StarTalk Radio - Cosmic Queries – Interspecies Communication

Episode Date: September 14, 2020

Will we ever be able to talk to animals? Neil deGrasse Tyson, comic co-host Chuck Nice, and marine mammal scientist Diana Reiss, PhD, answer fan-submitted Cosmic Queries on animal and interspecies communications. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/cosmic-queries-interspecies-communication/ Thanks to our Patrons Caralee Wahab, Tracy S. Skrabut, Ivan Perez, Joshua Torres, Garrett Jay, Leon Galante, Tyler Miller, and Pat Mallon for supporting us this week. Image Courtesy of Diana Reiss. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. 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. As Cosmic Queries, you know who my co-host is, Chuck. What's up, Neil? Thanks for being there in Arms Reach, in Digital Arms Reach. Digital Arms Reach, yes. I feel your zeros and ones kind of touching my face right now.

There you go. Base two, zeros, and one. That's right. You know what the topic is today? Interspecies communication. Ah, yes. That's just creepy. Well, I mean, it's beautiful, but creepy. It's gorgeous. 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 Tim. 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 Rees.

Diana, welcome to StarTalk. Well, hi. Thanks for having me today. And you've been in our backyard the whole time we've been having StarTalk. And where have you been? I'm here in New York. You're just right there? You've been talking to other animals, I think. That's it, yeah. Instead of your own damn species, all right?

I've been hanging out with dolphins. So let me just get the audience to know you a little better. You have a TED Talk where you share the platform with others who were trying to create something big. And what was that? Yeah, back in 2013, my three colleagues, we say, my partners on this were Peter Gabriel, the musician and visionary, Vint Cerf, who was the co-founder or the co-father of the internet. That's right, the co-founder of the internet. And 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, exactly. Given that list. They're a great group of people to work with. And we've been working together.

Where we have this idea, it was actually Peter Gabriel who started this idea and then approached the three of us. And the idea is, how can we use technology and 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 simplest way of saying it. And then we can use these shared codes to communicate. The other aspect of it 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 when 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 is language? What is communication? Chuck, you just nailed the big question and the thing that's under such debate. So the question is, 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 they talk to each other.

They twerk. They're like, yo, check it out. Chuck, I didn't know that. Chuck, thanks for letting me know that they twerk. That's how they talk to each other. They twerk. They're like, yo, check it out. Chuck, I didn't know that. Chuck, thanks for letting me know the bees twerk. That's a new way of saying it, Chuck, but it's true. They move, they wiggle, they shake their bodies. They do this waggle dance or twerk 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, 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 earth? The sun moves. Earth rotates. Earth is rotating. So the sun is moving to them and they have to track that and 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 some of this. About 10 years ago, I have the title, The Dolphin in the Mirror, Exploring Dolphin Minds and Saving Dolphin Lives. So your professional career is invested in trying.

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 years. Theater. Theater.

Yes. Theater. Acting. Thank you. We won't go there in too much detail. But 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 whales getting slaughtered, about the whaling in general. And 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, there wasn't that much known. It was in the late sevents. And I never watched Flipper. I wasn't a Flipper fan. I used to watch Lassie. 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 the 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? And it's bigger than our brain, right? They are 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. And our brain, the number of... I guess these are probably the body weight, right? Because size would otherwise be... Yeah, body weight. Yeah, body weight. Yeah. So our brains are seven times the size they would need to be

to run a body of our size. Okay? Because we're talking about body weight, 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, 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 have the value of one. Their brain is just the right size to run a body of that size, okay, in terms of map metabolism and everything else. So those buttheads on Star Trek, the guys with the big giant buttheads, they're... Really smart, right? 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, if we think about brains, though, it's still a huge mystery in terms of what the recipe is for being more intelligent, you know, to have more intelligent. Is it the number of neurons? Is it the organization of a brain? Is it, you know, how it's all connected? So that's still a mystery.

But it turns out that if we look at animals that show complex social interactions and have a lot of complexity in their behavior. They tend to be these animals that have these really high values in EQ. So those animals are animals like cetaceans, which are whales and dolphins, the great apes, elephants, along with us humans. And then it varies when you look at that sort of whole scale. I always thought apes were great.

I always thought so. Apes are really smart, yeah. So they were great ape once. It was great. It was great. Did you get started in this right around the time when dolphins were getting trapped in tuna nets and there's a whole huge outcry in the fishing industry about this?

I started a little bit before that. I started studying dolphins in the early 80s, 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. Why didn't anyone try to protect the tuna? Somehow it was okay to trap a net full of tuna. Because dolphins are not delicious. Is that? Well. No, I'm very serious, Diana.

Yeah. 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 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, they would be suffocated. They would drown. They were trapped, drowned. They would be hoisted up. Because they have to come up for air, unlike the tuna. Like us. And again, it was just a horrendous situation. Okay, but you're admitting that you're you more highly value mammals

than non-mammal vertebrates. No, it's just that canned dolphin does not sound or taste good. We're not going there. Canned dolphin is not a thing and it shouldn't be a thing, okay? Have some of this flipper salad

with mayo. 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 was it's on my list it's on my list very important didn't that win an academy award for documentary it was it was running if it in the running if it didn't win it? 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, herded, using a method where they create an acoustic barrier. It's called oikome. And they bang on pipes and they scare the dolphins into this cove and afterwards they're slaughtered. Some of the dolphins are still taken to 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 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. Okay, 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.

Let me say it this way. As a marine mammal scientist, I feel like 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. If I'm a marine tuna scientist, then we duke it out at the science conference, because I want to protect my tuna. Right. And the tuna scientist loses every time because tunas are stupid and delicious. Well, 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 we try for that? There you go. I love it. That's the way to do it. Yeah, it's a tough one. So I think we have to be humane if we're still eating

animals, and I think that's really critical. That's true across the spectrum of animals. 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 animals. I would rather that nobody's eating

any animals, to tell you the truth. That's what my big push is. 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, with our 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. Just have to live off the air. And that's the best you can do.

Well, Chuck, I think we don't have time in this segment for Q&A. We'll start right up in segment two. You got your questions lined up? Got them right here. You got them all there. Okay. So when we come back, more with behavioral animal psychologist Diana Reese and Chuck Nice

bringing the questions. We'll be right back. StarTalk Cosmic Queries. Co-host Chuck. Nice. Hey, hey. We're back. StarTalk Cosmic Queries. Co-host Chuck Nice. Hey, hey. Tweeting as ChuckNiceComic still? Thank you, sir. Okay.

ChuckNiceComic, yes. And our expert today on interspecies communication, Diana Reese. Diana, welcome back to StarTalk. Thanks. And we've got questions for you solicited from our fan base all across the social media platform. So Chuck, what do you have?

Okay, well, of course, you know, we always start with a Patreon patron because they support us financially. They pay us, yes. There's no better support. No better support. There's no better nation than a donation. Anyway, this is Kyle

Marston from Patreon. Hey, thanks for the kind of weird hashtag CQInnerSpecies 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. Not sure that reference. So let me see if I can reword that question. 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, information that we overlap with them so that we can possibly come to a common vocabulary. I think that's what they're asking there, Chuck, is it? Yeah, I mean, it's... Yeah, if we use the periodic table of elements as our own sort of reference frame.

That's our preference, right. And with that, 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. Yeah, 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 they would certainly have that organization. Yes. Okay, so Diana, what can you tell us about organizing information and use that as a foundation to communicate? Right. So first Okay. So Diana, what can you tell us 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? Aliens have tentacles, of course, and antennae, of course they do. Well, as we've seen recently in some films, 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. And what kinds of signals may be perceived by each of us.

So there's a lot of 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 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 track here? Or is the organization of the periodic table useful to bring other kinds of communication to bear 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. The question I keep on having about this is, what is it in their signal that we've gotten 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 were 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 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, 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, us. Chuck, you just said one of the biggest questions for me is, look, what if 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 we're such visual creatures. What if they're not using sight as their main sense, or it's not the same kind of sight? They have different receptors.

And we're very physiologically biased is what you're saying. Absolutely. For our own senses, sensory. So how would you connect that to, Chuck, you probably have another question related to this, but when you try to talk to dolphins, we can't compare periodic tables of elements. We can't say this is an apple. What's your word for apple? We can't do that. So what overlaps that even empowers you to even ask the audacious question, let's start with something that we have in common and 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 okay there are a few there are a couple of films named arrival you mean the one where the alien visited but i think they both were but the one with the the septapod the heptapods yeah the heptapods come down and um the the scientist thank you chuck for that visual like that that was my that was my heptapod. Chuck put his fingers up into the camera and he's pretending like...

You're not squirting ink, though. You have to squirt ink. But on this newer film, Arrival, which I thought was a brilliant film. I loved it. This linguist 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's not that fast. And, and 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 she watched them and she started also imitating what they were doing. Imitation is a wonderful way to start communicating. So if we go to another film, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that's what happened when they started communicating with the aliens.

Remember the sounds that the alien ship was producing? Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. What did we do? The people who were on Earth started imitating that, that kind of musical note, 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. 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 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 and other animals and an astrophysicist. You mean like you? Yeah, I would have. How very Dick Cheney of you. I'm looking for a vice president. 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 other... Just like you, yes. But somebody, yeah, in that realm. I've actually, yeah, I actually did some work with a SETI project many years ago, talking about that this is a great training ground

when we study species, other species. Don't worry, Diana. We would have sent you too. So don't worry about it. Yeah, we got your back on this. Okay, thanks, guys. So what's your dolphin story? Yeah, so we're talking about imitation.

And 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 Circe. And I was asked to teach her 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 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. Little Circe readily ate the heads. She ate the middles. 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 it broke her ability to interact or get fish. And then I'd just stand there and look at her. And then I would come back. You punished 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, it's negative reinforcement. It's not that you're inflicting harm on her 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 10 to 15 seconds, five seconds. I varied it. And then I would come back and she learned, hey, something's wrong 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 I'd show her an empty bucket and everything's done. Again, she was young and I had to teach her this,

not for me, but for the people where I was working. So everything's going fine. Circe'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 now one day by accident, I happened to give her an uncut tail. And Circe 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. She gave

you a timeout. That's when you need that music. Yeah. At the time... The Mexican... I mean, the Western standoff. So what's going on here? I mean, 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 communicated to something to her, that's really pretty amazing. But I couldn't do anything with an 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,

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 this. So she called the time out on you is what happened there. I think she did. And I actually wrote this up. You know better than to cut my fist like that. That's right. I trained you to serve me. How many times am I going to teach you how to cut a fist? It's so hard to get good help these days. Stupid humans. They don't even know how to cut a fist 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 a lot of fun. I saw a comic once, it might've 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.

Yeah, right, right. The dolphin analysis of humans. Yes, and that's very much what we do with most other animals, to tell you the truth. We've got to take another break. We only got to one question in that segment, Chuck. Who cares? It's such a great conversation. Chuck, all right, when we come back, we'll see if we can 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 interspecies communication with Professor Diana Reese when we return. Hey, we'd like to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons. Carolee Wahab and Tracy S. Scrobbett. Guys, thank you so much for your support. You know, without you, this show would not be possible. And for those of you listening who would like your very own Patreon shout out, go to patreon.com slash StarTalkRadio and support us. StarTalk.

Cosmic Queries. Interspecies Communication. Diana Reese. Diana, do you have any social media handles you want to share with people? Okay, they can go to... Whether or not they're human, by the way. I welcome all.

So where's the best place for them to land? They can look at interspecies.io. That's a website. Yes. And for my research with my colleague Marcelo Magnasco who's a professor at Rockefeller University

they can put in Reese 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 gotta up your game here, okay? All right, let's go. All right, let's get to this. Let's call the whole segment a lightning round, okay? All right. Let's do it. Torin Wallengrim 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 when they want to be subterfugal and they want to deceive you? That's a whole other situation. Okay, deception is not, it's not well studied in the non-human animal world yet, but it's a whole other situation. Deception is not well studied in the non-human animal world yet,

but it's a really interesting topic. The reason why I ask is, 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 his bullshit. The dog will look at you like it's never been fed in its 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. But they know not to go to you because you don't put up with that. My cat also does it to me later. 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 all do the same thing. Okay? So, all right. This is Colton. Keep going, Chuck. 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 competent are you that any of these could be communication from an advanced 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 Diana, that turns out to be a question for me. These FRBs 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 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 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. I'm sure you have to check with everybody you know, too, on the planet who's listening

and make sure it's not coming from a source that we know. What'll happen is they'll check, they'll come visit Earth and say, where's that guy, Neil Tyson? We gotta have a word with him. Dude, how come you're calling? Yo, I was texting you, man. How come you keep ignoring my text?

All right, All right. All right. Let's move on. Keep it going. Let's keep it going. Keep it going. Keep it going. 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 predators. Let me tell you, the ones on the outside of that ball aren't having such a good go of it. How do they know to stay in such perfect formation and dance and weave in unison?

Hopefully humans wouldn't need to mimic this behavior. Hopefully aliens wouldn't need 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 interspecies communication? Because 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 they kind of go hand in hand with each other,

trying to decode the communication, what we call intraspecies 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 there's an 11 foot mound.

They love gossip. That's how they do it. Is that what that is? Termites. That's what's really happening. You cannot shut those termites up. That's how they do it. Is that what that is? Termites. That's what's really happening. You cannot shut those termites up. That's what's really happening. So, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of studies right now that are going on now and 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 interspecies 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 not using human words. 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 touchscreen that gives them visual forms that we know they can see. And then if they touch those forms on a touchscreen, they hear a whistle. Or that they can hear, they can imitate, and they get specific things. So we meet them halfway using more of their code. So you have a giant iPad for dolphins. You know what?

You know that's going to lead to dolphin Tinder. You know that. You know there's going to be dolphins swiping right now. Actually, we've watched them do that movement, the swiping. But when we first gave them the keyboard, the touchscreen, it's a four by eight foot touchscreen. It's actually an optical touchscreen. If they touch it, their touch is actually seen by cameras.

So it's optically sensed. Oh, I got you. Okay. First day they saw this, we did what we called whack-a-fish, not whack-a-mole, to see if it would work. And we had fish going across the screen. One of the young dolphins who had never seen anything technical like this just immediately started touching all the fish. He looked like a teenager going for the fish. He was great. So just to be clear in the technology,

their nose touching the screen is not what you're sensing. You have cameras that are triangulating on where the nose touched and that gives it a coordinate. Correct. And 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 beak or the rostrum that touches. Got on. Right on. So let's go –

Wait, wait. So that's not their nose in the front? Nope. Nope. That's their rostrum? That's their rostrum or beak. That's their mouth and their – Okay.

Diana, I'm never going to call it their rostrum, okay? How about beak? How about beak? And you know what? Here's why nobody will call it that because you got, well, not you, Diana, biologists named one of the dolphins a bottlenose dolphin. Thank you. There it is.

That's a beak. Okay, so why don't we agree to call it, it's snoot. How about that? It's snout. If they could call it a snout. It's snout. Snout. I'll give you that.

Yeah. We'll go with that. We're on the same page. Okay. So we're now communicating, Neil. Yes, we are. We have some intraspecies communication. There's hope for us here.

Okay. This is great. Chuck, give me some more. 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. So what are the tools that say this is how we know? cameras. We use recording to other kinds of recording devices to record their sound, to record 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 go with what behaviors. And again, but 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. And that's a lot of fun. Every time I see a nature documentary and the animal's doing some weird behavior, they always say, oh, it's a mating ritual. Maybe they're just trying to order pizza, you know?

Yeah, right. It's so funny. You're right. It is always a way of mating. It's all the way. It's every single time. We see here the mating dance. Of the... Right. And then insert species here. They're just trying to order pizza.

That's really all. They're hungry. That's it. But, you know, so animals communicate about mating. They communicate about finding food. But they also are doing a whole lot more than we ever expected. And the more studies that 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, they're saying to each other, Freddie's back. Freddie the bully is back. Well, there you go, right. All right, Chuck, keep going. We've got time for a few more. Let's keep going. Let's keep going. Here we go.

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, does it make different sounds than a dolphin in the Pacific? 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. That's really the simplest way to put that. Yeah, and we think they have dialects.

Really? Yeah, so if we have, and we've sort of seen evidence for that for many, many years. 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. Humpback whales, for example, make these beautiful haunting songs. Many of you may be familiar with that. I saw Star Trek IV.

Yeah. To save the whales. There you go. That's good, Chuck. Chuck, watch out. They'll jump on land and find you. I'll go to my door. There'll be a humpback there.

Like you rang. I like that imitation, Chuck. That'll be a humpback there. Like you rang. I like that imitation, Chuck. That's beautiful. But they change over seasons. Wow. 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 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, the window that they use may be strained.

Yeah. But we're in the infancy of those studies still. 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 would be amazing. You know, it's just a dolphin just like, hey, man, how you doing?

All right. Here we go. That would be the Cheech and Chong dolphin. That's a different dolphin, right? Exactly. That's – Really? 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 their throat? Or their throat can do two things? The blowhole has two, it's like 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 can do two, whistle and squawk at the same time. It's really cool.

Wow. Is that their version of walking and chewing bubble gum? At the same time. I have no idea. All right, here we go. Okay, time for like two fast have no idea. All right, here we go. Okay, time for like two fast ones, Chuck. All right, here we go.

Don Reem from Facebook. Don Reem. Yes, and Don says this. It is said that math is a universal language, which is 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. Diana, can dolphins count? Yeah, there's been evidence that they can track numbers of items and they can discern quantity differences.

And that's really all that counts. That's really all that counts, correct. Where's the food? The base system that you use actually doesn't matter if you can track of a number. 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 base two, that's why all computing is base two, is 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. So Chuck, we have time for one more. Just last one. All right. This is Varsha Chakadi, 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, the fact that they've been here a lot longer than we have, could that mean that they're speaking in a language 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. People have tried for a long time. We're still trying, but I think we still have a long way to go. They're clearly communicating. As Carl Sagan famously said, we judge animals by how well they can communicate with us. But we never judge ourselves for how well we can speak dolphin. But we never judge ourselves for how well we can speak dolphin.

I actually think dolphins, Neil, 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 to take us out, I think the whale has the biggest mammal brain. The elephant brain is pretty big as well. Where's the elephant on the encephalization quotient? Yeah. The encephalitis quotient. Sounds bad when you say it that way.

I know. Anything with an itis is bad, but go on. Yeah, right. So the elephant brain is about similar in relative size to its body as a great ape brain. Great ape brain. body as a great ape brain. So great apes brains relative to the size of the body are about 2.3. Remember, dolphins are about 4.2, humans are 7, elephants are about 2.3. 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 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. Diana, it's been great to have you here on a topic that we've all thought about, but never had an expert to anchor us. And so, Chuck, as you said earlier, we got to do this again. We got to. Yeah, it's great stuff. I bet we have many,

many more questions. We didn't even get to. 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 starTalk Cosmic Queries, the interspecies communication edition. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, bidding you to keep looking up. Bye.