StarTalk Podcast: Cosmic Queries – Interspecies Communication

[Music] this is star talk i'm neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist i serve as the director of new york city's hayden planetarium part of the american museum of natural history right here in manhattan this as cosmic queries you know who my co-host is chuck what's up neil oh thanks for being there in arms reach of digital arms reaching digital arms reach yes exactly i feel your zeros and ones kind of touching my face right now there you go uh base two zeros and ones that's right you know what the topic is today interspecies communication ah that's just creepy well it's i mean it's beautiful but it's gorgeous not not as gorgeous as interspecies dating but hey what are you going to do what are you going to do i don't know what that means what we have is one of the world's experts on this who is a professor of psychology at hunter college and is in the animal behavior and comparative psychology doctoral program at the graduate center of cuny the city university of new york the one and the only professor diana reese diana welcome to star talk well hi thanks for having me today ed you've been out in our backyard the whole time we've been having star talk and where you been i'm here in new york here's you just right there you've been talking to other animals i think that's it yeah instead of your own damn species all right yep i've been hanging out with dolphins so let me just get the audience to know you a little better you have a a a ted talk where you share the platform with others who were trying to create something big and what was that yeah back in uh 2013 my three colleagues we said my partners on this um were peter gabriel the musician and visionary vint cerf who is the co-founder of the co-father of the internet that's right the co-founder of the internet and um neil gershenfeld who's the director of the mit center for bits and atoms okay so no matter what you guys talked about in that ted video it seems to me you have the power knowledge and wisdom to make it happen yeah given that list it's it's they're they're a great group of people to work with and we've been working together uh with where we have this idea it was actually peter gabriel who started this idea and then approached the three of us um and the idea is that how is how can we use technology um our our new technologies along with ideas that we have to bridge the gap in terms of communication with other animals we share this planet with lots of other species obviously they have brains they're all communicating we just can't crack their codes so one of the ideas behind the interspecies internet is coming up with new interfaces so that we can communicate with these other species creating artificial codes or devices that allow them a voice is the is the simplest way of saying it and then we can use these shared codes to communicate the other aspect of it is is finding new ways to decode or to decipher the signals that they're all using amongst themselves so that's the basic idea so you wouldn't you have to define communication first because i mean when you talk about all these different species let's just take for instance some insects their language is chemical so you know what what is language what is communication jacques you just nailed the big question the big question and the thing that's so under such debate so the questions first of all are we the only species that use a kind of communication that we say is language where we use signals that are meaningful and that refer to things in the environment we call those referential signals so when i point to an apple i'm using a symbol i'm using a word that doesn't look anything like an apple but it refers to that and we can use that in a shared way to communicate now bees the little bees were actually the first species in which that someone actually decoded some of their communication and got a nobel prize for it this was a long time ago because they twerk that's how that's how they talk to each other they twerk they're like yo i check it out thanks for letting me know that bees twerk that's a way of saying it chuck but it's true they move their wiggle they shake their bodies they do this waggle dance or shake their booty dance right and they communicate not only where food is outside their hive but the distance from the hive and they believe it or not they these little bees with just you know with a little brain are communicating changes in the location of the food base and they have to track the distance of the food from the sun but guess what as you know what's happening with the sun moves well rotates earth is rotating so the disc the sun is moving to them and uh they have to track that and they they keep that interest they keep that in their communication it's amazing it's amazing these little bees do that that's why they're always following cardi b so diana you literally wrote the book on on some of this you uh back about 10 years ago i have the title the dolphin in the mirror exploring dolphin minds and saving dolphin lives so you you've been your professional career is invested in trying now now dolphins have way bigger brains than do bees so presumably you chose them because of whatever similarities you can align with humans is that right yeah i mean it's interesting my background believe it or not was in theater i was actually a set designer for many theater theater thank you we won't we won't go there in too much detail but um i i was always really fascinated by animals and i had an academic background i wound up taking extra courses going back for my phd and i was reading about um whales getting slaughtered about these you know the whaling in general and i i already knew i wanted to study animal behavior and i started looking up what we knew about whales and dolphins and at the time it wasn't there wasn't that much known it was in the late 70s and i i never watched flipper i wasn't a flipper fan i used to watch lassie and um but the more i learned about dolphins i thought wow these are really big-brained complex animals and we don't know very much about them they seem to be complex in terms of these societies and the seas we didn't know much about their communication systems but again they have these big magnificent brains what are they doing with it it's bigger than our brain right they're bigger than our brains but their bodies are bigger than our bodies so when we think about brain size and think about it relative to body size it's called the get ready for this one the encephalization quotient or eq it's brain size relative to body size so dana where are humans on this encephalization quotient yeah so our brains are seven times the size they would need to be to run a body of our size okay because we think we're talking about body body weight body the body weight and the brain weight okay the brain size that way so our brain is seven times think about it as our brain being seven times the size it needs to run a body of our size for dolphins they have a brain that's about four and a half uh 4.2 or 4.3 if you want to get really specific times the size it needs to be to run a body of that size most animals are have the value of one it their brain is just the right size to run a body of that size okay in terms of metabolism and everything so so those butt heads on star trek the guys with the big giant butt heads they're really smart right they're super i mean they're like the smartest people in the universe really big brains okay so yeah so it gives us a sense now if we look at you know abs if we think about brains though it's still a huge mystery in terms of what this with a recipe is for being more intelligent you know more to have more intelligent is it the number of neurons is it the organization of a brain is it you know how the how it's all connected so that's still a mystery just turns out that if we look at animals that show uh complex social interactions and uh have a lot of complexity in their behavior they tend to be these animals that have these uh really high values in eq so those animals are animals like uh cetaceans which are whales and dolphins the great apes elephants along with us humans and then it you know it varies when you look at that sort of whole scale i always thought apes were great i i always thought so it was really smart yeah you know i knew a great ape once it was great he was great but did you get started in this at right around the time when dolphins were getting trapped in tuna nets and this was a whole huge outcry for in the fishing industry about this i i started a little bit before that i i started about i started studying dolphins in the early 80s late actually even the late 70s but i actually worked on that project to try to stop dolphins from getting caught in the tuna nets that was a big issue as a scientist i do science for learning you know the basic basic science but then i think it's really important to apply that to do what we call translational science and apply it to really help protect those animals in conservation and welfare and stop these horrible situations all right why didn't anyone try to protect the tuna somehow it was okay a netflix dolphins are not delicious well oh no i'm very serious diana yeah is it aren't you being speciesist here you're saying oh protect the dolphin eat the tuna they're both big fish in the ocean and you're dividing it up and you're showing preferences what's going on here you're making really good points neil so first of all dolphins are mammals we know that and fish and there's and what we know about dolphins right now and i'm not going to say we shouldn't be protecting fish species because it's really important to protect all species on the planet so they can continue to survive i want to say that right up but with dolphins these are large-brained highly social self-aware meaning self-aware and socially aware animals that feel pain and they can suffer and they were treated in this way in the tuna nets where they'd get stuff they would be such a drowned people were trapped drowned they would replace them because they like us and uh again it was it was just a horrendous situation okay so you're but you're admitting that you're you you you more highly value mammals than non-mammal vertebrates no it's just that can dolphin does not sound or taste good no we're not going there it's not a thing and it shouldn't be a thing okay having some of this flipper salad people in certain countries are still eating dolphin oh no and eating whale even though yeah absolutely so in japan i don't know if you saw the film the cove it wasn't it's on my list it's on my list very important didn't that win academy award for documentary or was it it was in the running if it didn't win no no it won the academy award for the best documentary i worked on that film i was a science advisor and i was actually the person that told the director about the situation because many of my colleagues and i have been trying to stop these horrible drive hunts in japan where dolphins are herded h-e-r-d-e-d heard herded um using a method where they create an acoustic uh an acoustic barrier it's called oikomi and they bang on pipes and they scare the dolphins into this cove when they're there and afterwards they're slaughtered some of the dolphins are still taken to um specific aquariums most aquariums in the world absolutely oppose this and have been working to stop it but some aquariums in japan china and a few other countries procure their dolphins from these drive hunts and these animals are are are then taken and the rest of the group is killed and they're killed absolutely in the most inhumane manner you can imagine they shouldn't be killed at all but when you see how they're killed everybody who would see this would want to stop it and it means but let's say they found a humane way to kill them you're still preferring to protect the life of fellow mammals than fellow non-mammal vertebrates as a let me say this as a marine mammal scientist i feel like it i need to have a voice in this political arena and yes i think that for dolphins they shouldn't i can say clearly these animals need protection they shouldn't be killed then we duke it out at the at the science conference because i want to protect my tuna right and the tuna scientist loses every time because tuna stupid and delicious well let's let let's try this one what if we could make sure that the population that we're conserving tuna populations and when they are captured it's done in the most humane way possible that's the win-win so why don't you apply for that they love it yeah that's the way to do it yeah it's a tough so i think we have to be humane if we're still eating animals and i think that's really critical so that's true across the spectrum of america across the spectrum yes absolutely as a marine mammal scientist i speak out about the dolphins because that's where my area of expertise is but i really vote for all adam i would rather that nobody's eating any animals to tell you the truth that's what my big push is but you know people then you have to deal with the people who want to protect plants many years ago i worked at the wildlife conservation society you know we're five zoos and i ran the animal enrichment program and i was running a dolphin research lab there and my husband used to joke he said you can't have anybody she works with over for dinner because you can't eat anything either they work with that animal or it's a plant that they're cultivating so there's nothing going on you just have to live off the air right and that that's all that's the best that you can do well chuck i think we don't have time in this segment for q and a we'll we'll start right up in segment two okay you got your questions lined up so listen from the internet you got them all there okay so when we come back more with the behavioral animal psychologist diana reese and chuck nice bring in the questions we'll be right back we're back star talk cosmic queries co-host chuck nice hey hey tweeting as chuck nice comic still thank you sir okay nice comment yes and our expert today on inter-species communication diana rhys diana welcome back to star talk thanks and we've got questions for you solicited from our fan base all across the social media platforms so chuck what do you have okay well of course you know we always start with the patreon patron because they support us financially and quite frankly they pay us yes yes there's no better support okay no better support there's no better nation than a donation anyway uh this is kyle marston from patreon um hey thanks for the kind of weird hashtag cq inner species and how could we use the periodic table of elements and chemistry to communicate with life that demonstrates the capacity for the classification of potentially intelligent as an alphabet person man woman camera tv might be considered um i'm not sure that reference so so let me let me see if i can re-word that question all right so we have the periodic table of elements highly organized achievement of our understanding of the nature of matter and materials in the world if we have an alien and we want to communicate with them do you see value in organizing information in this similar way from information that we overlap with them so that we can possibly come to a common vocabulary is it that i think that's what they're asking their chuck is it yeah i mean it's yeah if we use the periodic table of elements as our own sort of reference that's that's our preference right right i mean that's i don't know i'm going to follow up with a question but i guess this is more for neil like would that be the same everywhere i mean the stuff would be the same everything we understand about chemistry tells us that if they were far enough along they would have the periodic table of elements or have something more advanced that we haven't come to yet okay but that they would certainly have that organization yes okay so diana what what can you tell us yeah about organizing information and use that as a foundation to communicate right so first of all carl i want to thank carl for that question because it's a really cool question so if you're face to face let's say we're coming face to face or face to tentacle with an alien because we don't know right no aliens have tentacles of course and of course they well as as we've seen recently in some in some films um you know one of the beginning things is we have to figure out what their sensory systems are okay if we're face to face there's and and what kinds of signals may be perceived by each of us so there's a lot there's a lot of um first steps that we have to take now if in communication and we can come back to that in a minute i'm assuming now that we're talking about that we've received some kind of signal and we're not face to face from what from carl's question and that they've sent us something that we have deciphered as the periodic table or an equivalent of the periodic table is that am i on the right here or is is the organization of the periodic table useful to bring other kinds of communication to bear on on that encounter yeah so i mean if we know that we have some shared point of reference that the universe is organized in this particular way then we have to find a way of letting them know we're perceiving their signal it's meaningful to us in that way and giving them a signal back to say yes this has been received here is the equivalent for us and now you're trying to align your knowledge bases okay because what what the question i keep on i think i i keep on having about this is what is it in their signal that we've gotten that that lets us know that they have this organization now the other aspect of it is the question is we can say we are going to make the assumption and i think this is what you're saying neil that we have a common knowledge base of the universe if we're both intelligent species then we can encode something in a way or we have to try to encode something in a way that would be perceivable to another we'd have to either find use math and assume they know our math or know our chemistry and try to set up that communication where we're showing equivalence and use that as a bridge it gets into a common knowledge or something that's shared and finding the right way to share it and that's not trivial well it's not but i love the fact that you know as you guys are talking so i'm seeing atoms and molecules as like a base and so i'm asking this would atoms and molecules look the same to everyone in the universe as they do to us chuck you just said one of the biggest questions for me is look what if other this other intelligence doesn't see doesn't even see i mean we're making the assumption that sight that vision is going to be one of the main ways this creature would sense the world i mean it just seems it's we're such visual creatures what if they're not using sight as their main sense or it's not the same kind of site they have different receptors and we're very physiologically biased is what you're saying absolutely so how would you connect that to uh chuck you probably have another question related to this but when you try to talk to dolphins um we can't compare periodic tables of elements we can't say this is an apple what is your what's your word for apple we can't do that so what is what overlaps that even empowers you to even ask the audacious question let's start uh with something that we have in common and what would you where would you go from there let me jump to the film arrival for a minute because i think that could illustrate the point i don't know if there's a few the couple of films name arrival you mean the one where the alien visited i think they both were but the one with the the septa pod the heptapods yeah the peptopods come down and um there's the scientists the link thank you chuck for that vision like that that was my that was my heptapod uh put us his fingers up into the camera and pretending you're not squirting ink though the um um this linguist is is approached by the government and they say hey decode these aliens start communicating with them find out what they want here you know because they're they're they're trying they're scared this is an alien that's that's landed a bunch of aliens have landed and she says wait wait wait a minute we've got to back up it not that fast and when she's completely right if you're trying to communicate first of all you have to have some sense of who they are what their sensory systems are like so she spent weeks just watching them trying to interact with them creating something in common so they could start sharing and that was critical it was very very important and insightful by the writers the writer of the original story that it's not just oh you start communicating it doesn't happen that way it doesn't happen that way with dolphins sometimes you'll have a breakthrough with the dolphin rather quickly and i'm going to tell you a story about one of those breakthroughs that happened really quickly okay in a few minutes but you know she had she watched them and she started also imitating what they were doing imitation is a wonderful way to start communicating so it's if we go to another film like close encounters of the third kind that's what happened when they were started when they started communicating with the aliens remember the sounds that the alien ship was producing what did we do the people who were on earth started imitating that that kind of musical note and that musical composition and they were suddenly in sync they were communicating i recognize you i'm repeating back what you do that's the beginning of communication i'm imitating you and repeating it back now i want to jump to a dolphin situation wait before you before you give your dolph an example just back to the arrival movie for a second am i so wrong to think that i would not have sent a linguist and a physicist i would have sent an astrobiologist and a cryptographer could you tell me what a linguist has over a cryptographer in that situation because clearly they thought about that as you say they they they they knew what they were doing for their storyline it just would not have been my first thought it wouldn't have been my first thought either and i think personally i would have sent a cryptologist and someone who studies communication in other animals and an astrophysicist means like you i would have yeah i have found your vice president and it's me it didn't have to be me but it should be somebody who has some experience with just like you yes but somebody yeah in that realm i've actually yeah i actually i actually did some work with with a seti project many years ago talking about that this is a great training ground uh when we study species other species don't worry diana we would have sent you too so don't worry about it yeah we gotta wait we got your back on this okay thanks guys thank you so much what's your dolphin story yeah so we're talking about imitation and when i i had what i call my first encounter with a dolphin mind okay and i was a graduate student at the time and i was just starting my research and i was working with this young dolphin named cersei and i was asked to teach her uh to just stay with me in front of me and eat fish that had been that were three times the size of her head and uh they were frozen dead fish that were now defrosted so she could eat them and i thought well this is too big to give this dolphin so i cut them into heads middles and tail sections a little cersei readily ate the heads she ate the middle she spit out every tail and i looked at them and they had fins spiny fins so i cut off the fins thinking maybe they would be more palatable and then she ate everything now in the course of training her to stay with me while i was feeding her if she broke station that's this term we use that means they leave before you want them to i would give her a timeout which meant i would back away about 15 10 to 15 feet from the pool and and it broke her ability to interact or get fish and then i just stand there and look at her and then i would come back and punish her that's a punishment well it's a kind of a it's a way to say you've done the wrong thing okay you can think about it as a punishment but it wasn't i didn't think about it that strongly i had to say because i didn't have a shared code you've done something wrong and this was a technique that many people used with animals at the time we don't use it so much anymore you sort of say you just back away negative reinforcement yeah yeah yeah it's not it's not that you're inflicting harm on wrongdoing you're just removing something that she was enjoying exactly in that moment okay exactly so i would back away and again it could be for several seconds or you know 10 to 15 seconds you know five seconds i varied it and then i would come back and she learned hey something's wrong you know and it would get corrected and she was a really smart dolphin and she learned very quickly don't leave until i go like this at the end and it means every and i'd show her an empty bucket and everything's done um again she was young and i had to teach her this for not for me but for the people who where i was working so everything's going fine cersei's eating all the fish she's basically trained me to cut her fish just the right way i used to joke about that and um now one day by accident i happened to give her an uncut tail and cersei looked up at me her eyes got really big she spit it out and she bolted across the pool and took a vertical position and just stayed there across the pool and stared at me oh yeah oh and i get she gave you a timeout so that's where you need that music yeah at the time the mexican i mean the western standoff so what's going on here i mean she's is she really doing this it's an anecdote it's a one observation but as a scientist i thought wow if she's really imitating and using this to communicate to me that i'm doing something wrong like i commuted communicated to something you know something to her that's really pretty amazing so but i couldn't do anything with one and n of one so what i did was i set up an experiment where i was very careful to feed her properly and give her all perfectly cut fish over the next couple of sessions she never did it and then on purpose three on three different occasions i gave her an uncut tail and each time she went across the pool and did this to me that's the beginning of communication that's how it starts and again it's based on this idea i talked to you about she's observing me she's really smart and she's using something i do back and there have been cases like so she she called the timeout on you is what happened i think she did and and and i actually wrote this up better to cut my fish like that that's right i trained you to serve me how many times i'm going to teach you how to it's so hard to get good help these days stupid humans they don't even know how to cut a fish tail what can i tell you so i learned my lesson from that but i also wrote a chapter on this in my doctoral dissertation it was probably the best chapter in the whole thing i think that was the best one and it was because i partnered with her she gave me this idea and it's really fascinating because i think these are really smart smart creative animals who are watching us they're communicating back and often it's a problem that we just don't have the means or the system that we can look at it where we can show people scientifically they understand these sounds these symbols and they can use them and that's right i saw a comic once it might have been in the new yorker where these two dolphins are swimming and one says to the other speaking of humans one says to the other you know they face each other and make noises but it's not clear they're ever actually communicating with each other the dolphin analysis of humans yes and that's very much what we do with most other animals to tell you we got to take another break we only got to one question in that segment chuck who cares it's such a great conversation all right when we come back we'll see if we can bang out more than one question in the segment on inter-species communication with professor diana reese when we return cosmic queries star talk interspecies communication diana reese so diane if someone wants to see more beyond this episode how do they get uh get connected okay they can go whether or not they're human by the way i welcome all so so where's the best place for them to land for the uh they can look at interspecies dot io yes and for my research with my colleague marcelo magnasco who's a professor at rockefeller university they can put in reese m2c2 and it will get them there rhys r i e s s at r e r e i s s d i s m yeah r e i s s m2c2 and it will get them to the website our website excellent excellent well chuck this is a cosmic queries and you've only delivered me one and a half questions so far well and they were they were so good you got to up your game okay all right let's go let's get to this let's call the whole segment a lightning round okay all right all right let's do it so dan you have to answer as though this is the evening news and you have to give me a sound bite super short okay okay go tor and wellington from patreon says what kind of nonverbal communication is already common between humans and other species is it more common than we think i know my cat wants to go outside when he starts scratching the door better that than him scratching your face so we might split between domestic animals and the rest of the animal kingdom so what do you say there diana yeah so animals are communicating with us all the time and we're communicating back these are not part of science studies it's basic communication they watch us we watch them and we get the more familiar we are the more we learn to interpret that so your cat or your dog is watching you it's reading your behavior you're doing the same that's communication how about they want when they want to be subtrafugal and they want to deceive you that's a whole other situation okay deception deception is not it's not well studied in the non-human animal world yet but it's really interesting the reason why i ask is um you know i was visiting someone's home and they have a sign there because they have a lot of dogs and the dogs always sit and beg while you're eating dinner the sign says the dog has been fed don't believe is [ __ ] [Laughter] the dog will look at you like it's never been fed in his whole life oh i think our pets do this a lot my cat goes to my husband and looks like i haven't been fed in five days you know i just fed the cat you just but they know not to go to you because you you don't put up with that my cat also does it to me later if my coffin doesn't my cat does it when my husband has just fed them as well see that's diabolical thinking it's not just animals i have three children and they are the same thing okay so all right this is uh this is colton judd colton says my question is on frbs since we've detected them we've gotten quite a few over the years how confident are you that any of these could be communication from an advance of alien civilization in a different galaxy or solar system is that possible i am also a huge fan of the show i think it's awesome and you guys are doing great work okay excellent so that so diana that turns out to be a question for me these are uh frb's are short for fast radio bursts and so there are two things we have to consider here either it's a new phenomenon in the universe that we don't have prior data to inform us on and so we should study it or it's intelligent aliens trying to send us a signal okay and every time we have a new telescope that has new capabilities and and new powers we discover stuff that we've never seen before that's very natural so if i'm a betting person i would say it's probably some new phenomenon that we have yet to classify and understand and that'll be i'll think that it's that before i will think that it's intelligent aliens beaming signals at us and that's why we can't answer them because neil is like this is not the communication and they're like why won't you answer us because neil will not let us answer you it's all my fault okay [Laughter] i'm sure you have to check with everybody you know too on the planet who's listening and making sure it's not coming from a source that we know yeah look the chuck will come visit visit uh earth and say where's that guy neal tyson dude how come you're calling yo i was texting you man how can you keep ignoring my texts all right all right let's move forward uh let's keep it going keep it going keep it going um oh wow this is a great one douglas stern says do we have any idea how swarms of fish communicate like when they form a tight-knit ball to avoid predators well at least the ones on the inside avoid the president let me tell you the ones on the outside of that ball aren't having such a good go of it uh how do they know to stay in such perfect formation and dance and weave in unison hopefully humans would need uh to mimic this behavior when the aliens come so diana do we really know everything we should know about how even species communicate with themselves enough to give me confidence that you are making progress in inter-species communication because if we if we don't know why birds flock and other kind of emergent phenomena but you're trying to find out how we can communicate with another species is that putting the cart in front of the horse yeah it's a good question neil so i think what if they kind of go hand in hand with each other looking trying to decode community communication what we call interest in trust species communication between the species when i see a termite colony there's a million termites and they all seem to know what they're doing because at the end of the day they love gossip that's how they do it termites that's what's really happening you cannot shut those termites up they uh that's what's really happening so yeah i mean there are a lot of there are a lot of studies right now that have been that are going on now that have gone on to try to decode the species own signals and we do that too with dolphins we try to understand how they're using their own signals and then when we make those steps into inner species communication between us and dolphins we try to incorporate signals that they may find meaningful or useful again we'll develop a relationship with them and then we're we're not using human words we don't want i don't want to use words with them they can't produce words we've created for example we've created an underwater keyboard and now a touch screen that gives them visual forms that we know they can see and then we if they touch those forms on a touch screen they hear a whistle or that they can hear they can imitate and they get specific things so we meet them halfway using their code so so you have a giant ipad for dolphins you know what you know that's going to lead to dolphin tinder you know that swiping you know there's going to be dolphins swiping right now actually we've watched them do that movement the swiping but we when we first gave them the keyboard the touchscreen it's a four by eight foot touch screen it's actually an optical touch screen if they touch it it their touch is actually seen by cameras so it's optically sensed first day they saw this we did a we did what we called whacka fish not whack-a-mole to see if it would work and we had fish going across the screen they one of the young dolphins who had never seen anything technical like this just immediately started touching all the fish she looked like a teenager going for the fish he was great so just to be clear when in the technology their nose touching the screen is not what you're sensing you have cameras that are triangulating on where the nose touch and that gives it a coordination correct and just just to be it's not their nose their nose is actually their blowhole that's at the back of their head it's the beaker the rostrum that touches that one right now um so wait wait so that's not their nose in the front no no that's the rostrum that's the rostrum or beak and you know what here's why no here's why nobody will call it that because you got well not you diana biologists named one of the dolphins a bottle-nosed dolphin thank you there it is okay okay so how about we why don't we agree to call it it's snoot how about that it's snout if they could call it out snap i'll give you that yeah we're on the same page okay we're now communicating we have some interest species there's hope for us here okay uh that's great okay let's go to tim word he's a patreon patron who says this what tools or techniques are used to discover communication in the animal world especially i wonder how we really know what we understand an animal is trying to tell us ah so yeah like it's pretty easy to know that an animal understands us it's hard for us to know if we understand them you know um so what are the tools that say this is how we know yeah well it's not easy and we use cameras we use video cameras we use recording to other kinds of recording devices to record their sound to record uh movement and then we try to see how they use their how they use sound and movement and perhaps smell the different senses in their social interactions so that's one way but it's laborious i mean people it takes years to try to understand what signals uh what signals go with what behaviors and again but these this is what we use we have to use our powers of observation and sometimes it's just our eyes and our ears and watching that's a good way to start but then we use other recording devices and then we use computers and we use big data analysis now hopefully will help us you know coupled with us to have breakthroughs in learning about the patterns that these animals use every time i see a nature documentary and the animal's doing some weird behavior they always say oh it's a it's a mating ritual maybe maybe they're just trying to order pizza you know it's so funny you're right it it is always [Laughter] but you know so animals communicate about mating they commute about finding food but they always they also are doing a whole lot more than we ever expected and the more studies that we we read about we realize wow we never thought that animals have alarm calls and that other animals will listen to like who's in the environment which predators in the environment and then it helps them know what escape route to go to or you know each other freddie's back freddie the bully is back you know there you go right but you know just if i can share an observation with you i i grew up in the city in new york city and so the sounds of the city are actually rather soothing to me and traffic and alarm horns and sirens and people and the bar spills out into the street this this is the sounds of my own species and i'm actually quite comforted when i hear it i go into the wilderness in the woods and i've hear people say oh it's so peaceful i say no it's not there's like crickets and cicadas and there's all this noise every animal is talking to every other animal and you find that soothing i find that annoying which is why neil has a sleep tape that goes man what the hell is your problem can you see me crossing the street i'm walking over here i'm over here right that's my sleep tape that's his sleeve it allows me to sleep all right all right all right let's keep going let's keep going here we go um oh my goodness where's this great question where are you beth tomlinson says this from facebook do marine mammals have different ways of communicating depending upon where they are in the world or their geography for example a dolphin in the gulf coast uh will does it make different sounds than a dolphin in the pacific um or or does that differentiate itself across different types of dolphins so do dolphins have a universal language or do they have dialects that's what it really comes down to yeah yeah that's that's really the simplest way to put that yeah and i they we think they have dialects and even yeah so if we have and that's but we've sort of seen evidence for that for many many years um but they also so they have we don't know if there's certain signals that they share as well so for example that means across groups of dolphins it's something that a lot of us are looking at um humpback whales for example have make these beautiful haunting songs many of you may be familiar with that and i saw star trek four yeah save the whales there you go that's good chuck chuck watch out the jump on land and find you i'll go to my door it'll be a hump back there like you rank i like that imitation chuck that's beautiful um but they change over seasons without in a group of whales but in different parts of the world the songs are different for the humpbacks with dolphins they not only may have different signals within the populations but the range of the sounds they make the frequencies are different we did a study out of my lab several years ago and we showed that bottlenose dolphins in bimini use whistles that are extend over a wider frequency range than in other groups so it may have to do with their environment and what the soundscape like you were talking about neil is you know they're they're they're they're uh the window that they use maybe it's yeah friends we're in the infancy of those studies and really some of them just have russian accents and have spanish accents that's really all it is to them that's all it is that's that would be amazing you know it's just the dolphins just like hey man how are you doing all right um here we go the cheech and chong dolphin that's a different dolphin right exactly do you know real quick you know dolphins can make two sounds at the same time there's a little piece of information you might not have known that's pretty cool well is one can they make one out of their blowhole and one out of the throat or the throat the blowhole has two it's like two two pot two holes that make up the blowhole and each one there are two sacks in each so they can click and whistle at the same time we showed in our lab too that they can whistle they could do two whistle and squawk at the same time it's really cool wow is that their version of walking and chewing gum at the same time no idea all right here we go okay time for like two fast ones chuck here we go hello dr tyson dr reese um it has been stated who is this who said this oh i'm sorry their name is this is uh don rem from facebook connery yes and don says this it is said that math is a universal language which is um the basis of which the numerals zero through nine the origins of that number system has to do with the digits that we carry on our hands would an intelligent species share our same mathematics even if they had a different amount of digits or no digits at all i can comment on that i don't know it dana can dolphins count oh yeah there's been evidence that they can track uh numbers of items and and then and they can they can discern quantity differences several okay and that's really all that counts that's really all that counts correctly where are the foods the base system you use is actually doesn't matter if you don't track of a number right and what we presume in my field is since any other number base system would be arbitrary based on you have 12 fingers 10 fingers six fingers if you were going to communicate you would de-arbitrize it and just use base two which is the smallest base you can use where you can meaningfully count and so so base two that's why all computing is base two there's one reason for that zeros and ones so you'd say no matter how many fingers you had let's use base two and that would be the fallback for what this would be yeah so chuck we have time for one more just last one all right this is rasha chuck hardy i think from facebook hi dr tyson dr reese greetings from india have we really been able to comprehend fully the ways animals communicate among one another truly owing centuries of evolution and sustaining very many calamities under the water their communication would have been more complex for even the human brain to understand so you know is it the fact that they've been here a lot longer than we have could that mean that they're speaking in a language that that we're incapable of comprehending we're just too stupid to figure it out right we are not very far ahead with that i have to say so i tend to agree i think we don't know how complex it is is the best way i can say it it may be quite complex it's a challenge for us to decode it has people have tried for a long time we're still trying but i think uh we still have a long way to go as carl sagan famously said uh we judge animals by how well they can communicate with us dolphin could but we never judge ourselves for how well we can speak dolphin yeah i actually think dolphins no i have to say i think dolphins have come a bit further than we have in terms of figuring it out excellent excellent and just just to take us out um i think that the the whale has the the biggest mammal brain the elephant brain is pretty big as well where's the elephant on the encephalone [Music] yeah the encephalitis quotient sounds bad when you say it that way i don't do anything with an itis is bad but go right so the elephant at brain is about similar uh in relative size to its body as the a great eight brain greater great apes great apes or brains relative to the the size of the body are um are about 2.2.3 remember dolphins are about four point two humans are seven elephants are about two point three and diane it does sound like you guys invented this eq to give more credit to these other mammals because for the longest while while we all grew up it was humans have the largest brain relative to our body weight to any animal even even dolphins right so any other animal would look at humans as having these stupidly large heads right compared to our bodies so then you come up with this other measure which is what is the minimum brain to run the body anything in excess of that that's really your intelligence exactly well it at least gives us an idea of it gives us a comparison okay it doesn't mean it equates with intelligence is there any animal whose brain is not big enough to control its own body i don't know of that i don't i have no idea i think most animals are controlling their body in some way really you've got so the ratio can never go yeah i'm sorry i know some people who i don't think are controlling their own bodies not directly related to brain size so the ratio can never get less than one on that well that yeah one it would be the lowest yeah right right okay just checking that diana it's been great to have you here on a topic that we've all thought about but never had an expert to to anchor us and so chuck we as you said earlier we got to do this again we gotta yeah i bet we have many many more questions we didn't even get to they were great questions thanks so much for having me and thanks everybody out there excellent excellent so uh dan reese and again your book uh give us the title of that again it's called the dolphin in the mirror the dolphin in the mirror let's look for that and chuck always good to have you always good to be here all right this has been star talk cosmic queries the interspecies communication edition i'm neil degrass tyson you're a personal astrophysicist bidding you to keep looking up [Applause] [Music]

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 170,528

Rating: 4.9086313 out of 5

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, chuck nice, diana reiss, diana reiss dolphins, interspecies communication

Id: 71ShgnMVfCM

Length: 51min 47sec (3107 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020