Radiolab - Hello

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

It's hard to start a conversation with a stranger—especially when that stranger is, well, different. He doesn't share your customs, celebrate your holidays, watch your TV shows, or even speak your language. Plus he has a blowhole.In this episode, which originally aired in the summer of 2014, we try to make contact with some of the strangest strangers on our little planet: dolphins. Producer Lynn Levy eavesdrops on some human-dolphin conversations, from a studio apartment in the Virgin Islands to a research vessel in the Bermuda Triangle.We have some exciting news! In the “Zoozve” episode, Radiolab named its first-ever quasi-moon, and now it's your turn! Radiolab has teamed up with The International Astronomical Union to launch a global naming contest for one of Earth’s quasi-moons. This is your chance to make your mark on the heavens. Vote on your favorites starting in November: https://radiolab.org/moonSupport Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.Signup for our newsletter. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail] support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Hey, this is Radio Lab. I'm Letif Nasser. Over the last year, there has been a cascade of headlines about scientists trying to use AI to translate animal languages into a form we can understand. At this very moment, brilliant scientists and sophisticated algorithms are trying to decipher the snuffles of pigs, the honks of geese, the squeaks of mice, the barks of dogs, the caws of crows, the moos of cows, the clucks of chickens, the chirps of fruit bats,

the meows of cats, and the songs of sperm whales. Those are just the ones that have been reported in the last year or so, but turns out people have been trying to listen and talk across the species divide for way longer than that. Today, we bring you a Radiolab story originally broadcast in 2014

about what is, I would argue, the greatest and most shocking of these stories. And what's even better is it's told by a human in the first person. Someone who is right there. Might not be appropriate for younger kids or more sensitive listeners. But with that warning, here you go. Hello from Radiolab. Without warning, here you go. Hello from Radiolab.

That's how you say enjoy in Dolphinese. I think. Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab.

Radiolab. From WNYC. Rewind. Hello, this is Lynn. Someone on the other side of this? Hey, Lynn. So a couple months ago, our producer Lynn Levy did an interview with this woman. Yeah, her name is Margaret Lovett. Yes. And this was Margaret's first

time doing a radio interview. That magic voice. This is so fun. But this was definitely not her first time talking into a microphone. One, two, three, four. This is the yellow mic. One, two, three, four. This is the orange mic. Almost exactly 50 years ago. The following recording was made on November 19, 1964. At 2300 hours. Margaret was at the center of this amazing weird experiment. Yeah. Yeah. Who were you at that time? Like what were you like? Well, I've always had a bit of, if everybody's going left, I'll go right.

She tried college for a while. Tulane University for a year. But she dropped out. And I was, what, 20 or 19 or something at that point. And moved to St. Thomas in the Caribbean. I'd never been to an island. Got a job at this hotel. Did menus, checked people in and out.

And one day she hears about this strange research facility on the other side of the island. And I thought, I wonder what that is about. And I asked a few people, and they said, oh no, no. They don't like people there or can't go there. And I was told not to go there, so I went there. Hmm. And that's how it all started.

And that's how we're gonna start this show. I'm Chad Abumran. I'm Robert Krollwich. Today on Radio Lab, producer Lin Levy brings us a couple of close encounters. Although not with aliens. No, it's not in outer space. Because it's much closer to home in this case. Although they are kind of alien-like.

Yes, alien-like. But not out there. Lynn, would you help me? It's a dolphin. Yes, that's... yes! Shows about dolphins. Yay! And we're calling this hour.

Hello! So when Margaret got to this mysterious place, there were dolphins there. And what happened was she ended up becoming roommates with a dolphin. Do you mean in the like bed-stuy, one-bedroom apartment sense? Sort of, yeah. She did end up living with a dolphin for many months

in this apartment. I-E-A-E. Apartment apartment? Mm-hmm. Had a little desk, had a little kitchen area with a stove. I think it was a little two burner stove or something and a pot and a tea kettle. But the thing that's a little bit weird about the apartment is that the whole apartment was filled with water. It was completely filled?

Well, I wasn't submerged, but I was in water up mid-fly sort of. It's just flooded with water. Just about there. So she could share it with this dolphin. A young male Peter. just flooded with water. So she could share it with this dolphin. Peter was a 10 foot long bottle-nosed dolphin, young adolescent male. And he lived there with Margaret and like he would, you know, he could like swim under the desk and there was a balcony, he could like swim out onto the balcony. The balcony was flooded too? The balcony was also

flooded. Yeah, it's really cool. And what was the idea? I mean, to try and study the dolphin? To study the dolphin, first of all, and take a lot of notes. Extensive notes. Did you have waterproof paper? No, I had a typewriter on this board hanging from the ceiling. They also had... Microphones everywhere. And specifically, the task she was given...

...was to teach Peter to speak English. A-E-I-O And she was supposed to teach the dolphin English? Yep. Really? Well, I mean this was John Lilly's project. Just for some context, you know how people get all like a little bit crazy these days about dolphins? They have like, you know, shirts with dolphins and necklaces with dolphins and everybody

has like dolphin hair bands, dolphin black light posters. Right? So this all kind of sort of comes from this guy, John Lilly, who was a scientist, a researcher starting in the 40s. A total right stuff physics major kind of guy out of Caltech. Man's man according to Graham Burnett. I'm a historian of science. But then according to Graham John Lilly has this epiphany. During the Second World War. At the time people just weren't thinking

that much about dolphins in general like there was not this idea that they were sort of extraordinary beings they were just like big dumb fish, you know, they were shot for sport. So John Lilly is doing this research about brain mapping and he ends up working with dolphins. And the story that he's told goes that he was experimenting on these dolphins and as he's working with them, you know, kind of like shoving things into their brains, they make noises, as would anyone. And when he listens back to the noises, which he's recorded, it sounds to him like the dolphins are trying to speak to him. To say something to him in not in a not a dolphin-y way, but in a human way, like trying

to speak English to him. Really? Yeah. What did he say the dolphin was trying to say to him? I don't think that we know that, but it sounded to him enough like human speech that he thought, like, something's going on here. This is important. According to Graham, he said later that it made him realize, like, we're not the only intelligent organisms out there

Like we have company that maybe humans are what happens when high intelligence evolves in an animal that also has hands and dolphins are what happens when Comparably if not still more extravagant intelligence Evolves in an animal without hands. What do hands get you? Well, hands basically get you an appetite for punching people in the head. It makes us tool users, but the distance between the hammer that you use to knock open your coconut and the hammer that you use to knock open the head of that other Cro-Magnon you were never that keen on is, in fact, zilch. There's no difference at all.

And by the time you got to the 60s with you know like peace and love. It was exciting to think that the dolphins and the whales have these huge brains but they don't like they're not after anything. They're not doing anything with it. They're not trying to hurt anybody. They're not building cities. They're just like being, man. And keep in mind, this is on the verge of the Vietnam War, where you have all this anxiety about overpopulation, environmental destruction. So very quickly, the Dolphins become like this vision. Of how we might ourselves be so different than we'd come to feel we were tragically. Does that make sense?

So John Lilly was one of the first people to get swept up in all this. He quits his government job, moves to the Caribbean, and sets up this lab. John Lilly's Communication Research Institute. To try to talk to dolphins, which is where Margaret ended up. And my feeling was this, that everybody was talking about how bright they were and how smart they were.

And it was dolphins, dolphins, dolphins. And then it was the hot topic. And yet every day, everybody at that building would get in their car and go home. Yeah. And I thought, what is that? So she volunteered to stay. Yeah, yeah.

Her bed was on this kind of wooden platform in the middle of the apartment. I was maybe two and a half, three inches above the water. And Peter was right there. And Peter could flip me a little water and wake me up at any point. And that was the whole point of it. I mean, this wasn't just sleep all night and then, excuse me, work in the day and then sleep again all night and then do some work in the day. I might as well go home. So I eventually, I didn't really shave my head, but I buzzed it, whatever it's called now, really close because any, you know, the hair getting wet thing in the middle of the

night was very annoying. Yeah, of course. So I just got rid of the hair and that was helpful. And then when Peter would come and squirt some water or want to play or throw something at me, then I could just roll off this elevator into the water and be with him and do whatever. She says he was fascinated by the things she brought with her. A piece of cloth, a tea bag. Tea bag was a fascinating thing.

I drank tea and the tea bag would fall into the water. And he would come and get it and sonar it, this creaking noise they make when they're sonar, and he'd look at it and take the string over his beak and sort of swim around very proudly with his tea bag. And then he'd throw it up against a wall and it would stick. And then he'd squirt water on it and it would come back down into the water and he would play with his teabag. Eventually, of course, he would bite it.

He has very sharp teeth. And it would break. And that was a very exciting thing when the teabag finally broke open. It had babies, as it were, zillions of tea leaves floating around. And he would sew none of them all and wanted to count every single one of them. And what did you think you would find out? I didn't know. You know, I was not coming at this from a science point of view.

That's not what I was bringing to the table. Yeah. I just, I just, I had no idea. I was programmed by John to work on the speech. A-E-I-O. He had sort of declared that they could probably speak. A-E-I-O. Look, when you're trying to have a conversation with someone, I, oh. Look, when you're trying to have a conversation with someone, he will listen. One person speaks, and the other one listens.

And then you speak, and I listen. And people sort of normally do that back and forth. When you start with a dolphin making airborne sounds, once they get the idea, there's a lot of screaming that goes on. They're very show-offy and they want to override you. So you have to spend a lot of time getting it down to, I'm talking now. I can speak now.

And now it's your turn. I can speak now. And yet if he's upset about something, he'll override you. Oh, Peter. And it's annoying. Now listen again. No, what's this? Come on, Peter. One, two, three.

Three. Now start again. One, two, three. Yes. But he learned very quickly to listen to me. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. But he learned very quickly to listen to me. And not to pick up my instructions. If I would say, no, no, no, Peter, I don't want you to do that. I want you to do this, this, this. He would give me back this, this, this. Parrot will often say, no, no, no, Polly want a cracker.

They will peat the whole thing of whatever you said. But Peter would pick up what I wanted when he was being a good student. And he was a good student. There seemed to be, with this one dolphin anyway, can't speak for all of them, an interest in what we were doing. He wanted to practice. He wanted to get it right.

There was a mirror and he would spend long periods of time by himself, didn't want me to be part of it. And he would practice whatever it was we had been doing in the lesson that day over and over and over and over. He wanted to get it right. No, that's not right. And he would work at that for no reason. He's not getting fish. I'm not interacting with him. He just wants it right. Like doing homework. Like homework, exactly. And after a few months of this, Peter did start to sound really different. One, two. One, two, three. One, two, three. Better.

Fall. Good. He kept getting better. It's extremely difficult for them. Hello. They just have a blowhole. They do not have the apparatus to really... S's are almost impossible. I would feed him my name and M is very hard.

He would eventually roll over almost into the water with the blowhole to muffle a... kind of a thing. Really? You're saying he would use the water as a way to help him make the sound? Yes. With that word? With that word. Oh my God! Do you think he knew that was your name?

I don't know. But nevertheless, we were a pretty good match. I knew his mood, his temperament, and he knew mine. He knew when I was sick, and I would get sick. I mean, you're in the water all the time, you're bound to get a cold or something. He just loved my anatomy. He wanted to know what my knees were doing. He would go behind my knee and sonar and look at it

and feel it and push it and find out which way it would and wouldn't go. And I gave him the time because I wasn't going home to look at my knee, to look at my feet. He was enormously interested, oddly enough, in the space between my fingers. Really? Not the fingers so much, but he would, I mean, you know, his beak could just barely fit there, but he wanted to put in between each finger and see what that was all about. The same with the toes. He didn't have any spaces anywhere.

Yeah. You know, he had solid flippers, but no space in between them. Do you think he was so interested in your fingers and toes because he didn't have any? Yes, I do. Margaret and Peter ended up spending about nine months living together. But towards the end, things kind of started to unravel. First of all, there weren't really results from this experiment. They never were able to publish any scientific papers.

And there were other problems. Lilly got very involved in drugs, especially. LSD, he did bring it down. He did give LSD. He says he did, I believe him to, to two of the dolphins. I would not let him give LSD to Peter. I wouldn't allow that. Why would he give them LSD? Well, it's not a hundred percent clear, but it seems like he was trying to find a way to get the dolphins to open up, to connect, maybe to talk. In any case, by 1965, 66, his funding had started to dry up. And when people heard about Margaret's work, they tended to focus on like one particular part of the story.

You don't have to answer, but a lot has been made of your sort of sexually engaging with Peter. And I just want to ask, because you don't seem like a shrinking violet, I just want to ask, is there anything you want to say about that? What would I like to say about that? I think the sensational side of it is... Here's what Margaret told me. Peter was a young dolphin, he was horny, and he would hump her leg a lot, kind of like a dog might do, which was getting in the way of their work. So eventually I just said the heck with it. And she'd use her hand to, you know...

And it would quickly satisfy him, and then we could go back to doing what we were doing. And I never really gave it another thought. I never thought, oh, don't let anybody know. I never thought, oh, this shouldn't be. But because of details like this and the drugs, this experiment became extremely controversial. Almost untouchable. People didn't want to be associated with Lily. Nobody wanted to fund anything that sounded like Lily.

It just got this like aura of... Don't go there. Don't go there. Even people who wanted to do really rigorous work with human dolphin communication had a tough time getting any funding. And that lasted for a long time. And the thing is, even though there are so many reasons to disapprove of this experiment, when you talk to Margaret, you can't help but want to be in that apartment with them.

He would come over and when he was in what I call his sweet mood, and Peter had a lot of very, very sweet mood to him, he would sink to the bottom and take my foot in his mouth. And he wasn't so gnarling and he wasn't looking at anything. It was almost like a little kid comes and just wants to hold your hand. And he would just sink to the bottom and close his eyes and just hang on to my foot. And then he'd have to come up and breathe, and then he'd go back down, and he'd just grab my foot. And he would do this for a good while. I'm not sure what I'm sorry. We'll be back in a moment with another encounter. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrad.

I'm Robert Krowich. This is Radiolab and today... Hello! Yes. Or as a dolphin might say... How would a dolphin say it? I don't know. Well, and you know what?

That is exactly kind of the question of this next segment. I mean, the dream that a human being can talk to a dolphin or any animal really, get in their heads and cross that gap. This is a dream that humans have had since like forever. Yeah, St. Francis of Assisi goes way back. Now, in so far as dolphins are concerned, after the John Lilly situation, researchers did get a little tepid. Yeah, but they didn't stay tepid as you say, for long.

No. Because along came this woman, Dr. Denise Hersey, director of the Wild Dolphin Project, who basically decided to take John Lilly's experiment and flip it. Rather than have the dolphin speak English, let's have the humans speak dolphin. Or at the very least, let's create a shared language where humans and dolphins can speak. Or at least whistle. Well, you know, it's about finding a place you can meet. Back to producer Lynn Levy. Okay. So for Denise, this dream of finding that meeting spot, it goes back to when she was a little girl.

Well, when I was 12 years old, I used to page through the Encyclopedia Britannica in the days when we had books and I would always stop at the whale and dolphin page, look at the dolphins and go, wow, I wonder what their brains are like because they've evolved in the water. Are you thinking that when you were 12? I was. I was a total nerd. In fact, I entered this contest in Minnesota like, what would you do for the world if you

could do something? And I actually wrote, I would build a human animal translator so we could figure out what was going on in the minds of animals. So yeah, I don't know, I got the bug early and here I am. Were you having a fantasy about what you might learn? A fantasy? No, I was just curious.

So I don't know, you look in their eyes, there's definitely something behind there. You just wanna know what it is. Fast forward many years. Denise got a boat. And I went out to the Bahamas. She was like, if I'm going to study these dolphins, I'm going to do it in the wild.

That's where they live. So she tracked down a pod of wild dolphins. Yep. And she just tried to blend in. I actually anchored the boat in one spot most of the time. This spot in the Bermuda Triangle. In the middle of, I call it the dolphin highway. Where dolphins come and go.

They could come by if they wanted to, and if they didn't, they didn't. When they would come by, she and her team would just slip into the water. And behave ourselves. Just sort of watch, paying attention to who was who, which dolphin had a crooked fin, which one didn't. And when they'd leave, we'd get out. And that's really how we operated for the first five years. And it worked. Five years?

She spent five years just watching? Not doing anything else? Yes. Doesn't this take an enormous amount of patience? Well, sure. I mean, but after about five years, they started realizing, well, these guys aren't going to grab us and poke us and prod us. So they started just going about their own business.

Like feeding, mating, nursing, and talking. Or at least making a lot of noises, which she and her team would record. Wow, that's all dolphin squeaky? They make all these, yeah like that, that's like there's like a clicking kind of creaking sound that they make. Oh, it sounds like a zipper zipper. Yeah. Yeah, they make like whistles that are more kind of distinct. And then they make sounds that are like longer and weirder. And do you have any sense that each of these sounds means something different? Well, that's exactly what we don't know.

I could tell you what kinds of sounds are correlated with fighting and with mating or disciplining a calf. What we don't know is are there detailed kind of words in there? Is there more kind of encoded information? But what they do know is that each dolphin seems to have its own kind of signature whistle. Which is basically a name. Every individual has its own name. Peter had a name. Nobody's ever asked me that. Here's Margaret again. And his name was... Really? It was almost saying Peter here. Right. So I can call you Lynn by your whistle and you Robert by your whistle. So I could be a dolphin going, Lin! Exactly.

Do they do that? They do. Huh. Not only that, apparently dolphins will use the names of other dolphins who aren't even around like they can't see them. Like they'll talk about each other behind their backs? Yes, maybe. Wow, that means that they're using representations

of things which aren't in front of them, which is sort of like the beginning of language. If that's what they're doing and we don't know, but if that's what they're doing, then yeah, that's kind of like the edge of language. So, you know, it gives us hope that there's probably more information going on there than we know.

And now, finally, she has that device. Which device again? The magical, you know, human-animal translator device that she was dreaming of writing about when she was 12. She has this box that can generate dolphin noises, and it can recognize dolphin noises and if it works the way that you know that she's dreaming it'll work it could be the first like real two-way back and forth conversation between a human and a wild animal. So we're looking forward to this summer and getting out and getting more data and really exercising the boxes and see what happens.

Good, we're ready. So I beg my way aboard. Everybody good? See sick pills in the tummies? We left on July 8th from Florida and headed for the Bahamas to see this pod that she's been following kind of forever. Almost 30 years now. to see this pod that she's been following kind of forever. Almost 30 years now.

The boat is called the RV Stinella. Stinella is the scientific name for this particular type of dolphin, the spotted dolphin. Have you seen a spotted dolphin? I've never seen one in person. What is this boat like? It's like not a tiny boat, but it's not a big boat. And it was just absolutely full of humans.

And who are your humans? Well, there's Denise, obviously. How's it going? And you've got a captain. My name's Keir Smith. First mate. Danielle. Research assistants.

Allison Myers. Les Mason. Bethany Ollier. Nathan Skripchak. Volunteers. Drew Mayer. There's an acoustics expert. Matthias Hoffman.

For a long time I couldn't even figure out where everybody was sleeping because the boat seemed so small. I was like, there is not room for all these people on this boat. Behind you there's a hot soldering iron next to the fridge. And I haven't even gotten to this guy. Don't get into it. His name is Thad Starner. So you didn't have like any dolphin experience before this right?

Oh hell no. He's one of the guys who invented Google Glass. I became a computer programmer so I never have to leave air conditioning. And I'm out here in what is this 100 degree weather to do what? So his job on the boat is to, he's in charge of these boxes. Those boxes probably cost 100k at this point. We're looking for funding. Looking for funding.

So he's the tech whiz. When he came down to visit my lab, I was telling him about the two-way work and the difficulty with underwater stuff, and he said, oh, I build wearable computers. He says, oh, can you build me an underwater wearable computer? That shouldn't be hard. Four years later.

What does this machine look like? It looks like a toaster, like one of those fancy chrome toasters, except you wear it on your chest. Are they silvery in fact? They are silvery. They have a bunch of sort of knobs and buttons and speakers on them. It's got pre-programmed whistles in it. I can punch a key and it projects whistle A, whistle B, whistle C. She's programmed in signature whistles of some of the dolphins.

Rat, Pallet, Bijou. And we made signature whistles for ourselves. Oh. She can call their names and they can call her names. That's what she's saying? That is the idea, yeah. And if they do call her name, this name that she's made for herself, then the box should be able to recognize it and can tell her that she's been called by name. It'll actually say into her ear in English, Denise. This is real time, I call it real time sound recognition, but it's real time whistle recognition underwater.

How does, if she's made up this name for herself, how is it that they're going to know that that's her name? Well, the idea is that they're learning. So she gets into the water over and over and she says, you know, the equivalent of, hi, I'm Denise. Hi, I'm Denise. Over and over and over. And they learn it. You know, they develop this. Oh, like maybe they'll just start to use it and call her. Yeah. So you hope you hope they call you. I'd be really sad if they didn't call my name, but. But I guess at the very least, she could call their names and see how they react. Right. Well see that would be a eureka moment I think if you hit the Lolita button and Lolita suddenly turned and looked right at you with a shock of what the heck.

Wow that human called me by my signature whistle. Whoa. Has that happened yet? It hasn't happened yet. And this is something I just did not appreciate. For a while I was on this boat, I was like, why is this so hard? Like, this seems like it should be... These people are so smart, like, this should be easy. But they're just, like, constantly being defeated by the ocean, basically.

Which, and the ocean is, like, a worthy foe. But it's, like, the first year... First year was a complete disaster, trying to get the hardware to work. What happened the first year? Everything broke. It was Leek City. Basically the boxes just kept shutting down as soon as they would get in the water. That's not good.

It's not good. That's sort of not what you want. No. And last year... We had the boxes working, but then we couldn't find the dolphins. The dolphins just disappeared. Where did they go? Uh, you know, they went 100 miles away to another location. They don't know why.

I kept up with my side of the deal, Denise. Your dolphins stood you up. And one of the reasons I was on the boat is it felt like everybody was thinking, like, this is it. This is the year. We're going to go out there, we're going to find some dolphins and we're going to make some history. You ready? Ready! Excited! Now. Any minute now.

Okay it turns out it's not that easy to find these dolphins. They're not tagged, you know, they're wild dolphins, so you just like, you go to where you think they might be. Do you know that song? You stare at the water and you wait. What is that? What is that? What is that? What is that? What is that? What is that? What is that? For the first three days, pretty much, we were just driving around.

Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones. In circles, like literally in circles. You know, I feel like I had like a five hour conversation about Game of Thrones. I've never even seen an episode of Game of Thrones. Any dolphins? Any dolphins anywhere? Oh, right.

No. There's nothing else to do. Dolphins, come on dolphins, we need you now. Come on dolphins, come on dolphins, come on dolphins. To kick in. Dolphins, the dolphins. See a piece of seaweed, it would look like a dolphin. Dolphins, come on dolphins. A wave that looks like a dolphin. I have to say that everything looks like a dolphin to me right now. There are days like that. Dolphins!

Oh yeah, they are right there. All of a sudden out on the water we see one fin, two fins, three fins, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Oh, there's so many of them and they're so cool. As we're all standing there watching them, Denise turns to me and she goes, you want to go in? I don't know, do you recommend it? And I was not prepared for her to say that.

And also I was holding recording equipment and everything. And so I ended up just having to go in like in my clothes. Like wearing like my shorts and like a bra. And I had like all modesty, like thrown aside. They were like, you can go in. And I was like, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Go on. Jesus Christ, here I go.

Go on. Jesus Christ. Here I go. We'll be right back. Hey, I'm Jada Boomerod. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab and today. The show's called Hello. Back to Lynn.

I mean, it's a total sensory shift. The temperature changes, everything goes quiet. It almost feels like this classic through the looking glass moment. Where you go through the looking glass and like, everybody's walking on the ceiling. And I jumped in and there were two pretty big dolphins coming right at me, like maybe two feet from my head, and staring at me. And I was like, I don't know what to do. What did you do?

I stayed very still. I pretty much froze. Now how far were they from you? Two feet. Oh my god. Yeah, yeah. Dolphins are not small and they were looking at me in a way that was like, we see you. And also they're, they make these sort of clicking, sonari sounds, which are like...

Do you think they were talking to you or just talking about you? Well, no, what I mean, what I think they were doing is sonaring me, sort of looking at me with sound. I mean, my head was vibrating. They can see not just body shape, they can see your bones. They can see into you, like you really feel looked at. Wow. It was heart-stopping. That was unbelievable. That was so cool.

At that point I was like the trip could end now and I go home happy. You know, and everybody was like, calm down. Those weren't even the right dolphins. What do you mean? Well, those were bottlenose dolphins. Denise studies spotteds. But the next day. All right, onward for spotteds.

Spotteds are bust. We set out again, go for a few hours. Bethany does this dolphin dance. Leaking energetic spotage. And? Got some. Yeah. The dance work.

You saw them, right? Yeah, right there. Yeah, there we go. So then, everybody's like, you know, it's like all hands on deck situation. Everybody's like strapping on the boxes and strapping on headphones. What are you doing? There's a lot of scrambling.

There's so, so much scrambling. Oh, there's one off the bow here. It's like a fire drill. Now, I'm putting on my box. Here's the problem. I'm just testing. Unlike a captive dolphin, wild dolphins, they have other things to do. They have, you know, fish to catch, you kind

of have to entice it into having a conversation. Otherwise it'll just swim away. But how do you do that when you don't know its language? Well turns out dolphins are just crazy for scarves. Scarf high. Scarf low. When you throw them a scarf, they sweep it up with their tail fin and then they let it go and it wafts through the water and another dolphin comes up and sweeps it up with their

rostrum. So the idea is you use the scarf as kind of like a bridge. Denise and another diver will get in the water with a scarf. We'll get in the water and we'll just start passing it back and forth. It's human to human. Like, hey, look at this fun thing we're doing. Let them watch. If they want to get in the game, we let them in the game.

Sometimes we'll take the toy over to them, show it to them, and press the word for scarf. Say, hey, this is a scarf. They just made up a whistle for scarf? Yep. And ideally, and this is the key, the dolphins will pick up the word and use it too to ask for the scarf. If and when they do that, then you've got like a tiny bit of common ground that you can build on. Okay. Who you got? We have four spotted dolphins. They're our little candidates, Kiston and Pallets.

Yes, we've been waiting for them, right? We have. Just before they jump in, Denise walks another diver through the game plan. So you're going to hold it and you're not going to give it to them. You're going to entice it with them. You're going to be like, oh, this is so nice. And I like dive down with it and you're not gonna give it to him. You're gonna entice it with him. You're gonna be like, oh this is so nice. And I like dive down with it and like wave it or... Yeah, first start at the surface and just really get them with you. Moments later...

All clear? Good, we're ready. Denise jumps in, followed by three other divers. Four in the water! Were you in the water this time? No, I actually had to watch the whole thing from the deck and like you could see from the surface three or four adolescent dolphins.

See Denise is right up next to one of them. You see the back of her head and her little snorkel. That's good, she's surrounded right now. What are they doing? I'm not sure. Oh, they're kind of like twisting around each other. I will say this, she is tremendously graceful in the water. She gets in the water and she's like totally at home.

So maybe she is a dolphin. She might secretly be a dolphin. Going like around and around. There she goes under. Man, what is happening under there? This is what it sounds like underwater. This is the actual sound from the scarf dance? They record everything that goes on under there. I mean a lot of that is the dolphins just doing whatever they're doing but some of it is Denise with the box making this scarf whistle over and over like scarf

you want the scarf yeah scarf because she's like trying to get the dolphin to say the word, right? Yeah. Eventually, she and the dolphin surface and... You got the scarf right here. Oh! He's got the scarf! One of the dolphins is holding the scarf. Hey! It's like this flash of red.

Yep. And then they all go back under. And if Denise comes back up with it, that's real good. Alright, wait and see. After about a minute, she surfaces. I think Denise has it now. Got it. She dives one more time.

A minute later, dolphin has the scarf. And this went on and on. They were passing it back and forth so fluidly that I thought, maybe the dolphin has begun to ask for the scarf by name. Eventually, Denise gets... Gravity sucks! ...called back up onto the boat. And we all just sort of gather around like, well, well...

Yeah, the two juveniles picked up the scarf right away and we played some signage whistles and played some scarf whistles and then some Sargassum came floating by. Piece of seaweed. Showed them that and played the Sargassum whistle. You think you got any mimics? scarf whistles and then some sargassum came floating by. Piece of seaweed. Showed them that and played the sargassum whistle. You think you got any mimics? Nothing that triggered the system, but you know, let's see what it looks like.

It's exhausting. Wait, she didn't get anything? Well, I mean nothing the box recognized as a match. You know, nothing that indicated the dolphin like learned a word. Oh. It sounded like they were right there. But there was this one thing that happened.

She said that when she addressed one of the dolphins by its name, the dolphin turned around and looked at her and kind of cocked its little dolphin head. Really? Yes. Oh. I was so hoping that you'd say that. Yeah.

Oh wow. Also there was this moment where Thad and Celeste were looking at the data later. Who is that? And they saw that right after Denise made her signature whistle. Is that somebody responding with her signature whistle? after Denise made her signature whistle. Is that somebody responding with her signature whistle? Another dolphin made its signature whistle. Sweet! You mean like she said hi and it said hi back? Yeah.

That's amazing! Well maybe. I mean the thing is dolphins make their signature whistles all the time so it could nothing. Or it could be this... moment. I mean she's a very rigorous scientist, like she wants that to happen another 30 times before even starting to take it seriously. But still, it does make you think about the possibilities. What do you want to ask? I don't know. I want to ask everything. So. Like what? Oh, I'd like to know what their lives are like when we're not around.

I mean, how do you spend your day? You know, do they think about things? I mean, do they think about the future? Do they think about the past? I mean, we know they have long-term memories, you know? Do they remember their calves from 10 years ago? Do they think about death? Yeah, they certainly see it. It'd be anything you'd ask your friends, right? Hmm. Although part of me wonders, like are they even going to get there? What do you mean? Well, the goal is to have a conversation.

And you're going to do it this way where you're in the wild and you can't touch them and you've got to verify every whistle 35 times. Well, are they ever actually going to have a conversation? Well, because it's like day one of the language lesson. Yeah, I get it. But like, don't you feel like Margaret was... All the problems with that experiment aside, she was actually getting somewhere with Peter? Like they were actually having a real exchange?

In the moment, perhaps, but thinking forward, I believe that what you can accomplish by talking, by having a two-way conversation is just infinitely greater. And I totally agree, but if it's taken her 30-something years to get to a maybe hello. She doesn't even know if she got to hello yet. And if all she has is just a limited amount of time with these dolphins every summer, then 50 more times is going to take her 50 more years. And I was like, oh, God, the planet planet's gonna be 17 degrees warmer by that point. Dolphins are gonna have all migrated to some other spot.

It just feels like, ugh, come on. Just get in a pool and let the dolphin hold your foot. She's already got the hello going for her, maybe. So that's like a start. And then, yes, in 50 years, she may have moved past hello to a three word sentence. How's your Mac roll today? Yeah, I think that too. A three word sentence, yes. I would put money on a three word sentence in 50 years. The question is,

do we ever get to the point of exploring death? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. Lynn, do you have faith? I have faith that if Denise continues with what she's doing that we'll be able to talk about concrete things. We'll be able to talk about seaweed and we'll be able to talk about coral and we'll be able to have a scintillating conversation about scarves. I do believe that and that is not nothing. I mean that is pretty impressive in its own way. Big thanks this hour to our producer, Lin Levy. I'm Chad, I'm Ron. I'm Robert Krowich. Thank you guys for listening. Hi I'm David and I'm from Baltimore, Maryland.

Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyanam Sambandhan, Mac Keelty, Annie McEwen, Rebecca Lax, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Sarah Sandback, Ariane Whack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, this is Susanna calling from Washington DC.

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