Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain Stuff lorn Bolba bom here. Despite the prevailing belief that humans dominate the animal kingdom when it comes to smarts, we're actually ranked as the third smartest species on the planet, according to author Douglas Adams in his series Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But joking aside, there is something to be said for Douglas's idea, at least in terms of the species his narrator ranks as second smartest dolphins. His
stories rank mice as first. We're pretty sure that doesn't hold science water. But when you correct for differences in body mass, dolphins brains, and the brains of bottlenose dolphins in particular are pretty comparable to the brains of humans. They even come in second in terms of relative mass, above all other species. Their brains also have many similar
features that are frequently correlated with higher brain functions. Bottlenose dolphins likely possessed at a language comprehension skills, making them seemingly able to understand simple series of signed gestures, both in their semantic and syntactic senses. Bottlenose dolphins can understand that generalized words like ball can refer to sets of objects with similar characteristics. They could comprehend basic numerical concepts, and they're able to understand and react to questions about
objects outside of their immediate vicinity. They process information received both acoustically and visually, allowing them to recognize scenes presented on a television screen, something that chimpanzees must be trained extensively in order to do. The dolphins can then respond to the image with accuracy comparable to human response levels, even when the visual cues are delivered abstractly. Dolphins also
comprehend pointing, again something that chimpanzees typically struggle with. Considering that dolphins don't have arms, this ability is perhaps all the more razing, although researchers suspect the dolphins experience with
echolocation prepares them for the concept. Dolphins also seemed to demonstrate self awareness by using mirrors to recognize and inspect marks placed inconspicuously on their bodies, and they demonstrate a perception for and memory of recent activities, exhibited by their ability to either repeat or choose new behaviors to perform as directed by trainers. Dolphins are excellent mimics both vocally
and behaviorally. Interestingly, they're able not only to imitate each other, but humans as well, meaning that they can map their body shapes onto ours using equivalent portions, such as tails in the place of legs. Bottlenose dolphins have also been known to teach each other new tricks. For example, and injured dolphin was taught to tail walk while recuperating in captivity. After release, it began passing the technique onto other wild dolphins.
In another case, dolphins demonstrated their adaptive problems all in capabilities by picking up the habit of swimming with sea sponges on their snouts, which armored them against the prick of spiny fish. A third interesting scenario, albeit back in the lab, allowed bottlenose dolphins to choose and I don't know option during a difficult test. When the dolphins selected that option, they were likely considering their own thought process.
This indicates the cognitive concept known as meta cognition, which some consider an indicator of self awareness and higher consciousness. Today's episode was written by Jessica Kuthman and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other topics that would surely say so long, and thanks for all the fish if they had the opportunity to visit
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