Naturebang

The mystery of consciousness has been one of the most unsolvable problems across neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. How can a lump of matter come to be aware of itself? Is consciousness real, or an illusion? And even if I'm pretty convinced by my own conscious experience, how can I possibly know if something else is conscious too? Are you conscious? Is my dog conscious? Is the universe conscious, in a way we don't yet understand? Becky Ripley and Emily Knight wrestle with one of the biggest questions there is, with the help of some some surprisingly intelligent plants.Featuring Paco Calvo, cognitive scientist and philosopher of biology, Universidad de Murcia, and Anil Seth, neuroscientist and professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex. Produced and presented by Emily Knight and Becky Ripley.

Jackpot! Lights are flashing, bells are ringing, and you collect your big reward. No, this isn't Vegas, but it might as well be. We're in a specially designed casino for rats, where they gamble in pursuit of the Big Win: delicious sugar pellets. For both rats and humans, a finely tuned ability to assess risk against reward is essential for navigating an unpredictable world. We're pretty good at it. But why are we so easily derailed by the toxic allure of the Big Win, the roll-over Jackpot, the risk-it-all-on-black strategy which makes no rational sense? The answer may surprise you, and may also give you some insight into why you can't stop late-night doom-scrolling on your phone.Featuring Catharine Winstanley, Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, and Natasha Schull, cultural anthropologist and associate professor at New York University. Produced and presented by Emily Knight and Becky Ripley.

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight look to the animal world to question why we "power pose". Anteaters are masters of it. When feeling threatened, they rear up on their hind legs and extend their arms out wide to show off their huge claws. It is a posture that is designed to make them look more intimidating to predators or competing rivals. Does it work like this for us? If we take up more space in a power pose, are we perceived to be more powerful in the eyes of others? Featuring Arnaud Desbiez, president and founder of ICAS (The Wild Animal Conservation Institute), and Dr Daniel Gurney, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. Produced and presented by Emily Knight and Becky Ripley.

How do we extract the maximum amount of power from the sun? Becky Ripley and Emily Knight enlist the help of a giant, thousand-year old clam. And end up in the depths of space...Featuring Professor Alison Sweeney at Yale University, and Mike Garrett from the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics. Produced and presented by Emily Knight and Becky Ripley

Do lower voices demand more power? Do we take them more seriously? And is this a bias that needs to be challenged more in today’s world? Becky Ripley and Emily Knight compare the bellowing roars of red deer stags to dig deeper into the psychology of human and animal voice.Featuring David Reby, Professor of Ethology at Jean Monnet University, and David Puts, Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. Produced and presented by Emily Knight and Becky Ripley.

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight dig deep into the underground web of plant roots and mycorrhizal fungi networks. Here lies a 400 million year old market economy, founded on the trading of resources. Nutrients are traded for carbon. Carbon is traded for nutrients. And the exchange rate between the two is constantly in flux, to level supply with demand. This highly-evolved symbiosis between plant and fungi is crucial to the survival of over 80% of all terrestrial plants. And it also acts as a colossal carbon store. A recent study found that 13 billion tons of CO2 are passed from plants to mycorrhizal fungi each year. It's one of the most effective and important market trading relationships in the world. And it turns out, these belowground trade deals are not so different to the aboveground deals that play out within our own market trading economy. Both move and shake to the very same economic principles of supply and demand. Can our economic theories be applied back to the fungi-plant deals in order for the fungi to capture more carbon in the face of climate change? Or, flip-reverse it, can we apply some of their age-old trading strategies to our own economic models? They may not have a brain, but they have 400 million years of evolution under their belt, so their trade strategies may well be more streamlined and more symbiotic compared to ours. Featuring Dr Bethan Manley, fungal geneticist and data scientist at The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, and Dr Ted Loch-Temzelides, Professor of Sustainable Development at the Department of Economics at Rice University. Produced and presented by Emily Knight and Becky Ripley.

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight tackle a topic we love to fight about: parenting. How should we raise our kids? How much love is too much?Good parenting begins at home. And 'home', in this case, is a decomposing mouse corpse, rolled into a ball and buried 5 inches beneath the soil of the forest floor. Naturally. This is the home of one of nature's most diligent little parents, the black and orange Gravedigger, or Burying Beetle. The two parents team up to feed, nurture and care for their grubs until they're old enough to make it alone. But is there such a thing as too much parenting? Could a little LESS motherly (and fatherly) love, actually help the grubs be a little more self-reliant?In the human world, we can't seem to agree on the best way to raise our babies. Across time and across cultures, there have been parenting strategies that seem bonkers to us now, while our ways of doing things might raise alarm bells elsewhere. One factor here is that humans spend a lot of time parenting; we're one of the most heavily investing parents the natural world has ever produced. But our babies are needy for a reason: it takes an awfully long time to make a human. Featuring Rebecca Kilner, Professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Cambridge, and Dr Brenna Hassett, biological anthropologist at University College London and the author of 'Growing up Human: The Evolution of Childhood'. Produced and presented by Emily Knight and Becky Ripley.

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight dive into the watery world of rainbowfish to confront the age-old myth that fish have bad memories. In actual fact, they are much more intelligent than we like to think, with an incredible capacity for learning and memory, as seen in almost all fish species. Their ability to remember complex things over a long period of time means they can build social relationships, navigate huge distances, and even form cultures, as knowledge is passed down over generations. So, the science has spoken: fish have way better memories than we like to think. But what about us humans? Well, turns out our memories are way worse than we like to think. From the very first perceptual moment when you experience something, your brain is constantly filtering your memories so that it only keeps the information that it thinks you need. And the more you recount a memory, the more it deviates from "the truth". Which means, in reality, we forget most of our lives, and we misremember most of the rest! Begging the question: are we who we think we are? Featuring Professor Culum Brown, head of The Fish Lab at Macquarie University, and Dr Julia Shaw, criminal psychologist at UCL and author of 'The Memory Illusion'. Produced and presented by Emily Knight and Becky Ripley.

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight find out what it takes to learn the language of your people, with the help of some extremely chatty little birds.The song of the zebra finch has been compared to a 90's dial-up modem running triple-speed, or an alien fax machine. But to a female zebra finch, it's a song of irresistible seduction. The males learn their song in a very similar way to the way we learn language, and it all starts with the babies. Through babbling, then copying, then innovating motifs of their own, the zebra finches take their language and then put their own distinctive stamp on it.But if they don't learn it at just the right time, as a chick, they can't learn it as an adult.How does human language acquisition work, and what would happen if you denied a baby the opportunity to learn to speak? The surprising answer takes us to 1970s Nicaragua, and the extraordinary story of the birth of a language...Produced by Becky Ripley and Emily Knight. Featuring Professor Ofer Tchernichovski from Hunter College at CUNY, and Dr Judy Shepard-Kegl from the University of Southern Maine.

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight dive into the underwater world of killer whales, where tight-knit family pods are led by the eldest post-reproductive matriarch, to better understand why we have a menopause. Matriarchal killer whales usually stop being able to reproduce in their thirties or forties, but continue to live for decades longer. This phenomenon of having a long post-reproductive life is known only to exist in 5 species: killer whales, narwhals, beluga whales, short-finned pilot whales, and humans. That’s it. Females across the rest of the animal kingdom can keep reproducing into old age, many until their dying days. So why? If the success of a species lies in its ability to breed and pass on its genes, why have we – and a few species of whale – evolved this seemingly counter-productive thing that stops us being able to do that? What's the point of it? And what does it say about our need for grandmas?Featuring Prof. Darren Croft, Professor of Animal Behaviour at the University of Exeter, and Dr. Brenna Hassett, Biological Anthropologist at UCL and author of Growing Up Human. Produced and presented by Emily Knight and Becky Ripley.

Rhythm is everywhere in the biological world. The rhythm of heartbeat, the rhythm of breathing, the rhythm of gait and walking. In fact, in 'The Descent of Man', Charles Darwin wrote that the perception of rhythm is "probably common to all animals and no doubt depends on the common physiological nature of their nervous system.” And yet, recent studies have shown that even our closest living relatives, the great apes, can't seem to keep a beat. Becky Ripley and Emily Knight investigate.Enter YouTube sensation Snowball the Cockatoo. Much to the intrigue of evolutionary biologists, Snowball loves to dance to anything with a strong beat. Especially The Backstreet Boys. How is it that chimpanzees can't keep a beat and yet this parrot - which is more closely related to a dinosaur than a human - clearly loves to groove? What's going on in the brain of this bird? And how does that link to our own beat-keeping brains? Back in the human world, there's serious neurological benefit to this beat-based research. The more we understand how and why people move to a beat, the more we can appreciate its powerful therapeutic effects. It unites our brains with our bodies, which can help to relieve symptoms of movement-based neurological disorders like Parkinson's, and it unites us to each other. Featuring cognitive neuroscientist Aniruddh Patel and dance psychologist Peter Lovatt.

You may think 'culture' is one of those peculiar things unique to humans, like dancing to pop music or yelling at the TV. But you'd be wrong. Animals may not flock to the Opera, but they absolutely do have 'culture'; habits; traditions; ways of doing things that are passed down from one generation to the next. Animal culture has been studied in fish, mammals and even insects, and one of the longest-running studies is on a bird you might have spotted flitting around your garden, the humble Great Tit.Becky Ripley and Emily Knight head into the woods, armed with delicious peanuts, to find out more about Great Tit culture. It turns out that these enigmatic birds have long traditions which are shared among the community, and once formed, they can be hard to break, even if they're not serving the birds needs any more. Innovative experiments with puzzle-boxes show that old habits die hard. The one thing that can break the deadlock of tradition and bring back innovative thinking is the arrival of new birds - ones which aren't beholden to the prevailing culture.In the human world, it's well known that an influx of immigrants can have a profound effect on the prevailing culture, often bringing new ways of thinking and innovations in technology, or brand new cuisines. Becky and Emily explore one extraordinary example of this that emerged from the horrors of the Second World War. As German-Jewish scientists fled the anti-Semitic persecution of the Third Reich, they arrived on American shores with plenty to offer the established scientific culture.Featuring Michael Chimento, post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour, and Professor Petra Moser, professor of Economics at NYU Stern. Produced and presented by Emily Knight and Becky Ripley.

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight ask whether giving legal rights to things like rivers and forests changes how we think about the world that lives around us.The Whanganui River, in New Zealand, is a legal person in the eyes of the law. It is legally defined as a living whole, from the mountains to the sea, and two local Maori tribe members speak on its behalf as its legal representatives. Other nations have had similar thinking: the Amazon rainforest in Columbia, one of the Great Lakes in the US, and the River Ganges in India all have legal personhood, as does land in Ecuador and Bolivia, where Mother Earth is recognised as a legal person. Assigning personhood to non-human things is not a new idea. Since the late 1800s, corporations have been granted legal personhood, giving them the rights to hold property, enter into contracts, and to sue or be sued. Then in 1972, Christopher Stone, himself a Professor of Law, published the essay ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’, arguing that if corporations can have personhood, why can’t natural entities?Does the act of doing this reframe our relationship to the natural world, as something which lives not just for us, but alongside us in its own right? And as the law extents rights to nature, does that - in turn - extend our empathy towards the more-than-human world? Featuring Dr Rāwiri Tinirau, advisor on Māori and Indigenous human rights, and Anna Grear, Professor of Law and Theory at Cardiff University and founder of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment. Produced and presented by Emily Knight and Becky Ripley.