Kensy Cooperrider is a cognitive scientist, writer, teacher, and podcaster.
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From Buddhist monks to Renaissance musicians, fingers and palms once served as portable, visual, and kinesthetic tools for storing knowledge.
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Kensy Cooperrider is a cognitive scientist, writer, and podcaster dedicated to exploring the intersections of language, culture, and the human mind. After earning his PhD in cognitive science from the University of California, San Diego in 2011, he has focused his research on the unique traits that set humans apart from other animals—particularly in the realms of communication and cognition.
Cooperrider’s wide-ranging inquiries have led him into the history of measurement, the evolution of language, and the peculiar ways we use our bodies to think, from pointing gestures and finger names to hand mnemonics and time concepts. Beyond his academic work, he is a prolific communicator whose writing has appeared in publications such as Aeon, Atlas Obscura, and Nautilus. Cooperrider also hosts and produces the podcast “Many Minds,”which examines the diverse varieties of intelligence and mental life within and beyond our species.Educational Activities and Resources
Gesture and Cognition
History and Pre-Modern Studies
This course studies spontaneous gestures and their relationship to speech, cognition, brain, and culture. Topics covered include gesture and language development, gesture and conceptual systems, speech-gesture coproduction and its brain bases, evolution of language, and gestural behavior in special populations.
Literature and Cultural Studies
This course offers an introduction to structure of natural language, and to the cognitive processes that underline its acquisition, comprehension, and production. Covered topics include findings from linguistics, computer science, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience to provide an integrated perspective on human language abilities.
Literature and Cultural Studies
This course offers a specialized seminar that dives into how human minds vary across different cultures, languages, and environments.
Literature and Cultural Studies
This foundation course provides an introduction to the descent and development of the modern human mind and its exceptional capacities for innovation and creativity.
There are now more than seven billion people in the world. They speak an estimated 7,000 distinct languages, make their livings in countless ways, and worship different gods; many live in vast metropolises, others in lowland jungles or arctic wildernesses, still others in temperate suburbs.
Do all these people, across all these diverse cultures, think in the same ways? This course reviews research suggesting the answer is a resounding “no.”
Students consider evidence that people around the world have different concepts of space, time, numbers, nature, and more; that people in the “West” and “East” process information differently; and that there is a cognitive divide separating people in small-scale traditional cultures from people in globalized ones. Students also examine how cultural tools—from ancient ones like writing and abacus to recent tools like GPS and Google—have shaped and continue to re-shape human cognition.Media by this author
Feature | January | 2026
Metaphors matter: They enliven human speech and prose, animate arguments, and stir passions. Some metaphors power political movements, while others propel scientific revolutions. These little figures of speech delight, provoke, captivate, shock, amuse, and galvanize. In one way or another, metaphors just seem to help people make sense of a messy world. But how do they do all this? Whence their peculiar powers? What does it say about the human mind—as in, that humans just cannot escape metaphors—and frankly do not want to?
In this episode, Kensy Cooperrider features Dr. Stephen Flusberg, an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Vassar College who directs the Framing, Reasoning, And Metaphor (FRAME) Lab. Dr. Flusberg and Cooperrider first define metaphors, then discuss why humans are so drawn to them, including misleading ideas people may remember from middle school literature class. They consider why some metaphors work and others flop, and how the metaphors used to describe climate change and the prevalence and potency of war varies across different realms of public discourse. In addition, Dr. Flusberg and Cooperrider consider how metaphor operates in science and in scientific theorizing, as well as assess the question of whether there are some ideas that humans simply cannot grasp literally—concepts that can only be approached through metaphor.
Other topics addressed in the podcast episode include:
- Aura farming;
- Nautical metaphors and textile metaphors;
- Outmoded idea that metaphors are mere adornments;
- Metaphor versus analogy;
- Dead metaphors and how to resuscitate them; shadows and footprints; and
- Dan Dennett’s technique of metaphorical triangulation, and the brain-as-computer metaphor (and whether it is actually a metaphor).
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