Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. And I was gonna say Jerry's here, but she totally flaked on us.
And this is stuff you should know. Yeah, I've never wanted to be able to make a dolphin sound.
More in my life.
I mean, that was medium better than I could do.
Well, let's hear yours. I put I've heard better out there.
No, I mean I can't. I don't even want to try. Okay, how about this bet my nose. I'm a dolphin.
That was good.
A dolphin that speaks English is pretty impressive, Chuck.
I like that interpretation.
Yeah, Usa, so USA and Canada. So we're talking today. The reason we're trying to speak dolphin, Chuck, is because we're talking about anim communication. And just to clear things up right out of the gate, we're not talking about animal communication where we try to teach animals to speak human languages, whether it be sign language, English, whatever. Yeah, we already did that in our Live Coco the Gorilla episode.
Yeah.
Now we're going the other way here because there's a whole other tranche. As the French would say, of research that is going into listening to, decoding, understanding and potentially speaking animal animal languages.
Yeah, and this is one. It's like one of the rare cases whereas we'll see for a lot of year, science was like, animals don't do this, Like they grunt at each other, they make little instinctual noises, but they're not really communicating with each other or us. Don't kid yourself. And this is a rare case where I'm like, I don't care what science says. My pets speak to me and I understand what they're saying.
Yeah, no, this researching this, I was haunted by the ghost of Tracy Wilson. Do you remember like how hard core she was about not anthropomorphizing years back?
Yeah, sorry, Will, Yeah, sorry Tracy.
I do it.
And Tracy's a cat person, I know for it, she refuses to speak to her cat. No, I'm sure that's not true, but yeah, I mean that's a that's a fair point, and I think we've made that point many times whenever we've talked about pets like communicating or I think anytime we talk about pets, we kind of both agree that no, there's they're obviously communicating in ways we're just not fully aware of. And it's actually pretty anthropercentric to just assume that because we don't understand it, they're
not doing it. Luckily, Like I said, there's a whole tranche of search that is assuming no, these these animals have communication patterns that yeah, kind of follow the same general idea of human language. Yeah, and as such we have a chance of being able to understand it. But the whole, the whole thing is based on this idea. Like you said, science has long thought like that there was not that any any sounds they make were instinctual,
that there wasn't any purpose behind them. It was just that it was an involuntary response to something that evolution had kind of bred into that animal. And that was also predicated on this idea that Renee Descartes put out there, which is animals have like no inner lives whatsoever, only humans do.
Boo.
Yeah, I'm very disappointed with Descartes, and I know we've talked about this before, probably multiple times, but it bears repeating because he set that tone for centuries to follow.
Yeah, oh for sure. But I mean you needn't only look at your dog and to a certain degree, your cat but you know the first couple of animals we're going to talk about that Olivia helped us with this that she was keen to point out humans have been around for a while and you know, communicate with if you are the owner, slash, you know, mother, father, caretaker of these animals. We're talking about dogs and horses, and if you have ever had a dog, you know what
at least this one thing is. And that's called puppy dog eyes. And this is a trade. It's actually a muscle called the loam, the lam, the levator anguli oculi media alis cristo. It's a muscle in the eyebrow basically
of a dog that evolved from a wolf. Like They've done studies and found that wolves don't still have this or wolves don't have this right and that the only dog out of like the eight breeds they studied that didn't evolve this way was the Siberian husky, which is I guess closely related to a wolf.
It's a wolf posing as a dog.
And I don't know if you've ever known huskies. I'm not knocking any breed. I like huskies just fine. I've known a few, but and I've never been able to have a good connection with them. Yeah, and that may be part of the reason is that there haven't evolved as far away as as you know we have with our other domesticated friends.
That's a great point.
But they have done studies. There was one published in the proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences who studied dogs out for adoption at like a you know, what do you call it? Well, I can't even think.
Of the word an adoption dry.
Sure, it wouldn't a dry, but just in the in the pound.
Okay, what do you call those? Though? An animal shelter?
Animal shelter. You know how the easiest word won't come to you sometimes.
Yeah, I do. I've been there, buddy, it's very frustrating.
Anyway, sheltered dogs. And they found they studied all these dogs, like hundreds and hundreds of them over long periods of time, and the found that the dogs to use these lone muscles to make their eyes bigger and raise that inner brow were adopted quicker.
Yeah.
I think it has to do with exaggerating the shape of the eyes, which, as we've talked about the Kinder schema. I believe in the science of cute Yeah, that would just make them automatically cuter.
Yeah, bigger eyes. I mean, that's why those Disney characters have big eyes.
But the exactly, but the point of this is that dogs. We have clear evidence that dogs evolved a way to be expressive through their facial expressions in ways that affect humans. And that's a form of communication, exactly. That's just one form of communication. So it isn't anthe promorphizing to say that, you know, dogs have emotions and that they express these emotions like things like being happy to see their their friend,
their human friend. There's a guy named ecologist Carl Sephina, and he points out that his whole thing is like dogs love us. Clearly, it's clear as day. Anybody who owns a dog knows this, and anybody who says otherwise is just being a real stick in the mud, basically. But he pointed out that really the the whole thing
broke open. Finally, Descartes Smelly Corpse was finally cast off of the animal behavior field in the sixties, I believe when observational studies of animals really started in earnest thanks to people like Jane Goodall and I can't remember who her Lewis leaky that those people were coming back with report. It's like, guys, these are these animals clearly interact with
one another in ways that humans would consider empathy. They're communicating, they're doing all sorts of stuff we supposedly think they can't and then today it's being demonstrated. All of these these observations are being proven because we've fashioned MRI machines that dogs can go in, and we don't like, sedate the dog and put them in there. It's not going
to have any effect. They've made these open machines and then they kind of introduce them to the dogs, and the dogs free to come or go in the MRI, and if the dog says there long enough, they can study the dog's brain activity and what they're seeing is Nope, these these dogs are smart. They definitely have an inner life, and most of what we're taking as emotional communication is probably totally correct.
Yeah, and if they sit there long enough, they're good boys and good girls.
That's right, and they get treats, that's right.
We also have horses. If you want to look at another animal that humans have probably had the longest relationship with, and there's a horse trainer slash neuroscientist, which is a very handy thing if you're going to talk about animal communication. Her name is Janet Jones, not the former gymnasts who was married to Wayne Gretzky. Remember, Oh, I knew.
That name sounded familiar, but I didn't know why.
I say former gymnast, former actress. She was a gymnast too, though, right.
I haven't paid that much attention to Wayne Gretzky's marital.
Life anyway, different Janet Jones, and she said that horses and humans are are different because humans evolved into predators, horses evolved from prey species, So like we have different ways of looking at the world when you're riding a horse around outside, and we communicate that to one another, you know. Also throwing the fact that horses have a three hundred and forty degree range of vision with those awesome, humongous eyes on the sides of their heads.
Yeah, that last degrees really ticks horses.
It really does. But if you're like, if you're riding along and a horse, a horse might be scared about. And Olivia uses a great illustration of like an umbrella opening. It might spook a horse, but the human's like, Hey, that's just an umbrella. So they're gonna, you know, sitting
atop the horse. They're going to relax the horse by you know, I'm not a horse rider certainly know how you do this, but by moving your body and flexing your muscles in a certain way with the rhythm of the horse to let them know that it's cool.
Right.
So, what Janet Jones is basically saying is she wrote this really cool article called Becoming a Centaur and aon is that through this communication that horses and humans have have co evolved together to understand with one another and to be able to train one another with you're becoming like kind of a super organism for that time where you are a top of horse, yeah, and the horses below you and you guys are working conjuncture together, sharing sensory information.
I love that. I want to ride more horses in my life.
There's a that's a great, great thing to try to do, Chuck, I've.
Only done it a couple of times that I loved it.
I haven't for a really long time. I used to as a kid a lot more. I have it on the prairie.
Yeah, when you were when you were westward bound.
Yeah, in the wagon train.
Birds, we're gonna talk a lot about birds, because obviously bird vocalizations are you can just listen to birds and and tell that they are specific and that that probably means something. But humans and birds interact in different ways around the world. Specifically, a couple of tribes, the Jahua people in Mozambique and the Hods of Tanzania both use what are called honeyguides, and they are birds that they
can call. They each you know, use different calls in their inner respective places to call over these birds, and the birds come a flying in and say, hey, follow me and we'll show you the honey, and they go and get the honey. And if you're asking, like, well, why in the world would they do this, it's because the birds get the wax after they're finished, so it's a mutually beneficial relationship.
Yeah, And they've actually tested to make sure it's not just the presence of humans making sounds that catch the birds attention and then the birds associate humans with getting honey. They've tested other like control sounds, but there are specific calls that Jahwua people use. It's like a bird something like that, and that is what the honey guides respond to. They don't respond to hey, honeyguide or anything like that.
They respond to this call that the Jahua people have been using for countless generations, and that the Jahwa have been passing down from generation to generation. That also means that the honey guides wild birds, not tamed in any way. They're not coerced to do this. They're wild animals who clearly communicate with humans. They're passing down that that burr hum sound that a Jahua person makes in the woods means go find that person and take them to some honey,
and they'll they'll leave. The honey comes for you. Like people and birds passing down this common information that forms the symbiotic relationship.
That's nuts.
Yeah, And I imagine if they said, hey, honey guides, come over here, the birds would say, why else speak in English?
Right?
That's really weird.
Yeah, it happened to burr hume.
They're also, of course, and we're not going to get, you know, too much into this, but you know, for hunters, all kinds of mating calls and and I guess you don't have to hunt to use a maiding call if you want to. If you want to call a mooseover just to say hello, you could use a moose mating call, but all kinds of and it's not just mating calls, but usually it's some kind of mating call for any kind of game that you're hunting, or ducks or stuff like that.
Yeah, I crossed that part.
Out those people communicating with animals at the very least.
So you mentioned birds and how we're going to talk about birds a lot. But birds are just an obvious place to start, and that's where humans kind of started in tracking animal communication, whether they realized it was animal communication or not. Bird song has always kind of captured the human imagination and apparently back in the day they started to try to assign musical notation to recording bird
song by hand on paper. Good luck, right, And then as you know, the technology progressed and we got better at recording and reproducing sound. One of the things that we really started compiling a lot of we're bird song. Bird songs is bird song plural and singular?
I feel like the kind of word that would be I think, so.
Bird's song guy.
And there's actually a really great collection at Cornell. There are Ornithology Lab has what's called the McAuley Library. And I've got this app called Merlin. It's a bird identification app. It's free.
I think.
You just have to sign up with your email and if you hear a bird call, you just open Merlin and it's like Shazam for birds.
Amazing.
It is amazing and like it just sits there and listens and then it goes, oh is it this burden. It shows you a picture and tells you what that bird is, and you say, that's exactly what bird that is. Thanks Merlin. Merlin gives you a wink and goes back to sleep.
In your phone.
Yeah, it's It's a very popular app and very popular in my family. We use it all the time. A lot of We have a lot of identification apps that are really handy. We have like bird apps and plant of course and flower apps, and we has those. And then I have an art app where you can point it at a painting or something and it'll it'll tell you if it's in the database. Of course, it'll tell you who it is.
Cubist.
Now it'll tell you the actual artist I got, you know, Max Cubist.
So let me just set this up real quick, Chuck and I say we take a break. But although people were like, okay, animals have somewhat richer inner lives than we had always suspected, but they're still not using anything like what we would consider language. That carried on until the seventies until a couple of studies came through chick the legs out from under that what a.
Great cliffy, So I said, cliffy.
People know that means cliffhanger. I hope longtime listeners to longtime listeners. So, yeah, you were talking about until the seventies, and that's what I mentioned that science had always kind of poo pooed it, and it was in the seventies where people finally started you know, there were some sort of rogue hippie scientists here and there that was like nobody was listening to basically. But in the seventies is when a couple of big studies came out that you
mentioned pre break. One was in nineteen seventy seven a couple of primate scientists named Robert C. Farth say Farth and Dorothy Cheney, and they were working with one of those hippies, Peter Marler, who was an animal communication expert. When that wasn't cool. And they were studying vervet monkeys and Kenya, and this is a pretty big breakthrough and
pretty remarkable. They found that they they are using different we're going to say things like words for lack of a better term, sounds, vocalizations, but they used different words for different threats. So like they noticed that like something flying like an eagle versus something on the ground like a snake like a python, they would use those to indicate one or the other. And they learned this by
making recordings of it. And when they played it, sure enough, the monkey would look up into the sky or search the ground around them for the snake.
Yeah, depending on what call they played.
Back, that's right, not depending on what Brian Adams song they played.
So okay, smarty, So you can still make a case that, okay, so what they have these specific words for snake or for eagle, But it doesn't mean that it's anything more than instinct for a monkey to utter this particular cry when it sees a snake, and other monkeys to respond in kind, And it's all innate and none of it
means that they're using grammar or language. It's okay, fine, fine, just keep waiting a few more years, and we're going to go forward to Klaus Zuberbueler, great name, who is Swiss, as people who name their family's Zuber are wont to be. He studied the Campbell's monkeys in the Cote Duvoir, I believe the tomato Campbell's monkeys, and he found nothing.
Not Campbell's tomato soup.
Yeah, and he found that they actually use suffixes. Right, So if they use the alarm called crock or crack k r a K, that's how they spelled it, not the Campbell's monkeys, but Zuberbueler and his friends, Yeah, that means leopard is coming, but crack ou means it's just a general alarm like lookout or heads up or something like this. They can also like supplement crack or crack oo with booms that they will make. It can mean
like come this way. They can mean that there's a falling tree branch, depending on if they amend it with the suffix Ooh. So Zuberbueler is saying, like, guys, this is grammar. Those are words. This cannot possibly just be instinctual. And even if it is instinctual, then that would suggest that animals, at least some types of monkeys have a language instinct too. Who that's a whole other ball of wax,
like we talked about before. But Zuberbueler's like, dude, come on, and people started to finally be like, all right, fine, we'll kind of get on board with this idea that the animals are using something like language possibly.
Yeah, And he even, you know, as an example of how it's something that humans can potentially understand once they learn it, he was warned off by a leopard by hearing the leopard call apparently, and this was in a radio lab at one point shout out to Radio Lab, Yeah some of the ogs like us. But yeah, zuber Bueler was like, hey, you know, I heard them sound the leopard alarm, and that meant that I needed to to, you know, be watchful.
Yeah they weren't. I didn't understand. I didn't go listen to that episode of Radio Lab, So I'm not sure if they were warning him or he was just paying attention that they were.
I think it's that okay, So I think, but who knows, Maybe they're like Zuberbueler.
He spoke, he spoke Campbell's monkey for that moment and it helped them out. Yeah, sure so, and it wasn't just a zuberbueler who did. Apparently other animals, including birds and other monkeys that live around Campbell's monkeys have learned what crock or crack means too and will respond in kind.
So there's evidence that there's interspecial communication, and not necessarily that monkey talking to that bird, but that bird just from being around these monkeys using language, picking up certain words and speaking monkey ease, even though the bird actually speaks parodies or something.
Yeah. I mean, it's not any different, I think than you know. I have cats and dogs, and they each have their own respective feeding times and programs and systems and treat systems, and sometimes one will get a little of the other. Like, for instance, my dog Charlie will lick the wet cat food spoon after I give them
their wet cat food. So now Charlie knows when I say, uh, do you want your good stuff, which is what I say to the cats, and they come running in there for the wet food, Charlie knows, Hey, that's when I get to lick that spoon. So I'm speaking English and each of these animals is understanding what I'm saying, even though for Charlie I'm speaking cat, although that's really not true. You know what I'm saying.
No, I know what you mean. You know what I mean.
It holds up and it applies. It's also you can make the case very much like an English speaking person in America who's got a bodega down the street. M h understands what ka pasa means or aii or something like that.
Right. Yeah, it's think this.
Living in proximity of people who speak other languages, you pick up other languages. And that seems to very much be analogous to what we're talking about with the birds living around the Campbell's monkeys.
Yeah.
I guess the true comparison would be if my cats made a distinctive meal when they wanted, and who knows, they might when they want that good stuff, and that that signal. Charlie.
Yeah, but I think your analogy still worked.
Okay, thanks man, No problem.
You want to tell them about Con, I'll.
Leave it to you.
It there's a biologist name Con slobotic cough slobota. Oh No, that's not right at all. No, it's not slow bod Chikhov.
Oh, nice work. I think you totally nailed it.
Yeah, oddly enough, Con is the one that throws me. I've never heard that as a first name.
Con like Con.
Yeah, right, this is just gone anyway. That person is a biologist and they study prairie dogs and that they found that they have very distinct sounds that when they're talking about predators that basically say what kind of predator is coming, how what color they are, how big they are are, how fast they're coming at us, And they
can combine all those sounds in different ways. If it's an let's say it's an animal they've never a predator they've never seen, they can combine those other words to kind of say this is a new thing and not the whatever hunts a prairie dog.
Right Like if you saw a somehow a terrasaar came through a time warp into example, modern day Atlanta, and we were standing outside and we didn't know a TerraSAR because we'd never seen one before. We might say something like look a flying green dragon monster. And that gets generally the point across what Slobodchikov found is that prairie
dogs do the same thing. Yeah, and that they also have a tonal language very similar to Mandarin, where different changes in intonation of the same phoneme mean totally different things, and that they layer these different tones, that these prairie dogs language may actually be more complex than other languages in in that use that are used by humans.
Yeah tonally right, Oh.
I thought you were making a joke, like totally.
No, no, no, tonally yeah, tonally tonally speaking, not like the number.
Of words or whatever, totally tubular.
Uh.
And that they he fed all this stuff through a computer to pick out like just very I called that, by the way.
I know, but you're giving me nothing today, are you, mac as I keep fooling you these days?
Yeah, maybe that's it, okay to the max. Uh. So he fed this stuff into a computer so they could analyze, like, you know, stuff that humans can't even hear, like a program designed to analyze little minute differences. And what they found out was when they did experiments of like human beings walking and approaching the prairie dogs, they would say something different, for here comes the tall guy and the hat rather than here comes the short woman in the high heat.
Right walking through the prairie.
Yeah, you know, because all those short ladies and high heels.
Right, and the tall man in the yellow hat.
Yeah, I'm not sure what happened there.
So so things are starting to kind of pick up here. There's a one more we need to throw out that really had a big effect on demonstrating language use among among animals, and that was among Japanese tits using grammar.
These are birds, by the way.
Cute little birds. Yes, thank you for rescuing me from angry parents. And they have a distinct sound for snake.
Yeah.
And if you say that, if you take that sound, I'm not quite sure what the sound is, but I believe it's more than one part. And you play it out of order, it means nothing to them. To the birds, But if you play in order, they're like, oh my god, a snake ware and they've they've That shows that there is grammar, there's word order mountains. And if it were just innate, if it were just an involuntary reflex, it
wouldn't matter how you said that. If they heard one of those tones or whatever, it would it would evoke some sort of reaction or response. So you can speak Gibberish to Japanese tits just by switching the word order or the order of the sounds, which is the same thing, basically switching word order.
Yeah, pretty cool this, you know. Now we get to the question of is this something that they've learned or is it instinctive, Like are their older counterparts teaching in them these languages? Are they born with it? And we have a couple of really cool examples. One is something we talked about at length in the b episode, which is the waggle dance that honey bees do. Basically to
show another bee where the food is. They use their body position in relation to the sun and do this little vibrating waggle to indicate the distance, and that's how they tell everyone like, hey, let's go find this honey. In nineteen seventy three, a gentleman named Carl von Frisch won a Nobel Prize in physiology by translating this dance
and kind of figuring it out. And then just this year in twenty twenty three, they did a study about whether this was learned or something they're born with, and they found that it's super cool, but it's a little bit of both. So they got little baby bees who hadn't seen this waggle dance yet isolated them, and they found that they actually did try the waggle dance, so it is somewhat innate something they're born with, but they
weren't very good at it. And when they compared those to other baby bees who were living with adult bees who were ostensibly teaching them this dance, they did it much much better, were way more accurate as far as the distance goes. And so they found that like, yeah, they are born with it to a certain degree, but they get better at it by being taught.
Yes, and just a teeny teensy bit of it is mabelin.
Right, all right, there you go, you heavy?
Yes, thanks you.
So there's so bees that's a wiggle dances is almost just entirely incomprehensible to us, except for Carl von Hirsch.
He figured it out.
A much more closely relatable to us are hand signals, the communication that a lot of the great apes use. And what they found is that across apes there's similar similar gestures for similar meanings, but that groups and different species can use slightly different gestures. Whether it's a hand gesture, I think chewing on a leaf a certain way is flirting, there's a lot of different communicative body language or body gestures that apes use, but that they can be slightly
different based on groups, which is a dialect. A dialect is the use of a similar language or the same language in slightly different ways based on your group, your culture, your geography, what region you live in. It's exactly the same thing as the distinction between soda or pop or coke depending on where you live in the United States.
Same thing, same meaning. Those are all English words, but you would say that based on where you live or where you were raised or the culture that you were raised in.
Yeah, and you know, chimpanzees, of course, get a lot of research on stuff like this, and I think people are more apt to believe that a chimp would do something like that because they're just more like us. But they found the same thing in all kinds of animals, one of which is the naked mole rat, that they respond as far as the dialects go, they respond to soft chirps from people in their own colonies more than they do those a similar sounding soft chirp in a
different colony. So, in other words, it's a different dialect, and we're going to be doing one on naked mole rats at some point.
Easy it is.
I forgot forgot how much I love this animal from watching the great documentary Fast, Cheap and out of Control by master documentarian Errol Morris. And we'll talk about it when we eventually get to that episode. Okay, so, same great doc I have a recommend it though. You want to hear something super amazing? Yes, do you remember?
And I think our Evolution of Human Intelligence episode we talked about how they think the word he might actually be so old that Neanderthals might have used it, like it's one of the oldest sounds that humans make. There's the hand gesture for come here that you use where you kind of point right in front of you with your fingers downward.
M Yeah, apes, apes use that.
Oh wow, we still use the same hand gesture that we used back when we were.
Full on great apes.
That's awesome.
Isn't that amazing?
Ye?
It just works so well. Why why fix what ain't broke? We decided over millions and millions of years.
That's super cool. I think we should take a break because we have a star of the show that's about to appear several but a big star of the show is about to appear in Communication and that's called the Whale. And we'll be back to talk about wales right.
After this, okay, Chuck.
So, in addition to the Naked mole Rat episode, I want to do an episode on the Save the Whales movement that.
Was oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay, we're.
Gonna do that, okay.
But central to that was a guy named Roger Payne, who I'm sure will come quite a bit in that episode, so we won't get into him too deeply, but he was a I believe, a biological acoustician, some really arcane specialty made he Basically, he, I guess, had friends in US Navy listening stations that had been set up to eavesdrop on ro Soviet submarines, and those navy stations were turning up these amazing recordings of whale songs that people just didn't realize existed up to that point, and Roger
Paine wrote a science article on it that came out in the early seventies, and then simultaneous to that, he introduced it to the larger public, not just the scientific community, with an album called Songs of the Humpback Whale. It was released in nineteen seventy. It is recordings, I think, a thirty five minute album of recording of whale songs. It went multi platinum because I imagine that you could take acid or smoke pot and just sit there and zone
out to that for hours. But also it really dovetailed with the nascent environmental movement that was coming along at the same time too, and that actually helped contribute to the Save the Whales campaign that was highly successful just from releasing that album.
Yeah, I've listened to it today. You can stream it anytime you want. It's I'm sure you listen to it, right.
I didn't.
I found it distracting, Like even though it's instrumental silent, I was my mind kept being like, what the hell is that? And I couldn't concentrate, so I did turn it off.
Oh interesting, because I found it to be because I can only listen to very specific kinds of music when I do this study stuff, like mainly it's Brian Eno and now songs of the humpback Whales in Brian Adams and Brian Adams. It was good though I like it. I mean it's not it's very much background music and it's not even like a like I would defy anyone to even say, like, oh, if you listen to this like a melodic and it's like a song, it's really not.
It's whales making noises. But I just found it very relaxing.
Yeah, it is.
I can imagine like if I were, if I were just kind of sitting around zoning out on that, it would be extraordinarily pleasant. But my brain just wants to focus.
Yeah, on acid on PCP. There are all kinds of whales, though, and they have all kinds of communications that we've learned about over the years. The sperm whale they have what they call like a coda click pattern, and it depends It's kind of like a dialect as well, I guess, because it depends on what clan and clans are, you know, groups of huge, huge groups of whales. Sometimes there are thousands of them, made up of smaller groups, usually five
to ten female adults and their kids. But they get together in these big clans and the different clans have you know, variations of their language, and when they have overlapping territories, they get really really distinct because they're overlapping, so they can tell one another apart.
Yeah, they have like a clan signifier that they use identify themselves to others, right, because these whales don't really navigate the world by eyesight, they mostly do it from sound, so that's how you would do that. And these clicks apparently can last about ten milliseconds, but they're two hundred and thirty six decibels in volume, And to give you a a comparison, that's the word I'm groping for. Totally gunshot is one hundred and forty decibels. Okay, okay, your
pain threshold starts around there. So if you happen to be sitting next to a sperm whale underwater when it let out one of these clicks, it would blow your ear drums right out and possibly your entire head.
I can only picture you now underwater, sitting in your don't be Dumb chair, just floating above it or standing awkwardly beside it, yeah, or underneath it, or who knows, things got weird.
Yeah, it did get a little weird right out of the gate.
Really well, that was the whole point. And I love for your Instagram birthday posts. When I ask people to make their favorite Josh moments, those a lot of don't be dumb in there. I don't know if you noticed.
I did, and thank you for that. That was extraordinarily kind of you.
Of course, man, that's all true, but people love. Don't be dumb.
I get it, like I get it. Everybody just shut up.
No, it was great. Baby sperm whales and orcas have like baby talk. They babble just like a little human baby would. When they're learning. Newborn orcas make a really high pitched call. It changes as they grow into adults into a completely different sound, and it starts at about two months. The adult sounding stuff they start to learn, basically, it seems like it about two months, and then for years and years until they hit pubert. They are learning new vocalizations aka words.
Exactly like the development of human kids too. Yeah, orcas all so very much like those birds that live around the Campbell's monkeys. They can learn the calls of other species too that they live around. Apparently, orcus can understand what bottlenose dolphins are saying to one another. Again, bottlenose
dolphin is not trying to communicate with the orca. The orc is just eavesdropping and if it hears like O, there's some really great salmon over here you're clear, the orca will be like, I'm going straight to it because I love chinook salmon.
Yeah. The dolphin actually has my fact of the podcast that I can't wait to tell Ruby later on what they name themselves. Within the first few months of being born, they create a very signature whistle to identify themselves, so they you know, that's their name.
Yeah, And so I really want to make sure that this lands because sperm whales have clan codas you're saying to other sperm whales, I'm a member of the Jamboree clan or whatever whatever they would name themselves. Sure, it's like in click sounds, Yeah, but that's for their clan membership, not them as individuals. Bottlenose dolphins name themselves as individuals, like this is my name. I'm Josh the dolphin. Good
to meet you. That is what they're doing. Like that, it's that level of identity, individual identity that they're using to introduce themselves to other dolphins.
Amazing it is.
That really is one of the facts of the podcast. In the podcast chock full of facts of the podcast.
So we should probably talk about the brain a little bit, and like, you know, the question like have we ever actually studied the brain of these animals to see if there are anything like humans, because we know so much about human brains and the areas of the brain that handle communication and like emotion and stuff like that that
comes out through communication. And yes, they have. And we're gonna talk about something called spindle cells, which were discovered in eighteen eighty one and then basically went away and were rediscovered in nineteen ninety five. And these are specialized neurons that are in two very specific brain regions, the ACC, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the frontal insula the FI.
And they've basically established that both of these regions of the brain and humans are where we experience our emotion and are really important for monitoring ourselves and our bodies and how we feel, like are we in pain? Are we hungry? Did we goof something up? Like self monitoring?
Basically yeah, and not just self monitoring like on the individual level, but in relation to other people, like you said, like did we goof something up? Should we feel embarrassed? Have we made a social gaff? All of these things are kind of controlled self monitoring, self reflection by the
anterior cingulate cortex and the frontal insula. Right, So our ability to empathize, essentially is what we're talking about, is from the activity of these two and they're characterized by a large number of spindle cells, and only spindle cells are found in these areas. Okay, so we're like, okay, spindle cells, that's the seat of empathy, of emotion, of understanding other people. Well, it turns out that I don't know if it's neuron for neuron, sperm whales have more
spindle cells than human beings do. Yeah, okay, so we have really good evidence and it's not just sperm whales. There are other cetaceans. A lot of the great apes have spindle cells too. Don't ask how we know this, by the way, but where we've found that they have the makings of what it would take to empathize with others.
And if you put that together with the assumption or the growing understanding that they're communicating in very deep levels, it would make sense that if we can decode what they're saying, we'll find they have quite a bit to say that we could conceivably, you know, understand and connect with.
Yeah, that's I mean, that's just incredible.
It really is, because what we're seeing with those spindle cells is they're not like, you know, I'm hungry, let's eat that snake. And that's like the extent, the most fascinating thing a chimp says on any given day. Who knows what they're thinking, Like, it just opens up a whole universe of possibility about what they're thinking, what they're feeling, because bear in mind, they're also experiencing life in the universe, in the world and everything in a totally different way
than we are. So the idea of being able to tap into that and then to share our experience with them, I mean, I can't imagine what just massive impacts that would have on humanity and hopefully on the world and in general if we could do that.
Oh yeah, well, and to be able to figure a lot of this stuff out, they've they've we've long realized that some of this stuff is just beyond our abilities. The crow is one example. They use, like have a lot of different vocalizations of varying pitches and durations and inflections and rhythms and cadences, and there's just no way that humans could listen enough basically and isolate these crows by sex and age and social status and where they are and to be able to really learn all of
this stuff. So, you know, we talked about AI and large language models recently and got a few emails from people that are like, you know, there seem to be a lot of fear based stuff in this, which is true, and you guys didn't focus on any of the great
possibilities and maybe we didn't. So here's one cool thing that AI is gonna potentially do and that they're already starting to use, is helping out just sort of like we have figured out or how AI is working with large language models as predictors of like how a human might type of sentence that makes sense, and doing the same thing with animals basically and trying to figure out their language.
Yeah, just detecting patterns, figuring out what words are important, how they're being used, all this stuff. They've already got it. I think Deep Squeak was the first one that analyzes rodent sounds. And there's a couple of groups. One is seti ceti cetacean translation initiative project that's led by a
guy named David Gruber. They have there. The way I saw it put is that they're going all in on one plan, the EC two clan of sperm whales off the island of Dominica, and they are completely observing and monitoring this clan of sperm whales twenty four hours a day, every day of the year. They're down to using robotic fish that are gathering video and audio and everything that swim along with the whales. They know everything that these
whales are doing at any given moment. And so not only are they getting these whale songs and collecting them to feed into this the large language model to understand it, they're all so notating this stuff so that the context is also understood too, because what they what they think is that a different click or coda depending on the context, can totally change meaning. So they also need to know this too. But it's a huge undertaking. They have like
tens of thousands of whale song right now. To probably crack this language, they're gonna need millions. So it's they they started on the road, but they've got a ways to go.
Yeah, And it's like, I think what they're looking for is that next level, which is not oh wow, the whales told other whales where the good fish were or whatever, is they want answers to things like do whales tell stories, like very rudimentary stories to one another.
Or very advanced stories? Why does it have to be rude to artry?
You know?
Yeah, exactly do they if something like something big happens to a whale clan, do they talk about it afterward? Like a week later? Does someone bring this up? Do they do these maths in any way? And these are all like questions that would just blast open the door, like if answered, just blast open the door of our understanding of how animals may talk to one another.
Yeah, so SETI is eavesdropping in order to understand what whales are saying. There's another project called the Earth's Species Project ESP that is in part looking at types of whales not only to learn what they're saying, but to speak to them directly. So the difference between the two projects is almost like the difference between SETI and Mehdi as far as searching for alien intelligence is concern. It's
very similar in nature. But one of the things that Earth Species Project is trying to do is map all species languages to find universal terms or universal concepts and understand the different words, so you could translate tiger into whale, into human into you know Japanese tit.
Right, or if they're like conceptually like you were talking about, are there overlaps in things like grief or joy or these other like big sort of umbrella experiences that seemingly any living thing could.
Experience right exactly, and like you said, it would blow things open it totally. Some people are like, this would change humans forever, Like how could anybody eat meat after that point? If you can understand a pig is saying please don't kill me, Please don't kill me while you're killing it, right, you couldn't do it, and if you did, people would stop you kind of thing. Other people are like, well, I'm worried that we're going to use it to manipulate animals,
and people will probably try to do that too. Up the outcome would likely be both, like humans would be changed, our relationship with the animal world would be forever changed for the better and the worse. And that's just kind of how life goes. But that kind of change, I can't imagine how amazing it would be to witness that.
Yeah, I also thought this thing, the one thing you said was really cool about, like because the idea of like all right, let's say we could only get there like or understand. You know, I think who was the guy that was named.
Garber, he's the head of setting Ruber. Yeah, Gruber, Yeah, yeah, Gruber was.
He was like, you know, everyone's really excited. He said that also could be a real letdown. It could be like the do talk is just super boring. But the idea that you know, this thing that you said about, like, well, what if we could communicate, what.
Would what would we have to talk about with the whale?
And that's where you start to look at like larger commonalities of living things.
Uh.
And in the case of a whale, like you know, I got kids, You got kids. I love to swim, I love to sleep. We're both mammals, like we got
we have a handful of things we could actually talk about. Uh. And then the idea of like objectivity as a scientist comes in because it's and not objectivity in that like I really want this to happen or not, but objectivity of just like an experience that a whale can understand, can't even understand, like being dry, Like we would talk about being wet in a different context that a whale would because a whale would just say, like, what do
you mean wet? Like all is wet exactly, and we would say no, like wet's when you take a shower or get in a swimming pool.
But the hope is is that if they are capable of empathy, they're probably capable of metaphor, and that we could explain things to one another like prairie dogs do, like yellow tall human inhabit getting getting ideas and concepts across just enough for the other one to kind of understand things that are totally foreign.
To them, or whaling ship nearby swim the other way exactly.
There was a I saw somebody theorize that you could teach like a large language model to analyze and learn to speak teach itself to speak whale. But because we don't understand how large language models actually work, the AI and the whale could have a conversation and we would have no idea what they were seeing.
It's frightening, it is.
It's frightening, but it's also like wah wah, hilarious too, Like imagine putting all that work into it and that's the outcome.
Yeah, you'd have to.
Build another AI to tell you what the first, AI is talking about let's do it cool, pretty neat stuff.
I agree, And I feel like we're not done with this topic, you know what I mean?
Oh, okay, I think.
There's more more to come, all right. Oh, by the way, there is a listener who is Did you see that email that has grouped our stuff into uh tranches sweets?
No, I didn't see that one.
I'll make sure I'll forward it to you. I haven't even answered him back yet, but his name is Robert Fiddler. Ironically enough, because he's fiddling about with with our content and he has created sweets and subsuitees a in a spreadsheet for us.
That's awesome, Thanks Robert.
And it's she's looking over it. Justice system, police, true crime. Those are the big ones. Economics, finance, atmospheric science, weird, natural disasters, natural resources. Boy, this is amazing.
Yeah.
I haven't even really looked through it yet, but anyway, shout out to He called himself Robbie, Robbie Fiddler. Yeah, maybe we could publish it at some point or something on our website.
Oh I have to copyright Robbie Fiddler.
Yeah, we'll see anyway, did you say you listener mail? No, Okay, why don't you set me up then in the traditional way.
Chuck's feeling like the chatty Kathy, so that means it's time for a listener mail.
There you go, Hey guys, I'm an eleven year old Canadian living in Australia and we've been listening to your show my whole life. My dad's tell me he would listen to stuff you should know when cuddling me in the middle of the night when I was just a bbe. We love your podcast and hope you make many more for many years to come. We hope to see a live show soon. I love it when you guys do mysteries because they're one of my favorite things to listen
to on your channel. You've expanded my imagination and creativity and intelligence. Me and my get into big conversations about your episodes because you're so intriguing, and we discuss what we've learned and what we think. I'm just emailing you to let you know that my dad and I are traveling across a big chunk of Australia on a road trip in July to see the Australian Zoo. My dad has so many stuff you should know, just to listen to in the way, and I'm really excited to listen
to the podcast and go to the zoo. Oh and your jokes are pretty funny, but I make them even funnier and we all have a good laugh.
Nice, he's playing off jokes. It's collaborative.
I love it. So that says love dictated but not read from Reese.
Reese, You're pretty cool. I just have to say.
Yeah. And a little request from Reese, I imagine the samed at you please do one more of the voice from the last Halloween special. It's my dad's favorite.
Yeah.
I gotta think that Reese is talking about my friend Spiegel.
Yeah, I have to go back and listen to Sniegel again because he apparently was off last time I tried it.
So I'm not sousy.
Yeah, from what I hear, all right, some people emailed in and were like, that was not right.
All right, I'm shooting let down an eleven year old. I'm fine if you're fine.
Yeah, I'm prepared to do that.
All right.
Well, just listen in recent Josh. I will brush up on his smigle.
And eventually recent when I do it next, you can be like that was for me.
Exactly.
Okay, Well, if you want to be like recent show how super cool you are naturally without any effort whatsoever, we would love to hear from you. You can send it in an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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