Birds have been a source of fascination for thousands of years. And people have long looked to birds to explain humans. For Aristotle, birds were one of the nonhuman species closest to us. The similarities are noted, however, en route to arguing that human beings are distinct, unique, and elevated over the rest of nature.

People constantly cherry-pick examples from nature to defend our behaviour or social arrangements as “natural,” and birds play a major role in this work of political and cultural self-justification.

In this episode I reflect on my own relationship with my local birds in the context of this centuries-old double logic, why we find birds both uncanny and appealing, and what it means to live in community with nonhuman animals.

Transcript

Reading

Tim Burkhead. Birds and Us: A 12,000-Year History from Cave Art to Conservation.

William Cronon, ed. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature.

Chris Elphing, John B. Dunning, and David Allan Sibley, eds. The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behaviour.

Bernd Heinrich. The Gifts of the Crow, The Homing Instinct, Mind of the Raven, The Nesting Season, Ravens in Winter.

Bart Kempenaers. “Mating systems in birds.” Current Biology, Volume 32, Issue 20, 2022, Pages R1115-R1121,ISSN 0960-9822, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.06.066.

Joan E. Strassmann. Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard.

Credits

Written, recorded, and produced by Steve McCullough.

The music is “Dirt Rhodes" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons - By Attribution 4.0.

The cover art features “Concentric squares forming a geometric maze pattern” by Cansu Sarp.

Being a person means constantly navigating deep and genuine uncertainty. We are uncertain about what we think, how we feel, what might happen, and what we should do.

Being uncertain means confronting the limits of our knowledge or our foresight in our lifelong efforts to persist and thrive, to seek safety and security, to find companionship and community, so make some sense of the world.

We live in a digital media and social environment that tries to take advantage of that, that monetizes and exploits our desire for security and certainty. Some of the same cognitive biases and shortcuts that mean we can't ever be fully certain and secure when making our way through this very complex existence also make us susceptible to charismatic misinformation.

Transcript

Credits

Written, recorded, and produced by Steve McCullough.

The music is “Dirt Rhodes" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons - By Attribution 4.0.

The cover art features “Concentric squares forming a geometric maze pattern” by Cansu Sarp.

Cuturally, we are both fascinated and repelled by guns. They play a huge role in our love of action films and our fears of criminal violence. There are deep divisions in knowledge and communication between the communities of people who do and do not own guns. The reality of guns is obscured and shaped by the stories we tell about them.

In my early 40s, I took up hunting and became a gun owner. Crossing that divide taught me a lot about why we have such a hard time talking and thinking about guns.

Transcript

Credits

The music is “Dirt Rhodes" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons - By Attribution 4.0.

The cover art features “Concentric squares forming a geometric maze pattern” by Cansu Sarp.

Aphantasia refers to the absence of internal sense perceptions when remembering or imagining. It means knowing that you just ate a delicious chocolate cake, but not being able to re-experience its taste in your mind. People with visual aphantasia don't generate an image in their mind’s eye when hearing words like “apple” or “tree” or “dog.”

The brain’s image-processing and memory systems are involved in a range of conscious and unconscious experiences. Aphantasia is associated with a range of consequences, including impaired autobiographical memory and, potentially, less emotional awareness and empathy. It's an under-recognized aspect of neurodiversity.

Steve explores this experience and reflects on the uncanny fact that other peoples’ consciousnesses can work differently than our own, in more or less subtle ways with far-reaching effects.

Transcript

Selected Research

Beran, Michael J. et al (2023). Assessing aphantasia prevalence and the relation of self-reported imagery abilities and memory task performance. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2023.103548.

Blomkvist, A. (2023) Aphantasia: in search of a theory. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12432

Blomkvist A, Marks DF. Defining and ‘diagnosing’ aphantasia: Condition or individual difference?https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2023.09.004

Delem et al. Complete Aphantasics Process Emotions Differently, But No Less Efficiently: Evidence of a Non-linear Relationship Between Visual Imagery and Alexithymia. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/es425_v1

McCormick C and Lange S (2025) Missing images: autobiographical memory in Aphantasia and blindness. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcogn.2025.1644533

Monzel M, et al. Aphantasia within the framework of neurodivergence. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2023.103567

Monzel M, et al. Affective processing in aphantasia and potential overlaps with alexithymia. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bionps.2024.100106.

Wicken M, et al. The critical role of mental imagery in human emotion. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.0267

Zeman, Adam. Aphantasia and hyperphantasia: exploring imagery vividness extremes. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.02.007

The music is “Dirt Rhodes" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com).

The cover art features “Concentric squares forming a geometric maze pattern” by Cansu Sarp.

Something Interesting is an audio essay anthology that explores the philosophical, the political, and the personal.

I’m Steve, your host. My background is eclectic. I headed to university to study Applied Physics but wound up doing a PhD on Holocaust memoirs. I've been programming computers since I was a kid, and when I escaped the academic world, I worked for years as a web developer. More recently I’ve been a digital writer and producer working in climate change, human rights, and public history.

So I’ve always appreciated and used both sides of my brain. I love statistics, science and code but also words, ideas, and interpretation.

I'm fascinated by how we construct our selves and our stories to make meaning out of the unlikely enigma that is our shared existence.

In each episode I address a topic that intrigues me and matters to me in some more or less intimate way. In the first season I explore things including body image and masculinity, confidence and uncertainty, aphantasia - or thinking without images-, and birds.

I'm not presenting academic research here but these aren't just hot takes. I play with ideas, make connections, and generally explore the complexities involved in the perplexing, brief, and beautiful experience of being a person.

I’d be honoured if you’d join me.

Credits

Written, recorded, and produced by Steve McCullough.

The music is “Dirt Rhodes" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons - By Attribution 4.0.

The cover art features “Concentric squares forming a geometric maze pattern” by Cansu Sarp.