesome. In this conversation, we get deep into the story of her career and the key moments that defined who that best self is. It gets really personal really quick. We start off with a discussion of her family, and in particular how she learned to separate work from identity. From there we talk about the big...

Don Norman is a cognitive scientist and designer. He is perhaps best known for his book "The Design of Everyday Things." This was a landmark work which detailed the fundamentals of human-centered design. It is a conception of design not just based on how things looks, but how people think. And while this book has been most influential among designers and other practitioners, its origin is in Don's...

In this episode, I go in-depth with Mahzarin Banaji on her life story. Mahzarin started off just about as far away from life as a Harvard professor as you can imagine. And while she's a superstar of social psychology now, her introduction to the field was a chance encounter with a set of the five volume Handbook of Social Psychology, which she haggled down to a dollar per book at a random market i...

This week's guest is neuroscientist, filmmaker, and inimitable personality Sade Abiodun. She is a first year PhD student the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and her latest film project was Godspeed. This short film has done well on the festival circuit, and Sade was a finalist for the highly selective Sundance fellowship. In this episode, we talk about the difficulties of starting grad school, e...

En route to World Cup 2018. "You're an American." Full transcript: https://www.codykommers.com/notes-from-the-field This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

The name "Nigel Shadbolt" is spoken in my corner of the world with hushed tones and much reverence. This is not only because he is a big deal generally, but because he is an especially around Jesus College, Oxford, where he currently serves as Principal. What exactly one does as Principal of an Oxford college, I'm not entirely sure, but like all of Sir Nigel's accolades, it seems pretty significan...

Welcome to Season 1 of Notes from the Field with Cody Kommers. Full transcript at: https://www.codykommers.com/notes-from-the-field This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com

Dan Everett is the closest thing we have to a real life Indiana Jones. He is an academic whose work has mostly taken place in the far reaches of the jungle, where few others dare to tread. His crowning achievement is learning the Pirahã language, which before Dan undertook it had never before been cracked by an outsider. Dan began his swashbuckling career as a missionary and Bible translator....

One of Maria's biggest influence as an undergrad was Steven Pinker, who she studied under while at Harvard. The family resemblance is easy to see. She is so confident, smart, driven, and competent that it can at times verge on overwhelming. She earned her PhD in psychology from Columbia, where she studied under famous psychologist Walter Mischel. Eventually she went on to become a staff writer at...

"Uncertainty" would not exactly be the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of Steven Pinker's current position in the world. But that wasn't always the case. There was actually a stretch in Steve's early career in which he found himself in the throws of uncertainty and anxiety. In this conversation, we dig into a lot of Steve's early career experiences, as well as his process as a writer...

Mark and I recorded this interview about a month ago, before the outbreak of protests across the world in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. A lot has changed since then. Conversations are different, as are the topics under discussion. This interview does not reflect those changes, at least not directly. Even so, a number of the topics in our conversation and in Mark's research more gener...

Alan Baddeley is a professor of psychology at the University of York. He is best known for his model of working memory, which essentially won out in the history of cognitive psychology as the model of working memory. He's been in the game for many years, and a couple years back published a career retrospective called Working Memories, which details his experiences, where his ideas came from, and w...

This week's guest is someone very special. Michèle Lamont has had a huge impact on my own thinking as a psychologist. She is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and a Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Harvard University. The first time I encountered her work was in a book she wrote, published in 2000, called the Dignity of Working Men. It's a work of compa...

Mickey Inzlicht wanted to be a dentist when he grew up. But unfortunately he only made it as far as Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, with a joint appointment in the Rotman School of Management. He represents one psychologist and two beers worth of the Two Psychologists Four Beers podcast. He's someone who I look up to a whole lot, and there's a lot about what...

Little known fact about Brad Love: he holds the world record for the youngest sounding voice for any fully grown adult male. Okay, that might not literally be true. But the guy sounds young -- a fact that belies his prominence and esteem as a professor in the field of cognitive science. In fact, he's such a venerable academic figure that he's mentored students who have gone on to establish themsel...

Rob is a Gates scholar at Cambridge, doing his PhD in Psychology. He's written for such venerable outlets as the New York Times and Quillette. As you'll hear, he served in the Air Force and grew up in the foster system. He brings a different perspective than the usual one to the academic realm. Rob are exactly what we need in the academic world: people who have a different set of life experiences...

Olga's family moved to America when she was four years old. They were a Jewish family from Russia. Growing up in small town Texas, let's just say that she was the only one of her classmates named Olga. She is intimately familiar with what it's like to be an outsider. In her new book, Weird, Olga studies how the ways in which we fail to fit in are often what gives us our unique advantage. She is a...

Steve is a PhD student in social psychology at Cambridge. He recently published an article on Psychology Today about the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of social psychology. I thought it touched on a lot of great points, and so I wanted to have him on the show to go into it a bit deeper. We also talked about adjusting work expectations to match our new mode of cooped-up...

This is probably the most interesting interview I've done on Cognitive Revolution to date (sorry, Paul Bloom). To call Dr Julia Shaw by her title of psychological scientist at University College London is to severely underestimate the breadth of her mind. She is the kind of scholar who could accurately be described as "complete." It's not that she knows everything. But nothing is outside of the bo...

Jeff is a PhD at Harvard Business School. He's been working from home for years. And now that the rest of us are in the same position, he recently shared some of his tips for keeping productive and sane when work life and home life begin to coalesce. You can follow him on Twitter @Leesplez. You can also read my recent piece about self-motivation here: https://www.codykommers.com/post/self-motivate...