Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast.

I'm your host, Sean Carroll, and let's start with a very quick meta note about what's

going on with the podcast.

In particular, I wanted to mention that we now have transcripts of every episode that

are going to appear on the webpage with the individual posts for the episodes.

We'll have the entire transcript as soon as it appears.

This of course costs money.

I'm not doing it myself, so a huge thank you to those who are supporting the podcast

on Patreon, you're the ones who made that possible.

So I think this is going to be very good both for accessibility and also for searchability.

You can go in and you can see what's the podcast is about even before you listen to it, search

for terms throughout the whole archives, that's going to be really good.

Moving on to today's show, I want you to think about what is happening in your brain at

this very moment.

You're listening to my words or you're reading the words if you're reading the transcripts.

One way or another, there's a signal coming in.

Let's just say that you're listening, so you're hearing sounds.

So there's a vibration going on in your ear drums, words, sentences and so forth.

And you can recognize these words, just like you can recognize nonverbal sounds.

But there's something else going on that by the set of words coming in, we create meaning.

We attach to these words to these sounds that we're hearing, some picture of what I'm

trying to say, some relationship between these sounds and something out there in the world

...