Meaning Lab

Nov 14 2023 33
Meaning Lab Podcast artwork

Welcome to Meaning Lab, a show about the pursuit of meaning in work, life, and relationships. My name is Cody Kommers, and I've studied cognitive science at UCLA, Harvard, and most recently for my PhD at Oxford. This show is my opportunity to go deeper into understanding how our minds create meaning from the world around us. In each episode, I talk to a scientist, author, or artist about their approach to meaning-making, from language, to productivity, to writing, to travel. It's all fair game, as long as it gets us closer to understanding how we make sense of the world and our place in it.

codykommers.substack.com

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#108: Humanism and the conversation of the ages (feat. Sarah Bakewell)

Nov 14 2023 29 mins  
Ludwik Zamenhof was born in 1859 in a small city in Poland. His family was Jewish, and the area he grew up in also had factions of Germans, Russians, and Poles, all of whom mutually distrusted one another. During his childhood, Zamenhof developed a theory: these groups would never get along without a common, neutral language to communicate with people in the other groups. Zamenhof

#107: How a really good travel writer approaches her experiences abroad—and at home (feat. Erika Fatland)

Apr 25 2023 60 mins  
The Person and the Situation is a book by social psychologists Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, originally published in 1991. The argument made by Ross and Nisbett was that context matters. Human beings don’t behave in a vacuum, unaffected by the circumstances of society, history, and culture. The job of the social psychologist is to understand both the person and the situation. Wit

#106: Rituals matter more than you think (feat. Dimitris Xygalatas)

Apr 18 2023 54 mins  
Denis Dutton was a philosopher of art and media. He was born in the US but moved to New Zealand when he was 40, where he became interested in Oceanic Art. This interest led him to spend time in the village of Yentchenmangua on Papua New Guinea. Over the course of his ethnographic work, he began to get to know the locals.One day, Dutton noticed that his friends in the village seemed

#105: What can psychology tell us about meaning? (feat. Paul Bloom)

Mar 02 2023 86 mins  
Recently, I’ve been workshopping an idea. Basically, I don’t believe there is such thing as an activity that is intrinsically meaningful.Sure, there are activities which people consistently endorse as meaningful pursuits: having kids, productive careers, learning a language, that sort of thing. And while there is an empirical fact about what sort of activities members of our cu

#104: Palentine's Day (feat. Robin Dunbar)

Feb 14 2023 79 mins  
We pay a lot of attention to our romantic relationships. Whether it’s selecting a mate or maintaining one’s relationship with them. Apps make millions of dollars promising to streamline this process. Hundreds of books are published every year telling us how to do it better. And don’t get me wrong: long-term romantic partnerships are hard, no doubt. But that difficulty is not

#103: Tired, scared, and busy: why can't we all just get along? (feat. Mónica Guzmán)

Jan 31 2023 81 mins  
One of the central themes of this show is the importance of the stories we tell about ourselves. But in focusing on the egocentric stakes of storytelling, one of the things we overlook—I certainly do—is the importance of the stories we tell about others.We make sense of life in the terms of our own experience. We conceptualize the world in a way that corresponds to what we’ve

#102: Awe is the emotional component of meaning (feat. Dacher Keltner)

Jan 24 2023 63 mins  
I collect concise definitions of the good life. There’s something I really like about the idea of having a one sentence mission statement. It’s a kind of mantra to check in with from time to time to make sure you’re making decisions based on what really matters and not the more immediate, but also more fleeting, worries of the day. My personal favorite, which I recently refer

#101: Finding meaning in the maybe (feat. John Kaag)

Jan 17 2023 78 mins  
For many of us, life is a process of minimizing uncertainty. We spend our days trying to eliminate uncertainty from our lives. Find the right career path, the right partner, buy a house, or at least find a sense of long-term settledness. Raise a family and put our kids on track to get into the right college, so they can start the process over again finding the right career, the rig

#100: I interviewed 90+ scientists about their career. These are the 12 biggest lessons I learned.

Jan 10 2023 64 mins  
The month before I began my PhD, in October 2019, I sat down with an idea. The concept was to reach out to people I admired—mostly academics and authors—and ask them about the decisions they made when they were in my position. What did they do when they were grad students that set them up for success later on? Sure, I wanted to know about their success, in some sort of career-p

#99: There's a Reason You Can't Make Yourself Act like Everyone Else: You're Unique (feat. Chantel Prat)

Jan 03 2023 62 mins  
For many of us, there are moments of realization we’ve had where we can’t look at our lives, or what we do in them, the same way ever again. I’ve had many. As a cognitive scientist, one of those moments came from the realization that cognitive science—and psychology, and neuroscience—don’t tell us anything about individual human lives. They tell us about humans on avera