Extended Cognition: Brain, Fingers, Web and Krang

It’s easy to think yourself a mere brain within a human body -- a cognitive machine making sense out of all the incoming sense data from outside world. But what if other parts of the body and even objects beyond the body serve a vital role in our cognition? In this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, Robert and Joe discuss the concept of extended cognition and how it relates to the human condition, number systems, spider webs, octopuses, mantises and even a fictional alien brain monster.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how stoffworks
dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
today we're gonna be revisiting a topic that we brought
up in a recent episode that we did a little
bit back. We did the episode Where Is My Mind,

(00:24):
and we talked about the physical sensation of the mind,
where it feels like you're thinking from. And one of
the topics we touched on peripherally in that episode was
the idea of extended cognition. And that's this framework that
has emerged in psychology and in thinking about philosophy of mind,
that maybe cognition, the process of thinking involves more than

(00:50):
just the brain, and in a very real sense, not
just that there are some external tools that help your
brain think, but that your brain is thinking in conjunction
with those external tools. And before we dive into it,
I just wanted to give a shout out to the
fact that this topic was inspired by a good article

(01:10):
that I read in The Atlantic called does a spider
use its web like you use your smartphone? By Joshua
so called. So feel free to go ahead and check
that article out. We're gonna be talking about some of
the same topics today about the the idea of extended
cognition and what role it might play in biology and evolution.
That's right, We're gonna be talking about the spiders, but
we're also going to talk about some octopuses. We're gonna

(01:33):
talk about some mantoids. We're gonna talk about crying from
teenage muntant ninja turtles. So, uh, they're gonna be a
few different examples that we touch on now. Crying actually
has a very interesting publishing history in the philosophy of mind. Yeah, well, well,
I mean like literally crying or just things that are
crying esque. Well, crying is a classic example of the

(01:53):
brain in a vat, except, of course, in this case
the vat has legs and big beefy arms and a
little tiny head, which came first Daniel Dennett's paper about
the brain and the jar that we referenced in the
last episode, or or Crag himself. I'll under I actually
do not know when Krang emerged. You know more about
teenage muting ninja turtles than me. I'm sure I think
he dates back to the comics, but I have to

(02:16):
admit to not being super knowledgeable about teenage meeting Ninja Turtles.
It's most most most of my expertise comes from watching
some episodes of the cartoon, and of course the the
the first generation of movies. Oh and and the video
game to Beat Him Up video game. I pretty much
just know the movies and the game. Yeah. But anyway, Yeah,
so let's let's get into the idea of extended cognition. Essentially,

(02:38):
this can be phrased as a question, do mental processes
or cognition extend beyond the brain? Yeah? And this entails
the idea that our our our brains don't simply interact
with symbols, you know, form, stimuli, and so forth, but
that our brains interact with these external things and forces,

(02:59):
and from this our mind emerges. So the mind is
like a larger system than just what's generated by the brain.
In fact, the mind is, for example, the brain plus
its ability to count on the body's fingers. Yeah. Like,
I don't know if this is a perfect metaphor. You
can give me feedback on this one, but one way
I was I was trying to think of it. It

(03:19):
may be over overly elaborate, or overly mystical. But a
bongo player. Okay, uh, there's the bongo player playing the bongo,
so her hands are not the music. The drum is
not the music. The music emerges from the interface of
these two things. Yeah, I think that's a nice way
of putting it. Now, one way in which that's not
quite an apt metaphor is that it doesn't challenge our

(03:42):
assumptions in the same way. It's it's sort of natural
to think that the music is not in the player's hands.
But that is not always the way we think about cognition.
It is more natural, generally for people to think that
cognition lives inside the brain. That's where everything happens. Right.
I guess the more apt way to think of it
would be the bongo player's brain, the bongo players drum,

(04:06):
and when these things come together, this this musical form emerges. Yeah.
I guess that makes sense as as an introductory kind
of kind of metaphor here. No, no, no, I like it.
I'm not being I'm not being critical, no no, but
but I'm definitely stressing that it's it's We're gonna get
more elaborate than this. Okay, Well, if you accept the
idea just for the sake of argument. This idea might

(04:28):
not be the best way to think about cognition, but
let's accept it for the sake of argument and move forward.
That cognition could be something that's not just what happens
in the brain, but the combination of what happens in
the brain or the central nervous system and things outside
of it. What different symbioses of brain and external circumstances

(04:48):
could be represented there. Well, they're at least four different
variants of extended cognition. And you know this depends on
which papers you're reading for the most part, and you
know the original thesis statement. But there's embodied cognition, which
I believe we've covered on the podcast before. An embodied cognition.
Cognition is deeply dependent upon the body as an agent
of the brain. This could be, um, you know, a

(05:11):
causal role or a or it could have a greater role.
A lot of embodiment theory depends on the nature of
the mind body connection, which is something we've discussed your
time and time again. You've probably heard me mentioned the
rider on a horse versus centaur version of mind and body.
We'll explain that a little bit. Okay, So with the
the the rider on a horse, this idea is that

(05:33):
we have we have our brain and we have our body,
and they're basically two separate things. The brain is just
riding in the body doing what needs to do. But
it's it's not as interconnected. It's a separate entity that
controls the body. Yeah, exactly. And it's what it's the
kind of a lot of times we don't even think
really closely about it. We may just fall into the
trap of thinking of ourselves as a brain, and especially

(05:57):
when it comes to how we feel, how we're in
acting with the world around us, we're just thinking of
ourselves as this this this mind trapped in this brain.
But the center analogy here is is is more in
keeping with a lot of the studies that we discussed here,
and I think a lot of the research has come
out in previous decades, this idea that the mind and
the body are far more connected. It it's more like

(06:18):
a centaur, the human torso grown into the horse, where
it's a it's a unified body. For instance, if you
were to stab the flank of the centaur, then the
human portion definitely feels it whereas if you were to
stab the horse in the flank, then the rider is
only going to feel the uh you know the effects

(06:39):
of the horse suddenly jumping, leaping, maybe trying to throw
him or her from the horse. Yeah, that's a good point.
So if you want to go back to Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles, where does which one is krank the rider
on the horse? Right? Yes, to to refresh. If you're
not familiar with kran Um. Kran is like an alien
brain creature in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He's kind of irritable.

(07:00):
He's an irritable villain, yes, uh. And he just looks
like a squishy pink brain with two little tentacles and
left to his own, he just kind of like crawls
and slugs about. But he's He's frequently seen in two
different devices. One and this is more of what you
see in the cartoon. A full android body, arms, legs, humanoid.

(07:21):
It seems to have skin, It has a head and
a face, and and it enables him to like fight
Ninja turtles and push things over and move around our
world like a physical humanoid. If you've actually never seen this,
the guy is shirtless, wearing like a red speedo and
gray suspenders. It's pretty weird. Yeah, it has kind of

(07:42):
this punk kind of a punk field, but also kind
of like a pro wrestling field. It feels like the
fitting vessel for an alien trying to appear as a human. Now,
Krane also has another sort of robot body. Anybody who
had the figures as a kid probably remember the US
If you bought Krang is just uh, I don't know
what costs like six or seven bucks. I guess uh,

(08:05):
it would have been the little brain guy, little brain
dude with his tentacles in this little canopy walker contraption
like basically at a walking vehicle for it, sort of
like the A T S. T S and Star Wars
the Little Walkers. Yeah, So on one hand, I feel
like we can we can apply this, uh this this

(08:26):
brain body scenario, the centaur and the ride around a
horse to cringe. Like a lot of times we're trying
to think as if we are craying, as if we
are essentially this brain creature and this body is just
the vessel that we're using. But we're not crying. We're splinter.
That's what the T shirt says. That's that's the good
one for the bumper sticker. You're not crying, you're splinter. Okay,

(08:52):
so I'm gonna come back to crying in a minute.
But but let's talk about just some other examples or
possible examples of extended cognition. Okay, are we still unembodied cognition? Okay,
so maybe you count with your fingers classic example than
an rather overt example. Right, I do this all the time.
It's it's frankly a little embarrassing, um, but it's a

(09:13):
good trick, right is. Yeah, that's why my brain refuses
to learn more complicated methods of calculating things, because the
fingers are always there, even if I have to do
it below the table so that the gaming group doesn't
know that I'm doing it to, you know, figure out
hit points. They're they're they're always available, and they always help. Now,
one thing I noticed about counting on my fingers I

(09:35):
assume it's the same for everybody else, is that it's
it's even more helpful when you're trying to manage two
cognitive tasks at once, meaning you're not just counting something,
but for example, you're trying to remember the names of
something at the same time that you're counting them. Like
if somebody asks you, like, um, how many people from

(09:55):
your office we're at the meeting the other day, and
you're trying to remember them, so you go through their
faces and names and and list them off. So you're
trying to remember who you've already listed and who was there,
and trying to count them at the same time. So
you're juggling multiple different cognitive tasks and having the fingers

(10:15):
there to store the counting number while you're also trying
to call up faces and remember who you've already listed,
helps you get through the task without your brain catching
on fire. Yeah, I mean that's how I feel running
a role playing game, because that you'll be in a
combat scenario essentially trying to communally tell a story. You're
trying to manage pieces on a board, so there's a

(10:38):
spatial element, and then you're having to continually do math.
You know, granted not particularly complex math at all, but
you're still you're having to constantly adding some track things
to keep up with with hit points and damage. And
it's very obvious the role that our fingers and our
toes even may have played in the evolution of number

(10:58):
and counting systems, right, I mean it's right there in
the types of counting systems we use exactly based in
or decimal systems stem from the use of both hands,
while based twenty or vegesimal systems are based on the
use of fingers and toes. And you can point to
to any number of statements about posture and our body
positioning and how it relates to innate or learned cognition. Uh,

(11:20):
you know, not to get into arguments over the validity
of each of these, but you know, meditation, superhero pose
the kindly brontosaurus. Wait wait, wait, wait, wait, explain this
kindly brontosaurus. Oh yeah, kindly brontosaurus. I forget whose whose
brain child this is, But it's the idea that I say, say,
you're you're in an airport and you you know that

(11:42):
the individual behind the counter can really help you, but
they don't necessarily have to. You're in you're in a
situation where you really don't want to offend, but you
also know that if you try and charm your way,
if you try to intimidate your way, it's just you're
just gonna fall flat on your face. Right, So there's
this idea that you just kind of you assume this
posture like imagine you have a long uh brontosaurus or

(12:03):
I guess the potosaurus would be more correct. You have
this long sauropod neck at any rate ultimately doesn't matter
something you have the school book idea of a brontosaurs.
You kind of assume this posture where you sort of
crane your neck out and uh, and you have your
your your your arms folded. So you take on this
very um humble appearance, this very meat humble appearance, and

(12:25):
then you ask for help or you inquire with the
front desk for something that they don't have to give you.
And it's supposedly generates results, So it's like a it's
like a mercy generator. Yeah, but I could also see
how if you assume this posture, you are you know,
you're you're also adjusting your demeanor as well. Oh okay,
so you're saying that it could be a self feedback

(12:46):
mechanism that could be aiding in cognition like that you
could be for example, if you're in a situation and
you know you need to maintain a certain state of mind,
but it can be cognitively taxing to try to force
yourself to maintain that state of mind while you're doing
things in that situation, that maybe assuming a certain posture

(13:07):
automatically keeps your brain in that state of mind. Right.
The superhero post is probably a better example of this.
This was this was popular in some of the science
headlines for a little bit. You know, the idea that
you you roll your shoulders back, you extend your chest,
and this will give you a sort of a burst
of confidence. I think I saw people seriously questioned as
that result. It was. But but but it does raise

(13:29):
the question like if I do that and I feel better,
is that is there something innately enabling about taking on
that pose? Or am I just priming myself and I
sort of getting into superhero mode so that I'm pumping
myself up making myself feel a little braver by doing
this exercise. Yeah, well, I would say in that case,

(13:49):
it's possible that you could think of that as extended
or embodied cognition, right if it's doing some of the work,
so your brain doesn't have to continue to do that work.
Right now, there's also embedded cognition Sian. This is an
external environment um playing a role. So like the idea
that The interpretation of this, it came to my mind,
is like the beach makes me creative. Uh. There's also

(14:10):
enacted cognition. I think an example of this might be
yoga makes me relaxed. And as well as as as
a variant referred to as in clothes cognition, This idea
that a uniform or your style of dress changes the
way you think. Uh, and and in closed cognition was
coined by cognitive psychologist Hajo Adam and Adam Glansky from

(14:31):
Northwestern University several years back. I believe there's an older
episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind that gets into that.
There's some interesting studies about individuals holding clipboards or wearing um, uh,
you know, doctor's long lab coats, and how that affects
the way you think. Now, it's important to be clear
about the distinction we're making here between just all the

(14:53):
ways things beyond our brain normally affect us versus the
idea of cognition taking place in conjunction with them. So,
if you you're working on this idea of embodied cognition,
embedded cognition, enacted cognition, in all of these cases, you're
either talking about you know, your body or your environment
or activities that you're doing are literally taking the place

(15:15):
of information processing or information storage that would need to
happen in the brain otherwise, or in the central nervous
system in the case of a smaller animal. Yeah. Now
to bring it back to crying though, I just want to, Okay,
just so everyone can continue to to ponder this question
as we continue on with the episode. So you have
craying just naked, craying on the floor in a pool

(15:38):
of his brain juice, if crying in the big humanoid
android body, and you have craying in the sort of
simplistic six dollar walker. Okay, So to what extent or
each of these cases altering his cognition? Is craying on
the floor, crying the humanoid body and crying in the walker?
Are are they distinct cognitive situations? Is that android body

(16:02):
changing the way that Kring thinks? I mean, I could
see that it possibly could be like if Krang needs
to count on his fingers, but he doesn't have fingers,
he just has little like reachie tentacles that would be
difficult to count to numbers much higher than two. Now,
if he's working in his big body that has ten fingers.
He could maybe count on his fingers. I don't know

(16:24):
how much crying needs to count on his fingers. Well,
it raises the point if he's a if he is
an involved, intelligent creature that has these two tentacles, then
perhaps he has some sort of I can't remember he
has segments on those tentacles or their suckers. But maybe,
but maybe there is some sort of number system based
in his anatomy that he would otherwise use. And so

(16:46):
maybe when he is an android body, he's either handicapped
from a mathematical standpoint, or he is brilliant. I mean,
he created like a giant drilling superstructure. So maybe he's
smart enough that he can switch over to a decimal system.
When we talk about extended cognition in biology, one of
the hypotheses is going to be that extended cognition is

(17:08):
especially useful to animals that have less resources to spend
on building big brains. Obviously, in Krank's case, he has
gone all in evolutionarily speaking in big brains, right literally
all in all right, Well, on that note, let's take
a quick break, and when we come back we will
get into these studies, into the science and we will

(17:30):
see how some natural world animals stack up against well
against the human condition as well as the crane condition.
All right, we're back, all right. Before we get into
looking at extended cognition and biological research, I thought it
would be important to look at one classic paper in

(17:52):
the history of the idea of extended cognition, and this
is The Extended Mind. I think it's published by Oxford
University Press by the author's Andy Clark and David Chalmers.
Now it's worth noting this paper does include a reference determinator,
so Schwarzenegger's making it into classic philosophy papers. But in

(18:13):
addition to the other stuff we've talked about, one thing
they argue that I think is interesting is that beliefs
can be external to the brain. And they use the
example of a man with a memory disorder who carries
a notebook full of reminders about everyday facts. So the
way they set up the scenario, he's got a notebook

(18:33):
and if he needs to go to a location, he
can look up in the notebook how to get there
or where it is. And in a normal person's brain
who has the ability to store mental images and navigation ideas,
you would say these these ideas are beliefs. Right, You
believe the post office is located at the corner of

(18:53):
this street in that street, and you, based on that belief,
navigate to that location. In what since is a man
with a notebook full of reminders different from somebody who
stores that information in long term memory. Mhm. It's an
interesting question. And it also of course ties into our
our dependence on smartphones these days for their note taking ability,

(19:17):
their information storage ability, and their their navigational abilities totally.
And of course this also makes me think, now, this
might not be exactly as applicable, because a lot of
the people writing on the subject of extended cognition seem
very concerned about this idea of coupling or sort of
the ready availability of the external object to the mind.

(19:39):
But anyway, it makes me think about the way we
outsource many beliefs to the pronouncements of other people, people
in whom we vest expertise and authority. Right, So could
it be said that if I'm trying to figure out
what to believe, and I just trust that whatever doctor
expert over here believes is correct, have I extended my

(19:59):
cognition to include doctor experts? Biological cognition. Mm hmm, Yeah,
I would think so to a certain extent. I mean
it gets into this similar way that we we have
trouble remembering things if we know that our significant other
is more likely to remember it, or that there are
certain things that we we we only really remember when

(20:20):
talking to each other. Yeah. I think that's absolutely right,
And that would be an interesting thing you mentioned there,
because you're using the other person's brain as a tool.
But you could also consider that a form of enacted cognition,
where it's the process of talking. So it's not just
that it's stored in their brain, but that by talking
to each other, that act or process can call up

(20:42):
a memory that otherwise you wouldn't need to store in
your mind. Yeah. Like, here's an example from from my life.
My wife and I have trouble remembering what year it
was that we met, like when when we started dating,
and one of the reasons is it's always easy to
look up and see when the first Saw movie came out,
because we know that that that we met around the

(21:05):
same time that the first Saw movie hit theaters. Did
you all go on your first date together to see
sauw Uh? I don't know if it was the first
date technically, but early on we did end up going
to see the movie. So it's the Saw movie is
not special to us in any other way other than
it's a you know, just a marker on the timeline.

(21:26):
But since the marker is there, there's like a reluctance
in our brains to actually record the date or the
month or the year, because we can always just pull
up our phone, go to IMDb and see what your
saw came out. So every time you hear like a
chainsaw going through some splattery liquid sounds you think made
for each other, yeah, and with with lots of really

(21:48):
herky jerky editing thrown in there, and uh yeah, I
mean for a while there was a Saw movie every year.
Like most people don't appreciate how how helpful that was,
but we would say we would see, oh it Saw
five or whatever the right. So here's another way of
following up on this, the idea of like maybe talking

(22:08):
to your significant other that act could generate information that
offsets cognitive deficits. Could language itself have evolved to provide
an extension of our cognitive resources. Now go with me
for a second. We generally assume language is for the
purpose of communication. Right when you ask people what languages for,

(22:31):
it's so we can share ideas between one another. That's
obviously a big feature of it. I mean, that's what
I generally think of it for. But think about it
this way, Isn't it also sometimes the case that you
can think more clearly about something once you put it
into words. So what if words themselves act like a

(22:53):
calculator for causal reasoning. They're allowing cloudy, nonverbal thought to
be organized into something lucid, and in that way, they
are actually a way of extending your mind. There an
external tool that sort of stores and organizes information that
would be harder to manage internally without those words. Oh yeah,

(23:16):
like one thing that comes to mind that you know,
I have to think, like, what's what's the process that
I regularly engage in writing? So if you think of
something like, say, say a lead paragraph or a or yeah, yeah,
let's go with lead paragraph or even a the first
chapter of a longer work, the first page of a
short story, like that's a good catch. I'll just referring

(23:37):
to the segment of the thing you were you were creating.
But there are a lot of there are a lot
of things that that intro paragraph has to accomplish. There's
like a whole checklist of things you want to you
you want to achieve in doing that, and it's easier
to just sort of wrap it all up in a
in a basket and then consider that, uh in relation

(23:57):
to the rest of the piece, Right. But I mean,
i'd say at an even simpler level, I don't know
if this is often true for you, but it's very
often true for me. I don't know what I really
think about something until I write about it. Yeah, Yeah,
I definitely, I definitely feel that way. Yeah, like writing
writing about something is I mean, that's how I approached
the podcast. Many times, I have to write out my

(24:19):
thoughts and that's where it begins to solidify a bit
so that I can then tear it apart to a
certain extent when I try and speak it. Yeah. So
it's the words themselves and the sentences as abstract symbols
and and bits of encoding and the process of writing,
both of those things that help you clear up cognitive cloudiness. Yeah, yeah,

(24:41):
I would. I would agree. One more thing I think
is interesting that Clark and Chalmers bring up before we
go into extended cognition and animals. They say, you know,
if we discover that people use their environments for cognition,
that cognition isn't just in the brain, but that you're
literally thinking with the things around you, does that mean

(25:02):
that interfering with somebody's environment is the same as interfering
with themselves as a person. Yeah, I would, I would
think so, you know. I mean when it when you
think of so you're working space, they're like the careful
positioning of the things around you. Oh yeah, Like if
somebody moves the things around on your desk, I think
how violated that makes you feel? Yeah? Yeah, I mean it.

(25:26):
And it holds true whether you're talking about a messy
desk or you know, a meticulously clean desk. Things go
in a certain place and if they're moved, then that
throws you off. Yeah. I can totally see that. And
I mean we all have particulars like I work with
the window open or I work with the window closed.
I need this amount of sunlight, uh in my work environment,

(25:46):
or like if I go to yoga class, I need
my my yoga equipment in a certain spot. My water
goes here, my yoga blocks go here, and if they're
out of position, that's going to it's gonna put me
out of position cognitively to a certain extent. All right, Robert, well,
are you ready to go to the animal kingdom. Let's
do it. Let's let's pull in the animals. Well. Now, actually,

(26:08):
of course we are members of the animal kingdom. But
it is helpful when talking about cognition, when trying to
understand what it really is, to look at animals other
than humans. So you can get a more objective point
of view, and you can peel off a lot of
the human complexity, of most of the human complexity of
culture and whatnot that we have on top. So it's
kind of like getting down to more of the bedrock ideas. Yeah,

(26:30):
so let's look at animals and try to apply this
same principle. Some animals have brains, yet nevertheless use other
parts of their body or things outside their body apparently
to perform cognition. That's right. I mean, like I said,
we tend to fall back on our rider horse crane
in a can view of cognition because that's more combatible

(26:52):
with how we've come to view the bio mechanical human.
But this vision doesn't work as well with many animal models,
particularly smaller organisms, that essence really offload aspects of their
cognition to other parts of their neural system or outside
their neural system entirely. Yeah. One example I remember talking
about in past episodes is cockroaches, where so you know,

(27:12):
cockroaches have a central nervous system, but they've also got
things throughout their bodies that you almost want to call
separate little brains and their legs and body parts, but
they're not really brains. They're neural tissue that appears to
do some kind of independent information processing. Yeah. Like, another
example that comes up is crickets that hear through quote

(27:34):
unquote ears on their knees. One example that I always
love is the male praying mantis who continues to mate
after his mate has decapitated him. So in these cases,
copula tory movements in mantids are controlled by masses of
nerve tissue in the abdomen rather than the brain. So

(27:57):
what what that makes you want to say, is like, oh,
so they've got a second brain their abdomen, right, And
that's what some of the science headlines I remember they
went with that. They're like the male praying man as
has a brain and it's uh, and it's genitals. But
the truth is more interesting than that. Yeah, because it's
not the brain. It's it's not a second brain. Uh,
it's just nerve tissues beyond the brain. And in fact,

(28:18):
with the with the praying mantis, in any cases, the
the head is gone, the head is eaten away, and
it's going to copulate more ferociously. It's in a sense
the it's like the dead man switch or the dead
mantis switch has been hit on mating. Now you might
think like, well, I mean, come on, how much cognitive

(28:39):
capacity is really involved in mating? Like do you really
need to do that much information processing to mate? I
don't know what mantis mating exactly looks like. I'm not
imagining something incredibly complex. Well, they're they're videos, but videos
you can look up at work, or yeah, they're, well
they're It depends where you're your employers fall on a

(29:01):
mantoid intercourse. But yeah, I mean, uh, I think I
think we're we have a we have a relaxed policy
on it here if I'm remembering her handbook correctly. But
of course it goes way beyond just activities like mating.
You can say that cognition in many ways extends to
all parts of the body and even much more complex animals. Yeah,

(29:24):
let's take take octopi, octopuses, octopods. I think, I think
I like octopods. I know we've debated this in the past.
What's the plural of octopus. I'm going with octopods, not octopusies,
despite the James Bond film. Maybe that's the British Uh,
that's the metric thing. Maybe that is the plural for
talking about multiple copies of the movie. There you go.

(29:48):
If you've got like fourteen blue rays of octopusy on
your on your kitchen counter for some reason, it's just like, hey,
can you move the octopuses out of the way. I
need to chop some celery. There we go. So octopuses
are smart critters, though they have they have a rather
different brain from us, but they've been observed to pass
modified tests of consciousness. Even it's one of the reasons

(30:10):
that I make it a point not to eat octopi. Uh.
They certainly don't follow the big brain model of cognition, however,
with their central brain composing only a small part of
a greater nervous system, so by by most estimates two
thirds of their roughly five hundred million neurons are located
in their arms. Wow, that makes sense, right, I mean

(30:31):
octopi are you see them moving around there? Mostly a
creature of arms. It's it's that's their whole thing. That's
how they navigate their world. That's how they they capture
their prey. Uh, it's in the title of the organism.
So on our model of cognition, that would seem to
make us think that what the octopus must have in
its brain is a sort of picture of the environment

(30:54):
around it in its brain mental representation of its environment,
and then also some sort of appropriate receptive sense of
where all of its arms are in relation to the
features of that environment. Right, Like, it's got a room
in its mind that's the ocean floor around it, and
it knows where all of its limbs are in that room,
and the mental representation is that what's going on? Well,

(31:17):
according to Macquarie University's kin Ching, the octopus does not
seem to require centralized mental image, or I'm assuming this
is in line with the idea of body schema, right,
it doesn't need the centralized mental image of what its
body is doing in order to do it. The arms,
it would seem to put it, you know, loosely know

(31:39):
how to move. So the arms do their own thinking
in a way. Yeah. So a sucker on a tentacle touches, say,
a piece of crap meat. Yea, it sends a wave
of impulses up the arm. Now by most you know,
examples you would expect that, you know, are sort of
grade school understanding of nerve impulses. A human touches something,

(31:59):
the holse to travel up the arm through the nervous
system to the brain. The brain, Yeah, well, what happens
here is seems to be a little different. The base
of the arm sends another impulse down the arm. The
two signals meet and an elbow or bend forms. It's
not a real elbow, but a bind essentially forms to
allow the grass crab morsel to then reach the mouth

(32:22):
of the octopus. Now that is interesting now that this
is one of the facts that was mentioned in that
Atlantic article I mentioned at the top of the episode
that but this was very interesting to me. So it
knows how to bring a piece of food up to
its beak by bisecting the distance between the place where
it has grasped the food and the base of the

(32:42):
arm up at the up at the head by just
calculating that within the arm itself. Yeah, it essentially has
a cheat built into its its neural system so that
it doesn't have to make those computations with the brain.
That's my readA on it anyway, brilliant. It's also I
can't help but it sort of go wild with this
and and think, all right, well, we're talking about about

(33:05):
how external things change cognition. Uh, it's interesting to think
about in terms of other things was we've observed or
in one case hypothesized um octopus is doing. For instance,
consider the coconut octopus or veined octopus that uses coconuts
or seashells for shelter. Essentially, you know, basic tool use.

(33:26):
To what extent is that altering its cognition. Well, that's
a good question, and we might be able to apply
a criterion from the next study we look at too,
to judge that this criterion that's going to come up
in a minute is the idea of mutual manipulability. In
then a horrible word, manipulability, I practice saying it before
we got going here. But it's the idea that really

(33:48):
if something external is part of your cognitive system, then
your brain should be able to manipulate it, and it
should be able to manipulate your brain in return. So
there's a manipul relation feedback between the two. Now, I
wonder if that would apply to things like like these
coconut fragments or sea shells that would be used by

(34:09):
the octopus. Well, one more advanced but also controversial idea
would be how would this play into the crack and
hypothesis of paleontologist Mark mcminimon of Mount Holyoke College in
Massachusetts to be familiar with this, No, I hadn't, I
mean not until you were you put this in here,
so tell me about it, Robert, Okay, So there hasn't

(34:31):
been any recent movement on this. My understanding is that
is that he's still working on this and hopes to
publish more about it. It was it was rather controversial
when it came out. I criticized this as being far fetched.
But he's not a quag by any and by any extent.
He's he's an established paleontologists here. His argument is that
you have what we have, our fossil remains of a

(34:54):
prehistoric cephalopod, beak, and we have a curious arrangement of
dead Ichtheosaurus is Ichtheosaurus. Of course, it's the the kind
of weird looking dolphin reptile that we discussed in a
previous episode. I believe Fossie. You're saying, like they're discovered together.
You've brought a place where there's a fossil and there's
a strange arrangement of dead I theosaur fossils, and in

(35:17):
the middle of it you've got this beak right, And
as we discussed in our our fossil episode, fossil action scenes,
uh palion tottos have to interpret these findings and try
and figure out in what cases you're just looking at
a chance coupling of remains, and in which cases you're
dealing with fossil evidence of an interaction. In this case,

(35:38):
in this triascic cracking hypothesis, the idea is that the
bones are arranged in an unnatural pattern to resemble the
pattern of tentacle sucker discs on the the cephalopod itself.
Whoa so hold on this hypothesis is that this ancients

(36:00):
affle of pod made art. Essentially, yeah, that it's an
ancient self portrait and a glimpse into a two d
million year old inhuman uh and arguably creative mind. Well
I love that, but I can definitely see why people
were very skeptical of Yeah, so don't don't take this
one to the bank. But I really do hope that

(36:21):
that Mark mcmanimmon puts out another paper on this and
offer some more some more proof and some more thoughts.
Even if it doesn't turn out to have, you know,
any provable validity to it, I still love the idea,
sort of an octoponymous bosh, yeah exactly. Okay, Well, I
think we should take a quick break and when we

(36:43):
come back, we will get into spiders and their cognitive webs. Alright,
we're back, okay. So I want to finish by looking
at this one really interesting paper that was one of
the centerpieces of of the article I mentioned at the
beginning of the episode. So I went and looked up

(37:05):
this paper in Animal Cognition by Hilton Yapiasu and Kevin
in Lalande. And the paper is called Extended Spider Cognition
in the Journal of Animal Cognition, published in So this
is new stuff and this paper was very interesting. So
it starts with the idea of extended cognition. You've got

(37:26):
these two different models of cognition, cognition as a process
within the central nervous system and then cognition extending out
into other parts of the body or even other features
of the environment. And the question is which of these
ideas is a better system for understanding cognition in biology,

(37:47):
Which is better for cognitive biologists to use in their
research and to avoid controversy with basic terms, the authors
of the study except a common definition of cognition, which
is the acquisition, processing, storage, and use of information. Now,
while there are these different models of cognition beyond the
central nervous system, the authors don't really commit to any

(38:10):
one of them in particular, So they're not going down
the enacted cognition or embodied cognition path. They're just saying
anything that takes place beyond the central nervous system will
be considered extended cognition. Um. So one of the ways
to get out of the realm of philosophy is to
just test the extended cognition hypothesis and animals. So this

(38:32):
is what this study sets out to do, and they
want to test it in spiders. Now, in thinking about
where extended cognition could come from. In biology, the author's
cite a cybernetics principle known as Ashby's law of requisite variety,
and this states that if a system is going to
be stable, quote, the number of states of the control

(38:53):
mechanism of a system must be greater than or equal
to the number of states in the system being controlled.
Now that's really abstract language, but it actually is pretty
simple in biology. This just means that if an organism
like an animal is going to be successful in a
variable environment, it needs variable behavior. It needs to itself

(39:14):
be able to meet all of the different circumstances that
could come up in its natural environment. Complex threat environments
demand complex behaviors, right, yeah, I mean this reminds me
of some of the more cognitively advanced species. You look
at them and instantly thinking of birds. Uh pause, that
the new Caledonian crowing to employ various strategies to to

(39:39):
to to to earn its food. Yeah. Yeah, And you
see complex cognition in the bird that has fairly complex
challenges to face in the wild. So, of course it's
taken as a given that neural complexity usually underlies behavioral complexity.
Right If you see an organism doing a wide variety
of different things instead of the same few things over

(40:02):
and over again, it's usually a sign of cognitive power. Yeah, Like,
I mean, I think of a tiger, for instance, in
comparison to a new Caledonian crow. The Caledonian crow again
is having to employ various strategies to to earn that meal.
The tiger has basically one strategy, and it's really good
at that one strategy, but it doesn't diversify. It is

(40:22):
not a generalist. Well, I wouldn't. I don't know. I
wouldn't undersell the cognitive capabilities of a tiger. I mean,
I think compared to like a primate, a tiger is
probably pretty low on the cognitive scale, but compared to
a lot of organisms, especially a lot of herbivorous organisms,
it's probably pretty high. I mean, one thing you do
generally see, and this comes up in the paper, is

(40:44):
that predators tend to be higher in cognitive capabilities than
their prey. Oh. Yes, I mean I definitely put a
tiger above you know, a cow. I mean, clearly it
was framed by an immortal hand er. I I'm not
taken that away from it, right If it must roam
the forest of the night, and it's got to have
some tricks up its sleeve. But but you're right that
it might have a more specially adapted niche than some

(41:08):
other animals that have to be incredibly diverse generalists. Um.
But anyway, and with this in mind, it should be
clear that organisms inhabiting more challenging and unstable environments, and
one challenge they give is unpredictable fluctuations and resources, those
types of organisms need to require more powerful brains or

(41:29):
central nervous systems to deal with those challenges. So one
example of a hypothesis along these lines is the social
brain hypothesis. Now, Robert, I know you've encountered this before, right, Yeah.
In fact, at the World Science Festival that I just
came back from, there was a there was an entire
panel discussion on about the social synapps, about the social

(41:51):
brain and and how we think it evolved, especially in
terms of the creation of tools and then communication over
the over the creation of tools. Oh cool, is that
one of the ones they've put online? Uh? Yeah, I
believe that one is available online. Yeah, I'd like to
watch that. Yeah, yeah, maybe we'll revisit the topic for
a future episode. Well, anyway, just to give you the
quick gist here, living in groups is a complex and

(42:14):
challenging environment, putting great demands on your cognition. You've got
to remember who everybody around you is, what their personalities
are like, what their status is relative to you and
to each other. This is this is really demanding and
I mean and also as far as status goes, you've
got to figure out how you can potitionally move up. Yes.

(42:36):
One of the things that came up in the social
synaps talk is you have examples of primates. I can't believe,
I can't remember off hand if we're talking chimpanzees are
macaques where you will have a female that's low in
the totem pole, so to speak, but then she has
a child, and in the social environment, the young primate
is a means for her to rise up because all

(42:57):
the other animals want to touch it, they want to
interact with you know, the baby is valued by by
the group and this enabled this particular individual in the
study to rise up to to to near the very
top of the social order. Interesting. Yeah, and the fact
that there is always this variability and social hierarchy in
these animals with big social groups means that that's even

(43:18):
another like there, there's not just benefits, but there are
threats too. If somebody else can move up, you can
be moved down the hierarchy. So you've got to constantly
maintain all these social relationships. And this is hard work
for a brain. Yeah, even if you don't live in
a vicious working environment. Uh, your mind is still sort
of calculating, all right, where am I and what's the

(43:39):
status quo. So the authors state that this has been
somewhat borne out in research into primate brains. For example,
macOS living in groups to have increases in gray matter
in mid superior temporal sulcus and in rostral prefrontal cortex.
But of course, on the other hand, if extended cognition
is true, we should be able to find evidence of

(44:02):
biological systems where the size and energy consumption of the
central nervous system does not directly track with the cognitive
power of the organism. If you can think with things
outside your body, you should be able to find evidence
of organisms meeting the information processing requirements of their environments

(44:23):
or their survival niche without necessarily having the gray matter
to do so. Right, So, but I guess this brings
you to the question of like, why wouldn't you just
invest in a bigger brain If you need more cognitive
processing done, why don't you just make a bigger brain
that gets more work done. Well, this isn't easy either.
I mean, most animals live on the edge of survival

(44:45):
as far as as far as energy resources go. And
a central nervous system that does lots of computation on
its own needs lots of processing power, which means spending
energy building that neural tissue and keeping it active and maintained. Yeah,
I mean there's an economy to maintain here. We see
time and time again and an evolution that the antlers

(45:06):
are only going to be as big as they need
to be. Yeah. Otherwise that that that lineage is going
to perish and and small antlers are going to be
the the the adaptation that survives. Yeah. And so we
can forget about this because I don't know, as comfortable
humans like you, you might not be constantly concerned about
survival and starvation, but most animals are living at the

(45:29):
edge of starvation. It's just right on the horizon for them. Yeah.
One of the things that came up in that world
Science Festival panel discussion was just basic tools you see
other hominid species where they created a basic tool, you know,
like a stone implement for chipping away at things and
and and processing meat, and that tool did not change
it didn't They didn't evolve it beyond that point and

(45:52):
it remained the same for a thousand years or more. Uh.
That's rather different than the from the ascension of tool
us we see for the most part in human history. Right.
But yeah, for the most part, evolution is I hate
to anthromomorphize it, but evolution is is perfectly happy to
remain just at that threshold of starvation, like say, as

(46:13):
long as it works. So, the more cognition is limited
to the workings of a central nervous system, the more
energy is required to invest in that central nervous system. Thus,
extended cognition really could be viewed as an energy efficient
shortcut for giving an organism more information processing power with
less energy investment less resources going in. Also, this is interesting,

(46:38):
the authors pointed out central cognition relies very much on
powers of perception. Cognition, if you're going to yield accurate results,
is informationally greedy. Right. Think about the resolution of our
eyes and our hearing acuity, and how much of an
organism's resources go into sampling the outside world to make

(46:58):
sure it's getting a good internal representation of its surroundings.
So to plan for a future action, you need a
representational model of the world in your head. And if
your plan is to mean anything, that model needs to
be accurate, which means you need to take pictures of
the world around you that are information rich. And if
you offload some of that same cognition into the environment,

(47:21):
you might not have to do as much mental representation,
you might not require as much perceptual information. So that
brings us to what type of animals are going to
be the most favored for extended cognition. Obviously all kinds
of animals might use it to some extent, but which
ones are going to really go hard and on extended cognition?

(47:42):
If this is a fact of biology, the author's hypothesized
that the evolution of extended cognition should be especially favored
among small generalist predators. Now why is that, Well, first
you've got the small creatures. There's there's general what's known
as alimentary between brain size and body size, and that

(48:02):
means they track one another um, the bigger your body,
the bigger your brain. And one take away from this
is that if you want a more powerful brain, it's
much easier if you're a larger animal. Especially tiny animals
are going to have real difficulty recruiting sufficient information processing
power within the small collections of central nervous tissue that

(48:24):
their tiny bodies will support. The smaller you are, the
harder it is to energetically justify complex cognition within your
economy of survival. Yeah, because, as we said, cognition is
already pricey, right, uh So, so if you're small, you
might be really looking for a way to offload some
of that cognitive capacity into your environment, into other parts

(48:47):
of your body or in any of these extended areas. Now,
the next thing is predators. Why would predators especially need this, Well,
predators generally need more information and processing power than other organisms. Why.
It's that they quote tend to be large and mobile
so as to track diverse, changeable, and spatially distinct prey

(49:07):
distributions and thus require the information processing capability to detect
and respond to changes in these distributions. And this is
supported by observing that in mammals, predators tend to have
larger brains. You can also see this even in some
fishes like teleost fishes. Fish higher up the food chain
have bigger brains. You need them because of the work

(49:30):
you've got to do to survive. So you've got small
you've got predators. The other thing was general predators. Generalists
are animals that specialize in more than one particular environmental
niche they deal with more variability. Uh. The more general
and animals foraging landscape, the more variability it needs to
deal with, and thus the more processing power it needs.

(49:51):
And uh, the one this is not a pure predator
by any means that I always think of the raccoon, Like,
the raccoon is a is a pretty intelligent little critter
because because it is that it is such a generalist,
it is ranging, you know, a pretty far and wide
and within its its environmental ranging ground to to acquire
its food. Yeah, and you can really see raccoons getting

(50:13):
pretty crafty, yeah with your garbage. I mean yeah, I
even helping each other at times. I've I haven't read
a study about this, but I've heard accounts of of
raccoons they standing upon each other's shoulders to achieve some
sort of a goal such as drinking the nectar from
a hummingbird feeder, or to get the garbage can lid
off anyway. So this leads them to their main hypothesis

(50:39):
and the subject of of the study portion of their
literature reviews. So the authors say, quote, these considerations lead
us to expect, other things being equal, that predators of
a relatively small size with generalist habits are prime candidates
for extended cognition because they should be under particularly strong
selection to reduce their relative brain size but maintain their

(51:03):
behavioral richness. And one means by which this could be
achieved just through offloading brain processing to the body or
the environment. So who's a good candidate for meeting this spiders? Yes,
because spiders have been at it for a long time.
They have been there. There's some pretty old predators, pretty
successful predators found on every continent except Antarctica. They've been

(51:27):
on Earth for some four hundred million years, and while
the number keeps going up, I believe the most recent
species count was an excess of forty five thousand spider species. Now,
we've covered aspects of spider anatomy and behavior on the
show over the years. What was the most recent one.
We we did one on we did what it would
be like to get eaten by a Giant Spider. We

(51:48):
did that last October for our Halloween season because with
the giant spider movies they always cut away right before
the spider gets to the part where it eats you,
and we were like, well, what would that look like?
Does it stick the fangs in and drain your blood
like a vampire? And the answer spoiler alert, No, They
mostly like drool all over you and inject you with

(52:09):
with dissolving enzymes and turn you into mush and then
they turn you into bull list and we'll just go
listen to the episode. Yeah, now I think everyone knows
what a spider is. The basics are eight legs, venomon
things spinnerets that produce highly specialized strands of silk. Some
spiders use these to hunt or maneuver in their environments,
but a great many of them build traps webs, and

(52:32):
there are several types of webs. You have uh triangle webs,
funnel webs and mesh webs, cobwebs, sheet webs, and of
course traditional orb webs. Some three thousand plus species of
orbs spiders exist in the orb part. It's easy to
kind of get tripped up of this and imagine a
three dimensional orb. But basically we're talking about a circular web,

(52:53):
the classic spider web, the sort of thing that you
see in a giant spider movie, a haunted house, or
a burlesque show. It's the round spider web. And these
are incredible structures, engineered down to minute weaving in each
specialized strand. I always stress that a spider webbing is
not a silly string scenario. They are they're true weavers.

(53:14):
They're manipulating the substance of the silk strands and the
manner by which they're woven together. And this is just
into the line they're using, because they're then using that
spider silk line, which is strong and flexible. Uh, some
varieties are five times as strong as an equal mass
of steel and twice as strong as an equal mass
of kevlar. They're using that then to create this web structure.

(53:38):
And the web structure itself is far more than just
a sticky trap, because we see that in the movies,
the monster movies, the damsel is caught in against the web.
Usually like generally it just looks like she's leaning against
some rope web and then the big spider puppet comes.
But it's it's far more than that for starters. It's
a killing room, it's a killing floor. It's the home

(53:59):
turf uh for the predator uh. And it provides the
predator with a strong advantage over appropriately sized prey that
tumble into the web. And it's also a communication array.
You land on the webbing and the spider knows, now
this is going to be important. Yeah, that you land
on that web, but you fall into that web. The
spider knows, the spider feels. And it's no great leap

(54:22):
to say that the orb spider web is a vital
extension of the creature that built it and occupies it
waiting for the signals of the snared prey. Right. So,
the prediction that these authors given their paper is that
because spiders have the cognitive needs of generalist predators but
the neural limitations of tiny organisms, the authors think that

(54:43):
spiders should show signs of evolution favoring extended cognition if
such a thing as possible. And the special feature of
spider biology they're gonna look to is those webs, that
amazing silk, those threads. So we definitely used to think
of spiders as purely insta driven stimulus response machines with
no real cognitive capacity, but that isn't the case anymore.

(55:06):
Spider research has yielded a lot of interesting signs of cognition,
allowing them to learn new things. So some examples given
by the authors or that, for example, spiders appear to
plan routes of movement in advance, like there are these
cannibal jumping spiders that prey on orb weavers and uh.
When they prey on orb weavers, they'll watch them from

(55:28):
a distance first, then plan a route of approach that
loses sight of the prey animal en route, then drops
down from above to attack the orb weaver at the
hub of its web. There are signs that they actually
have the capability to display numerosity, like they can understand
some number distinctions, that they learn conditional tactics of aggressive mimicry.

(55:52):
In One example of this would be the these cannibalistic
jumping spiders. Again, they prey on orb weavers, uh, and
what they will do is they'll go up to the
edge of the web and generate false vibratory signals to
manipulate the behavior of their prey, so they learn what
signals to use for a particular spider by trial and

(56:12):
error to get the spider to come out to a
place where it can be attacked. There's at least one
variety of I believe it's an orb spider that will
essentially build a decoy of itself in the web. Oh yeah,
I think I've heard of that. But the authors also
say that they can generally like they can unlearn imprinted associations,
and they can generally display adaptability to changing conditions. So

(56:35):
they're not mere machines repeating a program. No, spiders appear
to have some real cognitive capacity that they can that
they can plan, that they can essentially think. Now, obviously
they're thinking is not going to be exactly the same
kind of thinking that you would identify with like a mammal,
like a primate, But they are spider philosophers. No, they

(56:58):
are doing some kind end of complex information processing. Now,
the experimental method that these researchers apply in their paper
is that this is a literature review, so they're not
doing direct new research or experiments in this they're reviewing
a lot of the existing spider research and what they're
trying to look for to see if something can count

(57:19):
as cognition is something I mentioned earlier, the mutual manipulability criterion.
They explain this by saying, quote, two entities that can
reciprocally alter the state of each other pertain to one
and the same system. Does that make sense? So if
if the external object and the spider's brain can both

(57:40):
change each other reciprocally, then you might consider this a
mutually manipulable system. So a couple of cases they look
out of the paper. One is how attention is managed
by web threads. So Robert, imagine you are a web
spinning spider. You want information and about your environment. Is

(58:02):
there something walking on my web? Is it something I
could eat or something that could eat me? But you've
got these neural limitations. You've got a tiny, tiny brain,
So how do you selectively apply your limited cognitive resources
to get the best info about what's going on around you?
What if you use your web itself? That's right, I

(58:25):
mean I'm depending on the web for the sensations anyway. Yeah,
but you're not just statically using the web. So it
would be one thing if you felt vibrations in the
web and that told you something about your environment. That
would be just kind of like, you know, seeing the
light reflecting off of something coming towards you. That'd just
be sensing something from your environment. But the spiders don't

(58:48):
just have their brains manipulated by info from the web.
They manipulate the web in return to to fine tune
their attentional systems. So web building spiders, for example, have
been shown to use web tension as an attentional mechanism.
And the same way we would focus our eyes on
a particular site if we wanted to pay attention to it,

(59:11):
they can pull certain web threads tight to focus a
vibrational attention on those areas of their webs. Okay, I
mean very very much like tightening the strings on a
guitar exactly. Yeah, And so it works. When you pull
the threads tight, you increase the resolution of the information
that you get through them. It's like focusing with a

(59:32):
telescope on something. And when researchers artificially tense one part
of a web, spiders are more attentive to that region
of the web, and hungrier spiders will adapt. For example,
normally you might have a fruit fly land in the
spider web, and the spider doesn't even care because there's
so little nutrition in it. Why does it even bother.

(59:53):
It's so tiny, right, and it's not gonna it's not
gonna damage the web. Right. But if a spider is
a very hungry, if it's on the verge of starvation,
it will pull the threads of its web tighter to
sense higher resolution information, including smaller insects landing on it,
like fruit flies. So if it's starving, a fruit fly
lands on the web, it's got the threads pulled tight,

(01:00:16):
so it can sense tiny stuff like fruit flies, and
it will go out and eat that meager meal because
it's starving. Now, when experiment or selectively placed prey on
horizontal threads in a web, spiders learn to favor horizontal tension.
That's an interesting thing too. So it looks like you're
seeing this reciprocal causation here, mutual manipulability. The web changes

(01:00:41):
the spider's brain, but the spider's brain also changes how
it uses the web. It can pull the threads taught,
or it can relax them, and it can adapt to
the needs of the spider at the general time it's
occupying the web. But there there's another interesting thing about
what they do with webs, uh their web building algorithm them.
So spiders appear to use the structures of their own

(01:01:04):
webs to offload some of the cognitive requirements of web building.
Think about how you build a house. When you build
a house, you have to use a lot of cognition.
You've got to measure the space available to you. You've
got to plan out the size of walls and rooms.
You've got to keep everything within your budget, and make
sure all the math works out, and make sure you've
got all the resources. Spiders build complex structures like webs

(01:01:28):
with tiny brains. How do they do it? The answer
is algorithmically using the web itself to store information about
the building process. So instead of constantly having to keep
all aspects of web construction and working memory, they can
start building a web and work from simple algorithmic rules

(01:01:49):
based on their sensory apprehension of the web characteristics that
already exist. So web construction is also judged by the
researchers to be mutually manipulable. Changes in the web during construction.
For example, if you go in while a spider's building
a web and clip certain threads. This change the behavior

(01:02:10):
of the spider. This changes the spiders thought processes about
how it's building because it affects this algorithm, but changes
to the behavior of the spider, changes to the spider's
brain rather also change the construction process. Robert, I bet
you've seen this classic example of what happens when you
give spiders drugs and try them to build webs. So
you give a spider LSD or caffeine. I think the

(01:02:33):
caffeine web was like the worst web, but all these
various drugs, and it changes their algorithm for how they
build the web. But also this occurs in their natural habitats.
Spiders build different kinds of webs based on changing environmental needs.
The example that comes to mind hears of, of course,
when we've taken spiders into space. Yeah, and observe their

(01:02:53):
attempts to to build webs there. Yeah, exactly. Here's one
more example from the paper that I thought was really
into thing. What about spatial memory substitution. So we exist
in the world that's got three spatial dimensions, and it
can be rough trying to build models of that world
and represent it correctly. Your spatial memory is probably not
as good as you think it is. And if you

(01:03:15):
want to be shocked, here's an experiment. Draw a picture
of a room that you go in frequently, indicating where
you think all the objects in the room are and
how far apart from each other they are. Now, go
check your drawing against reality. I think you're probably going
to be surprised how much you get wrong. All right,
that would be an interesting exercise. I'm very tempted to

(01:03:37):
go with like the smallest room in my house, like
a like a secondary bathroom. Uh, just sort of limit
the scope of the exercise. But even then, Yeah, I'm
betting I'm gonna get I'm gonna get my measurements wrong.
I mean, you'll probably get the general gist of the room, right,
you'll know the main things in it, basically what shape
it is, But where exactly the corners or position in

(01:03:59):
relation to each each other, Where exactly the pieces of furniture,
how far apart they are? I think you're going to
get stuff like that wrong. But spiders can use silk
a drag line to reduce a three D spatial environment
to a one D spatial environment, So that that might
sound kind of weird, but think about it like this.
You're an orb weaving spider and you get threatened in

(01:04:20):
your web. Maybe some kid comes along and says, oh,
cool spider, I want to squish it. It can drop
out of the web and hide among leaves. Say, but
it leaves a trail of drag line silk when it goes,
which it can later follow back to the web, And
this totally shortcuts the cognition that would be devoted to
three D modeling of the world for spatial navigation. If

(01:04:42):
you just have to follow the drag line silk back
to the web, you have reduced navigation to a one
dimensional activity, totally short circuiting all that need for cognitive navigation.
Now there are other There are plenty of things that
don't fit the criteria of mutual manipul ability, so they
probably wouldn't be considered extended cognition. One thing would be

(01:05:04):
something they looked at called matched filters. This is basically
the it's sensory filters. They provide adaptive information, but the
spider must simply accept the information they provide. The filters
themselves can't be manipulated for cognitive feedback. So uh. The
conclusion they come to is that web threads and structures
are part of a spider's information processing system, and that

(01:05:28):
spiders use their webs to think. The cognition of a
spider isn't just in the spiders central nervous system, but
it's thinking partially with its central nervous system and partially
with its web. Yeah, I mean, I mean it makes
sense again when you when you think of the web
as not just this thing it builds, but this thing
that it inhabits, this this in this artificial environment that

(01:05:51):
it has evolved to create, that is that is tailored
to its needs that it manipulates in order to help
sneer its ray. Yeah. Resource wise, it's a two for
one deal. You would need the web anyway to kill
and eat, so why not use it for cognition? Yeah?
And and as we we've we've shown the evolution is

(01:06:12):
an economist. It has to. It's it's not going to
spend any more any any more cash on the project
than it has to. Therefore, make use of the web
it's setting there. Let's let's let's let's use it to
enhance our cognition. In fact, the authors of the paper
observe something about this. They say, quote, it may be
no coincidence that some of the most cognitively sophisticated invertebrates,

(01:06:33):
and they give the example of social bees, wasps, and
ants are renowned for their niche construction e g. Nest building. Thus,
we have a double prediction that miniaturization will select for
extended cognition and that niche construction will facilitate the process
of outsourcing information processing. So animals like this, they tend

(01:06:56):
to build niches. But these niches, in turn, the animals
find a way to use them to offload some cognitive processing. Interesting. Yeah, yeah,
I'm instantly thinking about about bees and wasps and termites
other social insects and trying to to work out how
they would be manipulating this as well. I don't know. Listen,

(01:07:17):
maybe we'll come back to it in the future. Yeah,
we got anything else for Robert? I don't know. I guess.
I mean we can come back to Kran and say, well,
what what does this tell us about Crank? I don't know.
Would you consider Krang's human suit not human suit, it's
android suit, the guy with the suspenders? Would you consider
that his relationship with Krang mutually manipulable? I have I'm

(01:07:41):
I tend to. I mean, I don't I'm I don't
have a lot of like hard geek knowledge about about
teenage meeting ninja turtles. I don't know to what extent
this has been fleshed out within the franchise over the years.
But but yeah, I mean, he's he's in this this
suit he's in he's fighting ninja turtles with it, like
he's grappling turtles, He's climbing on stuff, he's blasting things

(01:08:01):
like it seems to be a vital way in which,
especially in the cartoon series, is a vital way in
which he interacts with the world. And that's a true
interaction with the with with the with with the going
both ways. He punches them, they punch him back. Is
a crying without a body really a crying? I guess
it's a different type of crying. Like it kind of
comes back to uh to. It's how it's processing numbers.

(01:08:25):
Is the process numbers differently with it with an android
hands in front of it versus just its two tentacles. Yeah,
that's a good question. Yeah. And then in terms of
the simple Walker device that that makes me think about
humans and automobiles. We had an off Mike discussion on
this earlier. To what extent could you possibly make an argument, uh,

(01:08:48):
for some sort of extended cognition occurring for the driver
of a modern automobile. Yeah, I mean that's a good question. Uh,
I I don't know. I mean what once you start
building in other things like a GPS device, that's obviously
something that you're offloading some cognitive capacity to. But there's

(01:09:08):
probably genuinely a question about to what extent you mutually
manipulate the GPS device in return. I don't know. That's
a case where the answer might be maybe you need
to think more about it. That would be something to
potentially come back and explore in the future because it
does get into this this basically it comes down to
the relationship we have with our smartphones and how that

(01:09:29):
is changing us from a cognitive perspective. Yeah, we're totally adapting.
We're learning that we don't need to remember stuff anymore.
We can look it up man, right, New World All right?
So there you have it, um praying spiders, octopuses, smartphones. Uh.
You can definitely check out the landing page for this

(01:09:49):
episode is Stuff to Blow your Mind dot Com. I'll
try to remember to include a link to that Atlantic
paper on there, so that you can know you can
read it if you wish, and uh hey, that's also
where you find all the other podcast episodes, videos, blog
post links out to our various social media accounts, and
if you want to get in touch with this directly,
you can email us as always at blow the Mind

(01:10:09):
at how stuff works dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works
dot com