Stuff You Should Know - How We’re Learning to Talk to Animals

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

If we could talk with the animals, grunt and squeak and squawk with the animals, what would we say? We’d better start thinking of something good because researchers are learning to speak sperm whale, prairie dog, and a bunch of other species' languages.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is ICT. Over the years, I've compiled thousands of inspiring and thought-provoking quotes. And now, I'm passing that knowledge onto you and my new daily podcasts. ICT's Daily Game. In less than five minutes, I'll break down why these words matter and reveal personal stories that show them in action in my life. Listen to ICT's Daily Game every weekday on the I.Hard Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast and start your morning with me." Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and we are the hosts of Stuff Mom Never Told You, an intersectional feminist podcast tackling everything and anything. And now we have a book that digs into the issues that impact so many of us. For example, what was the Pantsy Revolution?

What if the Battle of the Sexes had gone a different way? Why is Prince Islayah, in fact, so amazing? This book answers all of those questions and more, giving historical context for why they matter to all of us now. Stuff I'll never told you is a feminist past, present, and future, is out now. Available where books are sold, or get yours at stuffyshedreadbooks.com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and I was going to

say Jerry's here but she totally flaked on us. This is stuff you should know. Yeah, I've never wanted to be able to make a dolphin sound more in my life. That's... That's... I mean, that was medium. Better than I could do. Well, let's hear yours. I've heard about it.

No, I mean, I can't. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, So we're talking today, the reason we're trying to speak dolphin Chuck is because we're talking about animal communication and Just a clear things up right out of the gate We're not talking about animal communication where we try to teach animals to speak human languages, right? Whether it be sign language English, whatever. Yeah We already did that in our live Coco the Gorilla episode. Yeah. Now we're going the other way here because there's a whole other tranche as the French would say of research that is going into listening to decoding, understanding, and potentially speaking animal languages.

Yeah, and this is one, it's like one of the rare cases where as we'll see for a lot of a year's science was like, animals don't do this. Like they, they, they run at each other, they make little instinctual noises, but they're not really communicating with each other or us. Don't kid yourself, And this is a rare case where I'm like, I don't care what science says.

My pets speak to me, and I understand what they're saying. Yeah, no, this researching this, I was haunted by the ghost of Tracy Wilson. Do you remember like how hard course you was about not anthropomorphizing years back? Yeah, sorry. Well, yes, sorry Tracy. I do it and Tracy's a cat person. I know for she refuses to speak to her cat. No, I'm sure that's not true.

But yeah, I mean, that's a fair point. And I think we've made that point many times. We're whenever we've talked about pets like communicating or I think anytime we talk about pets, we kind of both agree that no, there's they're obviously communicating in ways we're just not fully aware of and it's actually pretty anthropocentric to just assume that because we don't understand it, they're not doing it. Luckily, like I said, there's a whole tranche of research that is assuming, no, these animals have communication patterns that kind of follow the same general idea

of human language. And as such, we have a chance of being able to understand it. But the whole thing is based on this idea. Like you said, science is long thought like, that any sounds they make were instinctual, that there wasn't any purpose behind them. It was just that it was an involuntary response to something that evolution had kind of bred into that animal.

And that was also predicated on this idea that Renee Descartes put out there, which is animals have like no inner lives, whatsoever, the only humans do. Boo. Yeah, I'm very disappointed with Descartes. And I know we've talked about this before, probably multiple times,

but it bears repeating because he set that tone for centuries to follow. Yeah. Oh, for sure. that tone for centuries to follow. Yeah, oh for sure. But I mean, you needn't only look at your dog into a certain degree, your cat. But the first couple of animals we're gonna talk about that Olivia helped us with this, that she was keen to point out humans have been around

for a while and communicate with if you are the owner slash mother, father, caretaker of these animals. We're talking about dogs and horses. And if you have ever had a dog, you know what at least this one thing is and that's called puppy dog eyes. And this is a trade.

It's actually a muscle called the LOM, the LOM, the Levittor, Anguli, Akuli, Medialis. Presto. It's a muscle in the eyebrow, basically, of a dog that evolves from a wolf. Like, they've done studies and found that wolves don't still have this or wolves don't have this. Right. And that the only dog out of like the eight breeds they studied that didn't evolve this way was the Siberian Husky, which is I guess closely related to a wolf. It's a wolf posing as a dog. And I don't know if you've ever known Huskies. I'm not knocking any

breed. I like Huskies just fine. Sure. I've known a few, but I've never been able to have a good connection with them. Yeah. And that maybe part of the reason is that they're haven't evolved as far away as we have with our other domesticated friends.

Oh, that's a great point. But they have done studies. There was one published in the proceeding of the National Academy of sciences who uh... studied uh... dogs out for adoption at like uh... you know what do you call it why can't you think of the word an adoption drive

sure it wouldn't drive it just in the in the pound okay what do you call those though an animal shelter shelter you know the easiest word won't come to you sometimes? Yeah, I do. I've been there, buddy.

It's very frustrating. Anyway, shelter dogs, and they found, they studied all these dogs, like hundreds and hundreds of them over long periods of time. And they found that the dogs to use these lone muscles to make their eyes bigger and raise that inner brow were adopted quicker. Yeah, I think it has to do with exaggerating the shape of the eyes, which as we've talked about

the kinder schema, I believe, in the science of cute, that would just make them automatically cuter. Yeah, bigger eyes. I mean, that's why all those Disney characters have big eyes. Yeah, bigger eyes. I mean, that's why all those Disney characters have big eyes. But the exactly. But the point of this is that dogs, we have clear evidence that dogs evolved a way to be expressive through their facial expressions in ways that affect humans and that's a form of communication. Exactly. That's just one form of communication. So it isn't anthropomorphizing to say that, you know, dogs have emotions and that they express these emotions, like things like being happy to see their friend,

their human friend. There's a guy named Ecologist Carl Safina. And he points out that his whole thing is like, dogs love us. Clearly, it's clear as day. Anybody who owns a dog knows this and anybody who says otherwise is just being a real stick in the mud basically. But he pointed out that really the whole thing broke open finally. Dig carts, smelly corpse was finally cast off of the animal behavior field.

In the 60s, I believe, when observational studies of animals really started in earnest thanks to people like Jane Goodall. I can't remember who her, Lewis Leaky, that those people were coming back with reports like, these animals clearly interact with one another in ways that humans would consider empathy, they're communicating, they're doing all sorts of stuff, we supposedly think they can't. And then today it's being demonstrated, all of these observations are being proven because we've fashioned MRI machines that dogs can go in. We don't like sedate the dog and put them in there.

It's not going to have any effect. They've made these open machines and then they introduce them to the dogs and the dogs free to come or go in the MRI. If the dogs that's there long enough, they can study the dog's brain activity and what they're seeing is, these dogs are smart. They definitely have an inner life and most of what we're taking as emotional communication is probably totally correct. Yeah. And if they sit there long enough, they're good boys and good girls. That's right. And they get treats. That's right. We also have horses. If you want to look at another animal that humans have probably had

the longest relationship with. And there is a horse trainer slash neuroscientist, which is a very handy thing if you're going to talk about animal communication. Her name is Janet Jones, not the former gymnast who was married to Wayne Gretzky. You remember that? No, I knew that name sounded familiar, but I didn't know why. Does he form a gymnast form of actress? She was a gymnast, too, though, right?

I haven't paid that much attention to Wayne Gretzky's marital life. Anyway, different Janet Jones. And she said that horses and humans are different because humans evolved into predators, horses evolved from prey species. So we have different ways of looking at the world when you're riding a horse around outside. And we communicate that to one another. You know, also throwing the fact that horses have a 340-degree range of vision with those awesome humongous eyes on the sides of their heads. Yeah, that last 20 degrees really ticks horses off. It really does.

But if you're riding along and a horse might be scared about, and Livia uses a great illustration of an umbrella opening, it might spook a horse. But the human's like, hey, that's just an umbrella. They're gonna sit on the top of the horse. They're gonna relax the horse by, you know, I'm not a horse rider, certainly not how you do this. But by moving your body and flexing your muscles in a certain way with the rhythm of the horse to let them know that it's cool.

Right. So, what Janet Jones is basically saying is, as she wrote this really cool article called Becoming a Centaur in Aeon, is that through this communication that horses and humans have co-evolved together to understand with one another and to be able to train one another with, you're becoming like kind of a super organism for that time where you are a top of horse and the horse is you, and you guys are working in conjuncture together, sharing sensory information. I love that. I want to ride more horses in my life.

That's a great, great thing to try to do, Chuck. I've only done it a couple of times, and I loved it. I haven't for a really long time. I used to as a kid a lot more. I had to come the prairie. Yeah. When you were, when you were westward bound. Yeah, in the wagon train. Birds, we're going to talk a lot about birds because obviously bird vocalizations are,

you can just listen to birds and tell that they are specific and that probably means something. But humans and birds interact in different ways around the world, specifically a couple of tribes. The Jawa people in Mozambique and the Hads of Tanzania both use what are called honeyguides. And they are birds that they can call. They each use different calls in their respective places to call over these birds. And the birds come a flyin' in and say, hey, follow me and we'll show you the honey.

And they go and get the honey. And if you're asking like, well, why in the world would they do this? It's because the birds get the wax after they're finished. So it's a mutually beneficial relationship. Yeah. And they've actually tested to make sure it's not just the presence of humans making sounds that catch the birds' attention and the birds associate humans with getting honey. They tested other like control sounds, but there are specific calls that a java people use.

It's like a bird, something like that. And that is what the honey guides respond to. They don't respond to, hey, honey guide or anything like that. They respond to this call that the jawa people have been using for countless generations. And that the jawa have been passing down from generation to generation. That also means that the honey guides, wild birds, not tamed in any way, they're not coerced to do this, they're wild animals who clearly communicate with humans, they're passing down that that burr-humsound that a jawa person makes in the woods means go find that person and take them to some honey and they'll leave the honeycums for you.

People and birds passing down this common information that forms a symbiotic relationship. That's nuts. Yeah, and I imagine if they said, hey, honeyguides, come over here. The birds would say, why else speak in English? Right. That's really weird. Yeah.

What happened to burr home? There are also, of course, and we're not gonna get too much into this, but for hunters, all kinds of mating calls. And I guess you don't have to hunt to use a mating call. If you want to call a moose over just to say hello, you could use a moose mating call. But all kinds of, and it's not just mating calls, but usually it's some kind of mating call for any kind of game that you're hunting or ducks or stuff like that. Yeah, across that part out. That was people communicating with animals at the very least.

So you mentioned birds and how we're going to talk about birds a lot, but birds are just the obvious places to start and that's where humans kind of started in tracking animal communication. Whether they realized it was animal communication or not, bird song is always kind of captured the human imagination. And apparently back in the day, they started to try to assign musical notation to recording bird song by hand on paper. Good luck. Right. And then as you know, the technology progressed and we got better at recording and reproducing sound, one of the things that we really started compiling

a lot of were bird song. Bird songs. It's bird song plural and singular. It's like the kind of word that would be. I think so. Bird song guy. And there's actually really great collection at Cornell. There are an anthology lab has what's called the McCauley library.

And I've got this app called Merlin. It's a bird identification app. It's free. I think you just have to sign up with your email. And if you hear a bird call, you just open Merlin and it's like Shazam for birds. Yeah. It's amazing. And like it, it just open Merlin and it's like Shazam for birds. Yeah, it's amazing. It is amazing. And like, it just sits there and listens and then it goes, oh, is it this bird and it shows you a picture and tells you what that bird is and you say,

that's exactly what bird that is. Thanks Merlin. Merlin gives you a wink and goes back to sleep in your phone. Yeah, it's a very popular app and very popular in my family. We use it all the time. Nice. Oh, a lot of, we have a lot of identification apps that are really handy.

We have like bird apps and plant, of course, and flower apps, and we have those. And then I have an art app where you can point it at a painting or something, and it'll tell you, if it's in the database, of course, it'll tell you who it is. It's like tubist. Now it'll tell you the it's in the database, of course, it'll tell you who it is. It's like cubist. Now it'll tell you the actual artist. I got you.

You know, max cubist. So let me just set this up real quick, Chuck, and I say we take a break. Okay. But although people were like, okay, animals have somewhat richer inner lives than we had always suspected, but they're still not using anything like what we would consider language. That carried on until the 70s until a couple of studies came through, kicked the legs out from under that. What a great cliffy. So I said Cliffey, people know that means cliffhanger, I hope. Long time listeners too.

Long time listeners. So yeah, you were talking about until the 70s, and that's what I mentioned that science had always kind of poo-pooed it, and it was in the 70s where people finally started, you know, there were some sort of rogue, hippie scientist here and there that was like nobody was listening to basically. But in the 70s, is when a couple of big studies came out that you mentioned pre-break. One was in 1977, a couple of primate scientists named Robert C. Farth, say Farth, and Dorothy Cheney, and they were working with one of those hippies, Peter Marler, who was an animal communication expert when that wasn't cool, and they were studying vervit monkeys in Kenya, and this is a pretty big breakthrough and pretty remarkable.

They found that they are using different, we're going to say things like words for lack of a better term, sounds, vocalizations, but they use different words for different threats. So they notice that something flying, like an eagle versus something on the ground like a snake like a python Mm-hmm. They would use those to indicate one or the other and they they learn this by making recordings of it And when they played it sure enough the monkey would look up into the sky or search the ground around them for the snake Yeah, depending on what call they played back. That's right. Not not not depending on what Brian Adams song they played So okay, smarty. So, you can still make a case that,

okay, so what they have these specific words for snake or for eagle, but it doesn't mean that it's anything more than instinct for a monkey to utter this particular cry when it sees a snake and other monkeys to respond in kind. And it's all innate and none of it means that they're using grammar or language. And they say, okay, fine, fine. Just keep waiting a few more years. And we're going to go forward to a class, Zuberbueller, great name, who is Swiss as people who name their family, Zuberbueller, or want to be? He studied the Campbell's Monkeys in the Coat de War.

I believe the tomato Campbell's Monkeys. And he found nothing. That Campbell's tomato soup. Yeah. And he found that they actually use suffixes, right? So if they use the alarm called crack or crack, K-R-A-K, that's how they spelled it, not the camels monkeys, but a superbular in his friends. That means leopard is coming, but crack who means it's just a general alarm, like look out or heads up or something like this. They can also like supplement Krak or Krakku with booms that they will make.

It can mean like come this way. They can mean that there's a falling tree branch depending on if they amend it with the suffix U. So, Zubabueller is saying like, guys, this is grammar. Those are words. This cannot possibly just be instinctual. And even if it is instinctual, then that would suggest that animals,

at least some types of monkeys have a language instinct too. That's a whole other Bala wax, like we talked about before, but Zubabueller's like, dude, dude come on and people started to finally be like All right, fine. We'll kind of get on board with this idea that the animals are using something like language possibly Yeah, and he even when you know as an example of how it's something that humans potentially understand once they learn it He was warned off by a leopard by hearing the leopard call, apparently. And this was in a radio lab at one point, shout out to radio lab, some of the OGs like

us. But yeah, Zubar Bueller was like, hey, you know, I heard them sound the leopard alarm and that meant that I needed to, you know, be watchful. Yeah, they were, I didn't, I didn't understand, I didn't go listen to that episode of Radio Lab, so I'm not sure if they were warning him or he was just paying attention that they were, I think it's that.

Okay, so I think, but who knows, maybe they're like, superbular. He spoke, he spoke Campbell's monkey for that moment and it helped them out. Yeah, sure. So, and it wasn't just a zubabueller who did. Apparently, other animals, including birds and other monkeys that live around Campbell's monkeys,

have learned what crack or crack means, too. And we'll respond in kind. So, there's evidence that there's interspatial communication and not necessarily that monkey talking to that bird, but that bird just from being around these monkeys using language, picking up certain words and speaking monkey ease, even though the bird actually speaks parodies or something. Yeah, I mean, it's not any different, I think,

then, you know, I have cats and dogs and they each have their own respective feeding times and programs and systems and treat systems. And sometimes one will get a little of the other. For instance, my dog Charlie will lick the wet cat food spoon after I give them their wet cat food. So now Charlie knows when I say, do you want your good stuff, which is what I say to the cats, and they come running in there for the wet food.

Charlie knows, Hey, that's when I get to lick that spoon. So, uh, I'm speaking English in each of these animals is understanding what I'm saying, even though for Charlie, I'm speaking cat, although that's really not true. You know what I'm saying? No, I know what you mean. It, you know what I mean? It holds up and it applies. It's also you can make the case very much like

an English speaking person in America who's got a bodega down the street, understands what k-pasa means, or aiii or something like that, right? Like it's like, this living in proximity of people who speak other languages, you pick up other languages, and that seems to very much be analogous

to what we're talking about with the birds living around the Campbell's monkeys. Yeah, I guess the true comparison would be if my cats made a distinctive meow when they wanted, and who knows, they might when they want that good stuff and that signal Charlie. Yeah, but I think your analogy still worked.

Okay, thanks, man. No problem. You wanna tell them about cons, I'll your analogy still works. Okay. Thanks, man. No problem. You want to tell him about cons? I'll leave it to you. He gives a biologist name, Khan Slobadakov. Slobada? Oh, no, that's not right at all. No, it's not. Slobodchakov.

Oh, nice work. I think you totally nailed it. Yeah, oddly enough, Khan is the one that throws me. I've never heard that as a first name. C-A-C-O-N, not K-H-A-N, like Con. Yeah, right, this is just Con. Right. Anyway, that person is a biologist and they study Prairie dogs, and that they found that

they have very distinct sounds that when they're talking about predators that basically say what kind of predators coming, how, what color they are, how big they are, how fast they're coming at us, and they can combine all those sounds in different ways. If it's an animal, they've never a predator, they've never seen. They can combine those other words to kind of say, this is a new thing and not the whatever hunts a prairie dog. Right, like if you saw, somehow a tarisar

came through a time warp and took modern day at Lanta and we were standing outside. We didn't know a tarisar because we'd never seen one before. We might say something like, look, a flying green dragon monster. And that gets generally the point across. What Slobodchikov found is that

Prairie Dogs do the same thing. And that they also have a tonal language very similar to Mandarin, where different changes in intonation of the same phoneme mean totally different things, and that they layer these different tones that these prairie dogs language may actually be more complex than other languages in that use that are used by humans. Yeah, tonally. Right? Oh, I thought you were making a joke like totally. No, no, tone. Yeah, tonally. Tonally speaking, not like the number of words or whatever. Totally tubular. And that they, he fed all the stuff through a computer to pick out like just very, I caught that by the way.

I know, but you're giving me nothing today. Are you mad as I keep fooling you these days? Yeah, maybe that's it. Okay. To the max. So he fed this stuff into a computer so they could analyze like, you know, stuff that humans can't even hear, like a program designed to analyze little minute differences. And what they found out was when they did experiments of like human beings walking and approaching

the prairie dogs, they would say something different for, here comes the tall guy in the hat rather than, here comes the short woman in the high heels. Right, we're walking through the prairie. Yeah, you know, because all those short ladies in high heels. Right. And the tall man in the yellow hat. Yeah, I'm not sure what happened there. So, so things are certain to kind of pick up here.

There's one more we need to throw out that really had a big effect on demonstrating language use among animals. And that was among Japanese tits using grammar. These are birds by the way. Cute little birds, yes. Thank you for rescuing me from angry parents. And they have a distinct sound for snake. And if you say that, if you take that sound, I'm not quite sure what the sound is, but I believe it's more than one part. And you play it out of order, it means nothing to them, to the birds. But if you play it in order, they're like, oh my God, a snake wear. And they've, they've, that shows that there is grammar. There's word order counts.

And if it were just innate, if it were just an involuntary reflex, it wouldn't matter how you said that. If they heard one of those tones or whatever, it would evoke some sort of reaction or response. So you can speak gibberish to Japanese tits just by switching the word order, or the order of the sounds, which is the same thing basically switching word order.

Yeah, pretty cool. This, you know, now we get to the question of, is this something that they've learned or is it instinctive? Like are there older counterparts teaching in them these languages? Are they born with it? And we have a couple of really cool examples. One is something we talked about at length in the bee episode, which is the waggle dance that honey bees do.

Basically, to show another bee where the food is, they use their body position in relation to the sun, and do this little vibrating waggle to indicate the distance. And that's how they tell everyone like, hey, let's go find this honey. In 1973, a gentleman named Carl von Frisch won a Nobel Prize in physiology by translating this dance and kind of figuring it out. And then just this year in 2023, they did a study about whether this was learned or something they're born with. And they found that it's super cool

But it's a little bit of both so they got little baby bees who hadn't seen this waggle dance yet isolated them and They they found that they actually did try the waggle dance So it is somewhat innate something they're born with but they weren't very good at it And when they compared those to other baby bees who were living with adult bees who were ostensibly teaching them distance, they did it much, much better, were way more accurate as far as the distance goes. And so they found that like, yeah, they are born with it to a certain degree, but they get better at it by being taught. Yes. And just a teeny, teensy bit of it is Maybelline.

Right. All right, there you go. You happy? Yes, thank you. So, that's WiggleDance is almost just entirely incomprehensible to us except for Carl von Hirsch. He figured it out. Much more closely relatable to us are hand signals, the communication that

a lot of the great apes use. And what they found is that across apes there's similar gestures for similar meanings, but that groups and different species can use slightly different gestures, whether it's a hand gesture, I think chewing on a leaf a certain way is flirting. There's a lot of different communicative body language or body gestures that apes use, but that they can be slightly different based on groups, which is a dialect. A dialect is the use of a dialect. A dialect is the use of a similar language or the same language in slightly different ways based on your group, your culture, your geography, what region you live in. It's

exactly the same thing as the distinction between soda or pop or Coke depending on where you live in the United States. Same thing, same meaning, those are all English words, but you would say that based on where you live or where you were raised or the culture that you were raised in. Yeah, and chimpanzees, of course, get a lot of research on stuff like this, and I think people are more apt to believe that a chimp would do something like that because they're just more like us. But they found the same thing in all kinds of animals, one of which is the naked mole rat that they respond as far as the dialects go. They respond to soft chirps from people in their own colonies more than they do those similar sounding soft chirp in a different colony. So in other words, it's a different dialect.

And we're going to be doing one on make it more at some point. Easy this. I forgot how much I love this animal from watching the great documentary fast cheap and out of control by master, documentary and Errol Morris. And we'll talk about it when we eventually get to that episode. Okay, so save it. Great. Great doc. I highly recommend it though.

You want to hear something super amazing. Yes. Do you remember and I think our evolution of human intelligence episode we talked about how they think the word he might actually be so old that Neanderthals might have used it. Like it's one of the oldest sounds that humans make. Mm-hmm. There's the hand gesture for come here that you use where you kind of point right in front of you with your fingers downward. Yeah, yeah, apes use that. Oh, wow. We still use the same hand gesture that we used back when we were full on great apes. That's awesome.

Isn't that amazing? Yeah. It just works so well. Why fix what ain't broke? We decided over millions and millions of years. That's super cool. I think we should take a break. Because we got a star of the show that's about to appear, a several, but a big star of the show is about to appear in communication.

And that's called The Whale. And we'll be back to talk about whales right after this. Okay Chuck, so in addition to the Naked More episode, I want to do an episode on the Save the Whales movement that was high-level. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, we're going to do that. Okay. But central to that was a guy named Roger Payne, who I'm sure will come quite a bit in that episode. So we won't get into him too deeply, but he was a, I believe, a biological accoustician, some really arcane

specialty. Yeah, he made it up. He basically, he, I guess, had friends in U.S. Navy listening stations that had been set up to Evesdrop on Soviet submarines. And those Navy stations were turning up these amazing recordings of whale songs that people just didn't realize existed up to that point. And Roger Payne like wrote a science article on it that came out in the early 70s and then simultaneous to that he introduced it to the larger public,

not just the scientific community, with an album called Songs of the Humpback Whale. It was released in 1970. It is recordings, I think, a 35-minute album of recording of whale songs. It went multi-platinum because I imagine that you could take acid or smoke pot and just sit there and zone out to that for hours, but also it really dovetailed with the nascent

environmental movement that was coming along at the same time too. And that actually helped contribute to the Save the Wales campaign that was highly successful, just from releasing that album. Yeah, I've listened to it today. You can stream it anytime you want. It's, I'm sure you've listened to it, right?

I did and I found it distracting. Even though it's instrumental, it's silent. My mind kept being like, what the hell is that? I couldn't concentrate so I did turn it off. Oh, interesting. I've found it to be, because I can only listen to very specific kinds of music when I do this study stuff. Mainly it's Brian Eno and now songs of the humpback whales. And Brian Adams. And Brian Adams. It was good though, I like it. I mean, it's not, it is very much a background music and it's not even like, like I would define anyone to even say like, oh, if you listen to this like the melodic and it's like a song, it's really not. It's whales making noises, but I just found it very relaxing. Yeah, it is. It's very cool. I can imagine like if I were, if I were just kind of sitting around zoning out on that,

it would be extraordinarily pleasant, but my brain just wants to focus on PCP. There are all kinds of whales though, and they have all kinds of communications that we've learned about over the years. The sperm whale, they have what they call like a Coda click pattern. And it depends, it's kind of like a dialect as well, I guess, because it depends on what clan and clans are, you know, groups of huge, huge groups of whales. Sometimes they're thousands of them, made up of smaller groups, usually five to 10 female adults and their kids, but they get together in these big clans, and the different clans have variations of their language, and when they have overlapping territories, they get really, really distinct because

they're overlapping so they can tell one another apart. Yeah, they have a clan signifier that they use to identify themselves to others, right? Because these whales don't really navigate the world by eyesight. They mostly do it from sound. So that's how you would do that. And these clicks apparently can last about 10 milliseconds, but they're 236 decibels in volume. And to give you a comparison, I think that's the word I'm groping for.

Totally. Gun shot is 140 decibels. Okay. Okay, your pain threshold starts around there. So if you happen to be sitting next to a sperm whale, underwater, when it light out one of these clicks, it would blow your your drums right out and possibly your entire head. I can only picture you now underwater sitting in your don't-be-dum chair. Just floating above it. Or standing

awkwardly beside it. Yeah. Or underneath it. Or who knows? Things got weird. Yeah, it did get a little weird right out of the gate really. Oh, that was the whole point and I love for your Instagram birthday post when I asked people to make their favorite Josh moments Those a lot of don't be dumb in there. How did you notice? I did and thank you for that. That was extraordinarily kind of you Of course, man, that's all true, but uh people love don't be dumb. I get it You feel like I get, everybody just shut up. No, it was great. Baby sperm whales and orcas have like baby talk. They babble just like a little human baby would. When they're learning newborn orcas make a really high-pitched call. It changes

as they grow into adults into a completely different sound. And it starts at about two months, the adult sounding stuff. They start to learn basically. It seems like at about two months. And then for years and years until they hit puberty, they are learning new vocalizations, aka words. Exactly like the development of human kids, too. Yeah.

Orcas also, very much like those birds that live around the Campbell's Monkeys, they can learn the calls of other species too that they live around. Apparently orcas can understand what bottle nose dolphins are saying to one another. Again, bottle nose dolphin is not trying to communicate with the orca, the orcas just eavesdropping.

And if it hears like, others some really great salmon over here, steer clear, the Orca will be like, I'm going straight to it because I'd love to know salmon. Yeah, the dolphin actually has my fact of the podcast that I can't wait to tell Ruby later on. What?

They name themselves. Within the first few months of being born, they create a very signature whistle to identify themselves. So they, you know, that's their name. Yeah. And so this, I really want to make sure that this lands because sperm whales have clan codas. You're saying to other sperm whales, I'm a member of the, the jamboree clan or whatever, whatever they would name themselves. I'm sure it's like in click sounds. Yeah, but that's for their clan membership, not them as individuals. But on those dolphins name themselves as individuals like this is my name. I'm Josh the dolphin.

Good to meet you. That is what they're doing. Like that's it's that level of identity. Individual identity that they're using to introduce themselves to other dolphins. Amazing. It is. There really is one of the facts of the podcast. And the podcast chock full of facts of the podcast. So we should probably talk about the brain a little bit.

And the question, have we ever actually studied the brain of these animals to see if there are anything like humans? Because we know so much about human brains and the areas of the brain that handle communication and like emotion and stuff like that that comes out through communication. And yes they have. And we're going to talk about something called spindle cells, which were discovered in 1881 and then basically went away and were rediscovered in 1995.

These are specialized neurons that are in two very specific brain regions, the ACC, the anterior, a Singulate cortex, and the frontal insula, the FI. They've basically established that both of these regions of the brain and humans are where we experience our emotion and are really important for monitoring ourselves and our bodies and how we feel like are we in pain, are we hungry, did we goof something up, like self-monitoring basically. Yeah, not just self-monitoring on the individual level

but in relation to other people. Like you said, did we goof something up? Should we feel embarrassed? Have we made a social gap? All of these things are kind of controlled, self-monitoring, self-reflection by the anterior-singulate cortex and the frontal insula, right?

So our ability to empathize essentially is what we're talking about, is from the activity of these two. And they're characterized by a large number of spindle cells and only spindle cells are found in these areas. Okay. So we're like, okay, spindle cells, that's the seed of empathy, of emotion,

of understanding other people. Well, it turns out that I don't know if it's neuron for neuron. Spurm whales have more spindle cells than human beings do. Okay. So we have really good evidence, and it's not just sperm whales, there are other cetaceans. A lot of the great apes have spindle cells too. Don't ask how we know this by the way. But we've found that they have the makings of what it would take to empathize with others. And if you put that together with the assumption or the growing understanding that they're communicating

in very deep levels, it would make sense that if we can decode what they're saying, we'll find they have quite a bit to say that we can conceivably, understand and connect with. Yeah. That's, I mean, that's just incredible. It really is, because what we're seeing with those spindle cells is they're not like, you know, I'm hungry.

Let's eat that snake, and that's like the extent, the most fascinating thing a, a, a chimp says on any given day. Who knows what they're thinking? Like it just opens up a whole universe of possibility about what they're thinking, what they're feeling because bear in mind, they're also experiencing life in the universe, in the world, and everything in a totally different way than we are.

So the idea of being able to tap into that and then to share our experience with them, I mean, I can't imagine what just massive impacts that would have on humanity and hopefully on the world and in general, if we could do that. Oh, yeah. Well, and to be able to figure a lot of this stuff out, we've long realized that some of the stuff is just beyond our abilities. The Crow is one example they use.

Crows have a lot of different vocalizations of varying pitches, iterations and inflections and rhythms and cadences. There's just no way that humans could listen enough basically and isolate these Crows by sex and age and social status and where they are and to be able to really learn all of this stuff. So, you know, we talked about AI and large language models recently and got a few emails from people that are like, you know, there seem to be a lot of fear based stuff in this, which is true. And you guys didn't focus on any of the like great possibilities. And maybe we didn't. So here's one cool thing that AI is going to potentially do and that they're already starting to use

is helping out just sort of like we have figured out or how AI is working with large language models as predictors of how a human might type a sentence that makes sense. And doing the same thing with animals basically and trying to figure out their language. Yeah, just detecting patterns, figuring out what words are important, how they're being

used, all this stuff. They've already got it, I think deep squeak was the first one that analyzes rodent sounds. And there's a couple of groups. One is CETI, CETI, CETI, CETI, Translation Initiative project. That's led by a guy named David Gruber. They have the way I saw it put, is that they're going all in on one clan, the EC2 clan of sperm whales off the island of Dominica. And they are completely observing and monitoring this clan of sperm whales 24 hours a day every day of the year. They're down to using robotic fish that are gathering video and audio and everything that swim along with the whales. They know everything that these

whales are doing at any given moment and so not only are they getting these whale songs and collecting them to feed into this the the large language model to understand it, they're also notating this stuff so that the context is also understood too. Because what they think is that a different click or a quota depending on the context can totally change meaning. So they also need to know this too, but it's a huge undertaking.

They have like tens of thousands of whale song right now to probably crack this language they're going to need millions so it's they've they've they've started on the road but they've got a ways to go. Yeah and it's like I think what they're looking for is that next level which is not oh wow the whales told other whales where the good fish were or whatever is they want answers to things like The whales tell stories like very rudimentary stories to one another or very advanced stories Why does it have to be rude or true? You know, yeah exactly? do they um if something like something big happens to a whale clan?

Do they talk about it afterward like a week later? Just someone bring this up? Do they do these math in any way and And these are all questions that would just blast open the door, like if answered, just blast open the door of our understanding of how animals may talk to one another. Yeah, so SETI is eavesdropping in order to understand what whales are saying. There's another project called the Earth Species Project,

ESP, that is in part looking at types of whales, not only to learn what they're saying, but to speak to them directly. So the difference between the two projects is almost like the difference between SETI and METI as far as searching for alien intelligence concerns. It's very similar in nature. But one of the things that Earth Species Project

is trying to do is map all species languages to find universal terms or universal concepts and understand the different words so you could translate tiger into whale into human into, you know, Japanese tit. Right. Or if they're like conceptually like you were talking about are there overlaps in things like grief or joy or these other like big sort of umbrella experiences that seemingly any living thing could experience. Right. Exactly. And like you said, if it were both things open, it totally. Some people are like, this would change humans forever.

Like, how could anybody eat meat after that point? If you can understand a pig is saying, please don't kill me, please don't kill me while you're killing it. Right. You couldn't do it. And if you did, people would stop you kind of thing. Other people are like, well, I'm worried

that we're gonna use it to manipulate animals. And people will probably try to do that too. The outcome would likely be both. Like humans would be changed or relationship with the animal world would be forever changed for the better and the worse. And that's just kind of how life goes. But that kind of change,

I can't imagine how amazing it would be to witness that. Yeah, I also thought this thing, the one thing you said was really cool about, like, because the idea of like, all right, let's say we could finally get there, or understand, I think who was the guy who was named Garber? He's the head of SET-E. Yeah, Gruber, yeah.

Yeah, Gruber was, he was like, everyone's really excited, he said it also could be a real letdown, it could be the do talk, it's just super boring. But the idea that this thing that you said about like, well, what if we could communicate, what would, what would we have to talk about with the whale? And that's where you start to look at like larger commonalities of living things. And in the case of a whale, you know, I got kids, you got kids. I love to swim.

I love to sleep. We're both mammals. We have a handful of things we could actually talk about. And then the idea of objectivity is a scientist comes in because it's, and not objectivity in that I really want this to happen or not, but objectivity of just like an experience that a whale can understand can't even understand like being dry Like we would talk about being wet in a different context that a whale would because a whale would just say like what do you mean wet like right always wet Exactly, we would say no like wets when you take a shower or get in a swimming pool

But the hope is is that if they are capable of empathy They're probably capable of metaphor and that we could explain things to one another like prairie dogs to like yellow tall human in hat. Getting ideas and concepts across just enough for the other one to kind of understand things that are totally foreign to them. Or wailing ship nearby. Swimming the other way.

Exactly. There was a, I saw somebody theorize that you could teach like a large language model to analyze and learn to speak, teach itself to speak whale. But because we don't understand how large language models actually work, the AI and the whale could have a conversation and we would have no idea what they were saying. That's frightening. It is, it's frightening, but it's also like, wah, wah, hilarious too. Imagine putting all that work into it and that's the outcome.

Yeah. You'd have to build another AI to tell you what the first AI is talking about. Let's do it. Cool. Pretty neat stuff. I agree. And I feel like we're not done with this topic, you know what I mean? Oh, okay. I think there's more to come. All right. Oh, by the way, there is a listener who is, did you see that email that has

grouped our stuff into tranches, sweeps? No, I didn't see that one. I'll make sure I'll forward it to you. I haven't even answered them back yet but his name is Robert Fiddler Ironically enough because he's fiddling about with With our content and he has created suites and sub-sweets and a in a spreadsheet for us That's awesome. Thanks Robert and it's she's looking over it Just a system

Police true crime those are the big ones economics finance atmosphere science weird natural disasters natural resources boy This is amazing. Yeah, I haven't even really looked through it yet, but anyway shout out to you He called himself Robbie Robbie Fiddler. Yeah, maybe we could publish it at some point or something on our website Oh, I have to but copyright Robbie Fiddler. Yeah, maybe we could publish it at some point or something on our website. Oh, I have to, but copyright Robbie Fiddler. Yeah, we'll see. Anyway, did you say you'd listen to a mail? No. Okay, why don't you set me up in the traditional way.

Chuck's feeling like a chatty Kathy, so that means it's time for a listener mail. There you go. Hey guys, I'm an 11 year old Canadian living in Australia and we've been listening to your show my whole life. My dad's telling me he would listen to stuff you should know when cuddling me in the middle of the night and I was just a BB. We love your podcast and hope you make many more for many years to come. We hope to see a live show soon. I love it when you guys do mysteries because they're one of my favorite things to listen to on your channel. You've expanded my imagination and creativity and intelligence. Me and my dad get into big conversations about your episodes because you're so intriguing and we discuss what we've learned and what we think. I'm just emailing you to let you know that my

dad and I are traveling across a big chunk of Australia on a road trip in July to see the Australian zoo. My dad has so many stuff you should know to listen to in the way and I'm really excited to listen to the podcast and go to the zoo. Oh, and your jokes are pretty funny, but I make them even funnier and we all have a good laugh. Nice. He's playing off jokes. It's collaborative. I love it, so that says love dictated but not read from Reese. Reese, you're pretty cool. I just have to say.

Yeah, and a little request from Reese. I imagine this is aimed at you. Please do one more of the voice from the last Halloween special. It's my dad's favorite. Yeah. I got to think that Reese is talking about my friend's meagle. Yeah, I have to go back and listen to smiegle again because he apparently was off last time I tried it. Oh was he?

Yeah. From what I hear. Alright, some people emailed in and were like, that was not right. Alright. You can let down in 11 year olds. I'm fine if you're fine. Yeah, I'm prepared to do that. Alright, well just listen in Reese and Josh will brush up on his smiegel.

Eventually, Reese, and when I do it next, you can be like, that was for me. Exactly. Well, if you want to be like Reese and show how super cool you are naturally without any effort whatsoever, we would love to hear from you. You can send it in an email to stuffpodcast.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you're gonna want to hear.

In my new podcast, iced tea's daily game. I'll be dropping some daily wisdom and personal insight that I believe is essential to achieving success in business, love, life, hustling, whatever. I'll be coming to you every single week day with a fresh new quote that speaks directly to me and I hope to you as well. In five minutes or less, I'll break down why these words matter

and reveal personal stories and experiences that show them in action in my life. My goal is to inspire all of you out there to achieve success and happiness, whatever that means to you. So start every week day morning with me and get inspired. Listen to I.C.'s Daily Game every week day on the I Heart radio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and start your morning with me. Hey, this is Annie.

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Available where books are sold, or get yours at stuffyshedreadbooks.com. From I Heart Podcasts, these are the whistleblowers. I wasn't just gonna sit silently by. Somebody needs to just give everybody the whole truth. You take your question in black sales and get it on up out of my facility. If you speak out, you won't pay. You should be prosecuted.

When power corrupts, conscience is the last line of defense. I'm Miles Taylor. Listen to the whistleblowers every Thursday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Miles Taylor. Listen to the whistleblowers every Thursday on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.