Humanity and the Deep Ocean | James Nestor

[Music] to introduce James I don't know how many people were here last week for aerial Waldman's talk on the future of human space travel there there are a few in here great so this is a really interesting talk in the wake of that because Ariel was talking about how we're going out into the universe about the technology the machines that we need to build to go out and explore further outward what James's book and the the people he documents in deep are finding things deeper within this planet finding things below and actually not just using technology but actually finding things within themselves to be able to explore deeper into this planet so we've got an amazing hour in front of us let's give a big round of applause to James to get that start [Applause] thanks a lot about ten years ago my friend Steve called me up and said hey man do you want to go to this lecture some astronauts gonna be speaking about how an asteroids gonna hit the earth and we're all gonna die and I thought awesome astronauts asteroids space post apocalyptic prophecies I'm in that was one of the first ever long now seminars and was right over there in the Presidio and since then I've been to literally dozens and dozens of these things so it's really thrilling for me to be here and giving you all my my own personal post apocalyptic prophecy tonight so I'm gonna give you a little review on what you're gonna be seeing here about two-and-a-half years ago I was sent by outside magazine to cover something called the world free diving championships now this is a very weird competition where people test each other to see how deep they can dive on a single breath of air and I didn't know too much about free diving hadn't done it didn't know anyone who had I remember being out there in Greece it was held in the deep waters and kalamata Greece outside of the marina and being on this platform and watching this guy take a single breath of air up turning his body and sinking and sinking some more and sinking some more until I couldn't see him four minutes later he came back up he had just swum 335 feet on one breath of air now I thought it was totally impossible I had no idea the human body was capable of diving to such depths so for a minute I thought wow there must be an air tank down there so I checked that out online and found if there had been an air tank and if he would have actually breathed some of that air his lungs would have exploded as he ascended to the shallower depths he would have died it's only the human body in its natural form can we withstand a fast 300-foot underwater ascent so I started checking out some more information and found out that not only do humans share these amphibious reflexes with whales dolphins and other marine mammals but we also share a number of other extra senses with these animals that help them navigate through a dark cold environment humans have those too that's what I ended up writing this book about and that's what the rest of this presentation is about so the second we put our faces in water something amazing happens your heart rate starts to lower about 25% of its normal resting rate blood starts rushing from your extremities into your core your brain waves soften you enter this very meditative state the deeper you go into the water these reflexes will react more and more until a very deep depths you resemble only a passing resemblance to your terrestrial form scientists call this transformation the mammalian dive reflex or more lyrically the master switch of life and they've been researching it for about 50 years and the term master switch of life describes not one but many reflexes that affect the brain lungs and other organs that work in concert with a bunch of other reflexes and senses within us to protect us from the immense underwater pressure of a deep dive they essentially turn us into deep-sea diving animals now ancient cultures knew all about the master switch and used it for centuries to harvest sponges pearls and food thousands or hundreds of feet below the ocean surface certain sailors that went out to the South Pacific and Japan reported seeing divers dive down about 150 feet and stay down there for 15 minutes at a time on a single breath now I know what you're thinking that sounds totally impossible and all of the scientists that heard these reports consider them either fallacious or complete exaggerations they didn't believe him even up until the 1950s scientists said the deepest a human could dive in the water and survive was about 100 feet any deeper and her lungs would collapse well today free divers are diving to depths of 700 feet on a single breath of air and the longest breath old underwater is 12 minutes and 30 seconds so that's just two and a half minutes short of these made-up reports by these ancient sailors and consider we haven't been doing this for that long competitive diving has really only been going on for about 15 years so in a matter of years maybe five maybe seven maybe even sooner we'll be diving down to 1,000 feet and holding our breath for over 15 minutes now I know what you're thinking how is that possible how can the human body survive and depths that are 30 times that of the surface well in water the deeper we go the more pressure increases and the more air contracts sea water is 800 times denser than air so this pressure increase happens very quickly a dive down just to 10 feet is equivalent to diving down an atmosphere 10,000 feet instead of a bag of chips you know when you're driving up to the mountains or boarding a plane bag of chips will inflate well everything in the ocean deflates the lower and lower you go even human lungs so human lungs at 33 feet will be half their volume at 66 feet they will be 1/3 of their volume at 99 feet 1/4 of their volume and on and on and on so you can imagine how small they would be at 300 feet the equivalent pressures of a deep dive down to those depths would probably injure or kill us but not in the ocean because we all came from the ocean and each of us literally has an ocean within us human blood holds about a 98% similar chemical composition to seawater we're only missing a molecule of iron seawater is missing a molecule of magnesium the human fetus seen here develops in an amniotic fluid that's about 99% similar to seawater our first characteristics are fish like we grow fins first instead of feet and our one misfiring gene away from growing fence instead of feet or hands were born to dive the human infant when placed in water can hold his or her breath comfortably for about 45 seconds at a time and she'll begin breast wroking like this little person and open her eyes and they're very comfortable in water and we only lose this ability when we're taught how to walk but we're gaining it as you will soon see it's pretty easy what I'm going to show you now is a free dive by a French diver named gr me Neary this has been viewed about 20 million times on YouTube so the second Neary goes in the water something amazing happens his heart rate is gonna lower blood is gonna start rushing from his extremities he's gonna enter this very mellow space at around 35 feet that's where he is now he's gonna enter something called neutral buoyancy where the water is no longer going to be pushing him up towards the surface as it would in a swimming pool but it's gonna start sucking him down deeper and deeper and will keep sucking him down this video is supposed to be in real-time so if you get bored during this talk you can try to hold your breath as long as he's going to right now so you're gonna see he's gonna hop off this cliff here and he's not gonna kick his legs he's not gonna move his arms he's just gonna effortlessly float down this isn't a video trick this is what happens at this depth something freediver is called the doorway to the deep what everything reverses everything changes at around a hundred and fifty feet his lungs will be about the size of two baseballs and his heart rate will lower even more free divers have recorded heart rates as low as 14 beats per minute that's about a third of a person in a coma and some free divers have recorded heart rates as low as seven beats per minute now according to our understanding of human physiology that's totally impossible that shouldn't be able to support consciousness and yet deep in the ocean it does and still no one knows exactly how so he's a protein about 300 feet and this is when the master switch really starts kicking in blood is gonna start passing through his organs and the alveoli in his lungs will engorge with blood to keep them from collapsing these reflexes only happen in deep water it's the only way to trigger them and we all have them so his body isn't really anything special all our bodies would be doing the same thing his is doing at this depth so as he dives even deeper something called the spleen release happens this usually only happens during times of shock when you get in an accident the body reflexively releases new oxygenated blood into the bloodstream but it also happens in deep diving and free divers like Neary use this as a turbo charge to dive even deeper so he's reached the very bottom now is the really hard part he needs to make it back up and still be conscious but you can see he's very experienced at what he's doing he is French so he's doing a little French miming hair for you he's in the invisible box and he's he's back up and since the ocean is pushing against him he can literally crawl up this cliff as though he were crawling up it in regular air it just takes a lot longer as he continues to go up all of those master switches within him are reversing so his mind will wake up his heart rate will speed up all of the blood within his core will begin pushing out to his extremities the human body in its natural form can't get the bends when they're diving on your own power that only happens to scuba divers we know how to process that exchange of nitrogen gas as you see as he approaches he's gonna purge all that nitrogen gas from his body take a big deep breath and get ready to do it over again so that is the master switch of life we are not the only ones to have the mass switch many marine mammals also have it seals dolphins whales use the master switch to dive to depths much deeper than we can this guy the Weddell seal can dive down 2500 feet and hold his breath for 60 minutes at a time now researchers who were studying these seals in the sixties found that they actually seemed to gain oxygen the deeper they dove now everything we know about physics and mammal physiology says that's impossible they can't gain oxygen these guys don't really care about our rules they do it all the time they come up perfectly healthy and they've probably been doing it for about a hundred thousand years so we have more in common than just the master switch with oceanic animals we also share many of these extra senses that I was talking about to survive in a lightless cold and pressurized environment animals need extra senses to navigate communicate and see what good our eyes when you're in complete blackness all the time you need another way of getting around in humans many of these senses are latent and mostly unused but that doesn't mean they've gone away we still have them and with a little practice we can reengage them the first of these I'm going to talk about is magnetic reception now we've been taught that animals have five senses with which we can view the world or perceive the world taste touch smell sight and hearing but the problem is an attractor so ssin what good is sight again when you're cruising around migrating from one island thousands of miles away and back again it's of no use so they have to be using something else researchers in the 60s were wondering how these animals were able to to migrate in these amazing patterns and they started putting satellite transmitters on sharks what they found was amazing sharks were migrating hundreds of miles from one island to the other and back again but what was even more amazing as they were doing so in perfectly straight line which is a really hard thing to do when you're dealing with ocean currents and you're not able to see anything so at the same time that marine researchers were looking at these sharks and wondering what was going on a German zoologist by the name of Frederick Merkel started noticing some pretty peculiar behavior with European Robins this is a European Robin he noticed that in the fall the Robins always hopped south in the spring they always hop north so even in enclosed rooms when they couldn't access the Sun or the Stars they would always hop in these directions so Merkel did what many good scientists before him have done and he started running some pretty weird experiments he got each of these European Robins got a bunch of them put them in a bucket turn the bucket upside down and on the floor of that bucket was a little touch sensitive pad that would record what direction the Robins would be facing in in inside of this bucket where obviously it was pitch black he did this over several months and the results were always the same and spring they would always be facing north in fall it would always be facing south in other words this was the exact same direction the Robins would be flying in during their normal migration patterns they were hardwired to be facing in these directions and they always faced in these directions with one exception when he put the Robin's in a magnetically shielded chamber this is what happened to their sense of hopping and their sense of direction it totally disappeared so what was interesting is the scientists that saw Merkel's studies and talked to him about it thought he was a complete fraud they said this is pseudoscience they called his studies a complete sham 20 years later what did we discover that not only birds but a host of other animals like even bacteria has a magnetic sense so Merkel was right researchers believe that all of these animals are able to home in on the subtle energy the Earth's magnetic field which is pictured here and they're able to use this energy as a kind of natural GPS to find their way around the globe I actually just got this tattooed on my back a couple of days ago just to remind me so now I'm gonna show you something else in 2003 I believe it was some researchers attached a satellite tag to a great white shark named Nicole three months later this tag came off and the researchers uploaded all the data and they were able to see where Nicole swam how far how deep and all that what they found was amazing Nicole swam 7,000 miles within three months that's pretty good but what was even more amazing is she followed a straight line from South Africa to Australia and six months after that the researchers were in South Africa at the exact same beach where they had tagged Nicole and who did they see Nicole she had swam back probably following that same tract so how is this possible many researchers believe that these little dots on the shark's nose and have something to do with it these are called ampullae of Lorenzini and sharks have about 1500 of these and they're sensitive to the slightest change in electric fields they allow sharks a remarkably acute electroreceptive sense of everything around them great white sharks are able to sense electrical fields as small as 125 millionth of a volt these guys the bonnethead sharks are able to detect electrical fields as small as one billionth of a volt just to put this into perspective for you man I was holding a one-and-a-half volt battery one of those batteries that you put into a camera when the teeny ones and I ran 400 miles of wire from this battery down to Los Angeles this shark could sense the electrical field off of that battery 400 miles away so this sense is five million times more sensitive than any human sense and is by far the most sensitive sense we've ever discovered on the planet so next time you're swimming at the dolphin Club you can remember that sharks aren't really smelling you there honing in on your electro receptive field that is coming off of your heart and brain waves so it was a pretty frightening thought when I learned that as I surf down at Ocean Beach all the time so anyway sharks do it bees do it birds do it we probably do it too humans have probably using have been using some sort of magnetic cept of scents for centuries ancient Polynesian sailors could navigate hundreds of miles across the open ocean and usually always make it back to the same exact spot now they could use celestial navigation for some of the time solar navigation for some of that other time but they couldn't use both all of the time especially during stormy weather so how did they do it then there's these guys the googoo Emma thir and Australian Aboriginal tribe they incorporated cardinal directions into their language they didn't have words for right left forward or backwards but they did have words for north south east and west if one of these guys wanted you to make room for him on a bench he wouldn't ask you to move over to the right he would ask you to move south they didn't bend backwards they meant eastwards or northwards so the only way this group could communicate was if they knew their exact position on the globe at all times which is a very hard thing to do at night and a very hard thing to do in an enclosed space but they weren't alone dozens and dozens of cultures also used cardinal languages just like these guys the chech all of central Mexico they again didn't have words for right or left but they had words for north south east and west in the 1990s a bunch of research took one of these Ketchel speakers and placed him in a room they blindfolded him and they spun him around about 25 times and immediately asked him to identify where north south east and west was this guy did it without any hesitation 20 times in a row and I think they just gave up and moved on after that so you know thank God for the 70s here's a here's a picture from some 70s experiments in the 70s and 80s human magnetic reception was all the rage they conducted over 1,000 experiments in this stuff and almost all the time people who were blindfolded twisted around magnets on their head whatever they were able to point in their home direction with one exception when the experimenters would tape a little piece of magnetite to their foreheads they lost all sense of direction now researchers had done this years before they had taken a turtle and they had taken a bird and taped I'm not talking about a kitchen magnet I'm talking about a teeny teeny piece and it's really sad if you ever see these videos because turtles just kind of swim in circles lazily they have no idea how to make their way around so something was interesting I saw a couple days ago that the Nobel Prize in science just went to some researchers that identified something called the internal GPS within cells this these cells are able to activate and stay activated only when an animal is facing in one particular direction which is how we're able to find our way around and remember where we've gone we don't know if these cells are banged narrow receptive yet but it makes sense that they would be there doing more research in that so I know what you're thinking is like it seems impossible that we would have the sense when we can't find our way out of a shopping mall or a parking lot the fact is we just don't need it today too much but we did need it about 400 years ago and before then this is what Manhattan was supposed to look like about 400 years ago you need a pretty good sense of direction to make it through here and especially through the heavily forested areas this is what hatton looks like now you need zero sense of direction to make it around here the pattern of settlement roads and other landmarks that under grid our modern society make it easy to know exactly where we are and of course ever we're in doubt you pull out your phone from practically anywhere on the planet you can see exactly where you are through GPS so our keen sense of magnetic reception has probably become latent and mostly dormant just like our need to free dive to the seafloor and grab food but that doesn't mean it's gone away it's probably easy to revive it if you really want to just close your eyes let your body do the rest the last thing I'm gonna talk about is echo location this is not so much a extrasensory ability as it is a very acute sense of hearing now dolphins and whales use echolocation to see with sound better than we can see with our eyes a dolphin can sense a rice grain from 230 feet away with echolocation and a sperm whale can see human in water from a mile away echolocation is so powerful in these animals that it can penetrate through flesh and give them a view to what's inside of the things around them they essentially have x-ray vision and this is just an animation of a sperm whale using echolocation and looking at everything around him now we're not that good at echolocation but we are pretty good this guy is Brian Bush way he's completely blind he lost his eyesight when he was 14 years old I'm not talking legally blind he has zero optic nerves he can't see but he is taught himself echolocation the same echolocation that whales and dolphins and even bats use to see in his surroundings he is able to ride his bike through busy city streets by clicking and listening for the echoes of those clicks processing where everything is around him he goes camping alone in the woods for weeks at a time when I was with him he could tell the difference between a tennis ball and a Rubik's Cube from across a dining room table just by clicking when researchers took Bush way and some other human echo locators and put him in an fMRI and it looked at their brains as they echo located they found that the visual cortex started lighting up to the researchers there was no difference from what a bush way and the other human echo locators were seen with sounds as it is what we were seeing with their eyes so different frequencies they were just processing them in the same way so we're pretty good but we're nowhere near as good as the sperm whale the clicks that human echo locators emit are about 60 decibels the sperm whale can click at about 230 6 decibels it's the loudest animal on the planet sperm whales can hear each other in the ocean from hundreds even thousands of miles away some researchers believe that they're able to keep in contact with one another through these clicks on other sides of the planet these clicks are so powerful in the water that they can blow out your eardrums easily and they could actually vibrate a human body to death so when you're diving with them it's a little sketchy what I'm gonna show you now is a video of some free divers that I ended up hanging out with I wasn't with them during this expedition but I was about six months later we went on a trip together and I had the same experience so of the clicks you're gonna be hearing are not coming from a boat they aren't coming from a camera these are the whales clicking these guys literally from the inside out to see what they're all about and the clicks were so powerful that one of these guys put out his hand to stop a whale from running into him and his hand actually was paralyzed for about four hours afterwards so he learned not to keep out his hand in front of him when he was diving this is an emerging discipline of research and it's pretty sketchy but um this is what it's like I'm not going to talk over this we're gonna play this kind of loud so you can really get an experience of what this is all about okay so I know what you're thinking why the hell would anyone want to do that I know that was pretty loud for all of us but trust me in the water it's like four million times louder and once you're hanging out with the whales for a long time this didn't happen to me but it happened to these guys their bodies started heating up from being pelleted with all of that energy after a while so again this is pretty sketchy stuff it's strange to do but it's important to note that these guys are fascinated by whales they don't necessarily want to free dive with them this closely but they have to because it turns out the only way to really study these animals up close is by free diving with them by approaching them in your natural form and interacting with them in that way scuba doesn't work it's too loud submarines don't work same thing robots don't work they freak them out but when you free dive with them if this amazing paradigm shift occurs and they not only don't swim away but most of the time the whales will turn around and welcome you into the pod and sometimes they orient themselves vertically and do this very weird sort of new-age thing around you as their as they're flicking it's extremely intense so the next question you're probably asking yourself is like why research sperm wells well it turns out that those clicks you heard they aren't just used for echolocation sperm whales and dolphins also use clicks for communication and inside of those clicks is probably one of the most sophisticated forms of communication we've discovered on the planet could be more sophisticated than human language now I know that sounds completely nuts to all of you and it certainly sounded nuts to me when I first started researching this stuff a couple of years ago but just consider a couple things the sperm whale brain is about six times the size of ours this is a picture of sperm whales facing us head-on and that top thing is their nose and behind that is their brain now sperm whales also have a neocortex in humans the neocortex is believed to govern higher level functions like conscious thought future planning and language well sperm whales not only have a neocortex but their's is about six times the size of ours sperm whales also have spindle cells these are long and highly developed brain structures that neurologists have associated with compassion love suffering and you guessed it speech all of those things that make humans human and separate us from great apes well sperm was not only have spindle cells but have them in a far larger quantity than we do and they've had them for 15 million years longer than we have so why do they have such an evolved brain why do they have a neocortex why do they have spindle cells what are they doing when they float side by side and communicate with each other back and forth like this again these aren't echolocation clicks these are communication clicks and when you free dive with them they first pepper you with echolocation clicks and then they start sending you communication clicks they are trying to contact us in some way we know they're talking we just don't know what they're saying but hopefully in the next few years of freediving marine research we just might all of the sounded pretty nuts to me a couple of years ago when I first met these guys but after seeing it myself and seeing the data they were collecting I realized this may actually be an attainable goal to try to make contact with these animals the reality is now I don't think we really have time to doubt these kind of bold brave outlyer groups doing this kind of research the fact of the matter is we're running out of time the ocean is changing the seas are rising 90% of coral reefs and the Caribbean are dead and they're not coming back I heard that about 50% of the Great Barrier Reef is dead and it's probably not coming back a hundred million sharks are killed every year their stocks probably aren't coming back so environmental hazards on the open sea like oil spills trash sound pollution nuclear waste all of this or some of this is killing whales and dolphins and species we don't even know about yet so these animals may be gone before we have a chance to fully grasp their amazing abilities and whatever we learn about them will lead us inevitably back to ourselves over the past couple years of free diving with these researchers free diving with these animals learning about my body's own and fibia SRI flexes and magnetic reception and echolocation it's become clear to me that we don't quite know what we are yet and what our potential is we don't know what we've come from what we are now or what will evolve to in the next 10,000 years so applying the many mysteries still untapped below the ocean surface seems like a pretty good place to start looking for answers thank you very much for coming down tonight appreciate it [Applause] questions I wanted to start off with art so were you so I think of this story as you came in as a skeptic and went native so you you didn't know you're gonna do were you a diver beforehand just had you done I have I had done scuba diving I have been next to the ocean my whole life and so I've been surfing forever I've been swimming in the ocean forever but I've spent all of my time at the surface I never really bothered to look below that so this was my first foray into that underwater world yeah and what was what was it like on your sceptical journey on your journalist journey to to see these things that seemed like they weren't real and how what was the most challenging to actually accept I mean did you did you or did you quickly kind of convert to what I guess all these things are realer or were there things that were harder for you to accept and what evidence convinced you well you can only listen to people talking about these experiences for so long and you can only take what they're saying with you know certain grain of salt you want to believe them but you also want to experience it yourself so I had no intention of freediving when I first started this research I just wanted to write about these guys write about their research and to sort of see the science and what they were doing but it became very obvious very quickly that if I was ever gonna truly understand what they were doing if I was ever gonna truly understand some of the things they were talking about I had to get in the water with them and so that's kind of one thing led to the other and I ended up becoming a free diver and learning how to do this along with them and you know but also you see something like that whale footage and it makes you a little apprehensive whales have sperm whales have eight inch long teeth they usually eat 60 foot long squid so they could chop us like in a millisecond but they don't and that was really interesting to ponder why they aren't eating us why they're communicating with us and and how long did it take to learn freediving what was that it took me forever because I had been exposed to free diving through only competitive diving so at Greece I mean I was mystified seeing someone dive down 300 feet but I saw a guy go into cardiac arrest not make it up to the surface I saw people come up with blood all over the faces I thought was the most insane and ridiculous sport sport I'd ever seen in my life but luckily while I was there I met all of these guys much more philosophical spiritual science-based researchers who are using free diving to apply something else other than a competition and we're using it for science and for a greater good and that's who I ended up hanging out with and spending all my time with so there's a little bit of don't try this at home involved it's it's there's it takes well you know these competitive guys they will dive past the point where their body tells them to stop free diving is a very it's very common sense your body lets you know it has various triggers that let you know hey maybe you should get up and grab a breath of air in competitive diving you learn to turn those natural triggers off which by nature is very dangerous so I listen to those and any reasonable free diver is gonna listen to those and in that regard if you do this responsibly and if you don't take it as a competition but understand it is more of a meditation or yogic practice it can be a very safe thing never do it alone always do it with someone so alright what's who's got a question out there on the stairs yes shallow water blackout oh ok ok so what what is shallow water blackout ok um what what happens when you go deeper and deeper in the water your lungs shrink well they reinflates as you come back up but there isn't enough oxygen in your blood to pull from your blood and reinflates the lungs so it creates a vacuum within your lungs within your chest and there's a reason why Neri expelled all of his air at around 12 feet that's when the greatest pressure happens in the ocean and so you have to expel all your air at that time a shallow water blackout is is a serious danger to people who push beyond their boundaries and it can happen to anyone if you if you keep pushing over and over the physics of it are very complicated that's that those are the basics of what happens to in a shallow water blackout but that's another reason why you never ever-- freedive alone 99% of blackouts and freediving which are rare in recreational diving happen within about 5 to 7 feet of the surface if you have someone there that grab you take you up you're gonna be just fine if you don't then you can be in serious trouble so it is a danger and that's why I don't feel like I should I should be speaking about you know the 20 different things you should be doing before free diving take a course with an experienced person if you want to do this and learn all the safety first and how common is I mean are there other courses there there's becoming like a lot of courses of starting up mostly in San Diego where you can do this stuff you know a lot of people app dive and you hear about how dangerous AB diving is it's because these people have never taken a course in free diving they don't know what's really what it's Oh abalone diving sorry abalone has nothing to do with your abdomen maybe there is something all diving that downtown but I don't know about it another question back there [Music] well I think it's only been until very recently that we haven't needed to to use diving you look at cultures around the world and every culture that was by the ocean was free diving almost every culture I mean even up into the Baltic Sea there's evidence of free diving cultures that dates back 10,000 years so you know it's just in the last about a hundred years that we've developed fishing technologies - that made have made free diving obsolete you know up until around fifty years ago there were still many japanese ama divers diving and greek sponge divers so i you know my understanding of how genetics forces can take thousands and thousands and thousands of years also with echolocation this is something i took a course little 30-minute course with brian bush way and was able to easily tell the difference between wood and glass and plaster and coroner's I mean it just clicks on very very quickly so I think we're a long way off from from forgetting all these things as far as kind of the evolutionary biology the developmental line of this are there has that connection been made before that hey we can survive you know we can handle going to these depths because you we're in we're in liquids you know that's like the ocean in the womb kind of thing is that is that something that's that you would you found sources that had already kind of made that connection or is that something I think well well yeah there's been a lot of research into mammalian dive reflex they've been researching it since the 50s and they found it in so many other animals and right now you know they're doing a lot of research with humans because these scientists will make will say the deepest we could possibly go is 500 feet and someone dives a 600 feet and they're like okay the deepest we can possibly go is 650 feet and then I saw a guy dived at 800 feet so so we keep reprising this because we just don't know the human body's potential in water yet we're not even close to understanding it so this isn't something to answer your question this isn't something I made up there's a long line of research that many people are doing at this time so the subheading of your book is renegade science that's right talk for a minute about how it's a renegade what the scientific establishment there's clearly some tension between the establishment of these guys yeah one of one of the main guys I write about his name is Fabrice Knoller and he was sailing out off the coast of Mauritius about seven years ago and he saw some whales and didn't know anything about well so he hopped in the water and he heard that clicking and he thought it was coming from a motor on the boat and then he looked down and he noticed there were whales surrounding him clicking at him and he stayed in the water for about four hours with these animals and just had this you know he's this french guy he's like mind-blowing New Age experience so since then he tried to work with a bunch of he's probably gonna listen to this Fabrice I love you thank you but uh he he tried to work with a bunch of the universities and a bunch of different researchers and they just had no interest so he started his own research group yes he has a scientific background he was he had a lumber store and he quit doing that and he was just he's possessed with trying to figure out these animals so he's very good lumber behind he his left lumber behind yes he but you know he's very good at collecting data he's not too good at analyzing it which is why he's gotten acoustic scientists from the French Navy and all that to help analyze the data but just very quickly in that few years that he's been collecting data with freediving doing this free diving approach he has more sperm whale and dolphin footage of communication than anyone else on the planet so um that just kind of goes to show you how effective this mode of research when he first came he was free diving or he was just it sounded like you said he was just kind of he was at the surface but but something amazing I was like they're they're cool with you when you're snorkeling with them but they get really excited when you're able to dive down about 50 feet and interact with them down there and that's when they really stick around and you said that if somebody goes down with scuba gear or robots they respond very negatively scuba is is very disruptive to them and it's very loud and so usually they're not gonna stick around most almost all of the time they're not about free diving almost all the time they see you they're gonna turn around and interact with you there's a yeah rebreathers are great and there's a lot of new technology with them right now the problem is when you're on these research expeditions you I mean it looks like Manny just go out to the ocean you just dive with these whales like I want to do it I don't know the real story is like ten days in a row on a teeny boat with eight other people in the Sun without shade looking for whales so when it happens when you see them you have to act very quickly got to put on your mask and get in the water immediately so rebreathers take a long time to prepare there's a lot of little things that can go wrong and they can be really dangerous if you're not meticulous we breather will clean the carbon dioxide out of the air that that you and and will create more oxygen so it's essentially like a scuba tank but it's a closed system so you wouldn't need to if you had a rebreather you could keep keep exhaling and inhaling no problem it's just they're quite large they're little cumbersome they're hard to take two very strange places and you need to be you know very quick but there are some photographers some of these shots were shot by a guy who uses a rebreather so yeah right there [Music] really good question so how do you do citizen science and crowd source towards this the science that's going on renegade and citizen science totally interchangeable we thought renegade science found it better for the book title so we use that but he's essentially a citizen scientist doing this what's enabled him to do all of this stuff is because technology is so cheap right now he's making all of his own rigs out of stuff he buys off at eBay you know ten years ago even five years ago a lot of this wouldn't be possible so he is trying to incorporate many other citizen freediving scientists to contribute towards this research his site is Darwin dot org and you can look it up online and see what he's doing he's always looking for volunteers so what he's doing is trying to find a rig or produce a rig that anyone can wear that will be able to record these clicks in a certain way that that scientists can actually use them and would you say his next step is publicizing it getting things out in the media or is is a publishing research or making a connection into a more formal research kind of what'swhat's this goal right now absolutely everything's gonna be peer-reviewed that's what the actual researchers at the University of Paris are doing right now they're making sure all of this stuff is bulletproof because it's so insane so before he really comes out right now they're just researching researching researching trying to establish the software get all the hardware set up and and just to collect more data and his focus is predominantly on on the whales themselves not on the human aspects of it I mean there are there is clearly this is pushing boundaries as far as what we understand about how humans can go underwater but is it is that pretty much mostly in terms of the extent to which we can stay under there's he just uses free diving casually as a tool it's an effective tool and that's it there are other people pushing boundaries at the Karolinska Institute they're doing a lot of research into the mammalian dive reflex there's one guy who has developed this new way of free diving on empty lungs so if you think it's hard to dive with a breath of air imagine doing it with no air at all on you he says that this allows you to go deeper because you don't have that exchange of I tried it once and it sucked so I'm probably not gonna do it so there there are people doing a bunch of research into the mammalian dive reflex there we go so so the books been out you said about three months about three months yeah how long did it take to write it and is the book you thought you were did you start this process at where you were at in this process you're like okay I need to write this book about free diving in Tibet what not at all I had no intention of writing a book about free diving or whales or dolphins or any of that but after Greece I remember talking to my agent said oh there might be a book here and we were able to sell the nonfiction book and of course the publisher got excited and wanted a one-year turnaround I don't know if you know too much about nonfiction book writing but it usually takes three or four years and I was very arrogant I said oh of course no problem and I could do it while holding my breath we please watch this so it took 18 months and nine months of that was spent traveling so I'm catch it been catching up on sleep ever since then so it was a very quick year-and-a-half book from start to finish till when it was delivered so and it's been out for about three months yeah is there any any more percent of what you you touched on in the talk about the the bank a sense in humans is that something there's a lot more but I didn't want to totally bore everyone with the specifics there's a lot more in the book as well they've found I'll just give you one little yeah one little piece so about two years ago researchers found a protein in the human eye called the h cry 2 protein that is Magneto receptive and from that they were saying this has probably been used for you know years and years and years to help us orient towards magnetic north what happens when the polar shift happens you know comes and that's when magnetic north will shift to magnetic South who knows it might be mean broad extinction for everyone who has magnetic reception but I guess we'll have to wait and see so was anyone here for our endangered language talk that we had a lot of our staff so so actually I think there were two topics here some of the the clicking the clicking languages which is I don't know if we've confirmed there's direct connection with the echolocation but certainly if there's some suggestions of that and then the cardinal languages with which and another talk in this series we talked about let's have one last question there's somebody who's read the book that's right there okay well this is sure I'll try to recap this very quickly is a very long story John Lilly was a Nero physiologist at the National Institute of Mental Health that created something called the sensory deprivation tank now it's been rebranded as the float tank because that sounds better so he got very interested in dolphins he was convinced they knew how to talk and ran a battery of amazing tests with the Navy and one test they claim to have deciphered and translated 242 words of dolphin whistle into English and then back again and then it gets very weird a bunch of conspiracy theorists come in the guy who did this a lot of this work with lily was a Harvard scientist suddenly died and the reports went missing forever and and then Lily got really into LSD and started shooting dolphins up with LSD and trying to have dolphin English language immersion workshops which totally worked so they they worked and then he got so depressed he knew how intelligent these animals were their brains are bigger than ours he got so depressed that he let all the dolphins free and said I'm never gonna do this again and he at that time completely destroyed the field of interspecies communication with all of his research and it took about 35 to 40 years for it to come back and it's just barely scraping back but it's all under the pall of Lily's shooting up dolphins with LSD and holding dolphin emergen length language workshops so these legitimate researchers are just having to constantly fight against this new age storm that seems to push in from all directions to do real legitimate science in dolphin communication all right well that's an amazing maid's place to end this so thank you everyone you've been a fantastic audience let's have one more round of applause for Jane thanks a lot [Music] you

Channel: Long Now Foundation

Views: 73,766

Rating: 4.9446321 out of 5

Keywords: Environment, Evolution, Language, Psychology, Science, Oceanography, Ocean, Ocean Life, Deep Sea, Freediving, Whales, Sharks, Extra Sensory, Echolocation, Sperm Whale, John Lilly

Id: aH9boP9pksM

Length: 56min 20sec (3380 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 08 2020

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