Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans

September 15, 2015 1:33 PM

“Head trainer Teri Turner Bolton presses her palms together over her head, the signal to innovate, and then puts her fists together, the sign for “tandem.” Comparative psychologist Stan Kuczaj records several seconds of audible chirping between [the dolphins] Hector and Han, then his camera captures them both slowly rolling over in unison and flapping their tails three times simultaneously. [...] Either one dolphin is mimicking the other [...] or it’s not an illusion at all: When they whistle back and forth beneath the surface, they’re literally discussing a plan.”

Dolphins make a large variety of noises, but “despite a half century of study, nobody can say what the fundamental units of dolphin vocalization are or how those units get assembled.” Some scientists may suspect that dolphins have a language, but they do not have hard evidence for it, and others doubt whether one exists at all:

“There is also no evidence that dolphins cannot time travel, cannot bend spoons with their minds, and cannot shoot lasers out of their blowholes,” writes Justin Gregg, author of Are Dolphins Really Smart? The Mammal Behind the Myth.

Past attempts to communicate with dolphins, like the experiment by John Lilly and Margaret Lovatt to “teach the dolphins to speak English” (previously on MetaFilter), were not a success. On the other hand, this could be because of insufficient technology:

It’s only within the past decade or so that high-frequency underwater audio recorders, like the one Kuczaj uses, have been able to capture the full spectrum of dolphin sounds, and only during the past couple of years that new data-mining algorithms have made possible a meaningful analysis of those recordings. Ultimately dolphin vocalization is either one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science or one of its greatest blind alleys.

posted by Rangi (35 comments total)

raman or varelse?
posted by entropone at 1:36 PM on September 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

Bottlenose dolphins can use learned vocal labels to address each other
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:38 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I want to believe!
posted by Splunge at 1:44 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Matthews, we're getting another one of those strange 'aw blah es panyol' sounds."
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 1:48 PM on September 15, 2015 [18 favorites]

if they are so smart why do they need or want to mimic humans?
posted by Postroad at 2:21 PM on September 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

It's a cruel mockery complete with pointing and laughing when we're not looking.
posted by erratic meatsack at 2:23 PM on September 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

"Yes! The deep neural network has got a lock on the semantic structure, and the inference engine has finally reconstructed the vocab tree... we're getting a translation! At last!"

"What does it say?"

"So... long... and... thanks..."

"I'm getting a bad feeling about this"

"for... nothing... you... bastards. And, uh, we're only getting an 85 percent confidence on the next phrase. Seems to be something about activating the atmospheric deoxygenator?"
posted by Devonian at 2:27 PM on September 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

if they are so smart why do they need or want to mimic humans?

Or really if they're so smart why would they want to associate with humans and learn their language to communicate with them better? Don't they know what humans are like?
posted by poffin boffin at 2:28 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Whatever. There's a remarkable number of scientists who believe animals lack basic emotions (listen for the word 'Anthropomorphizing') in the midst of an absurd amount of evidence to the contrary. Yes, yes, we get it that a) you want to believe humans are superior and b) you really, really want to experiment on animals but you really don't get to be a scientist and have that view.

It's in that context that I'm pretty skeptical about the language skeptics. Speech is just another thing we want to believe only humans have.
posted by effugas at 2:31 PM on September 15, 2015 [11 favorites]

No amount of nay-saying dolphin intelligence will ever phase me. I want to believe!
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 2:42 PM on September 15, 2015

> I want to believe!

Well then, just feast your eyes on this classic piece from The Onion's archive: Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs.
posted by mosk at 2:46 PM on September 15, 2015

me_irl.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 3:01 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Postroad: "if they are so smart why do they need or want to mimic humans?"

What dolphin does not dream of one day qualifying for a boat loan?
posted by boo_radley at 3:22 PM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

mosk: "> I want to believe!

Well then, just feast your eyes on this classic piece from The Onion's archive: Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs."

Onion make Fa happy.
posted by Splunge at 3:24 PM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

Woah, wait a minute. They're making (the first step of) a universal translator and using it on dolphins?

FTFA:

They’re designing an algorithm that systematically searches through heaps of uncategorized data to find the fundamental units hiding inside. Feed in videos of people using sign language, and the algorithm pulls the meaningful gestures out of the jumble of hand movements. Feed in audio of people reading off phone numbers, and it figures out that there are 11 fundamental digits. (It’s not smart enough to realize that “zero” and “O” are the same number.) The algorithm uncovers recurring motifs that might not be obvious and that a human might not know how to look for.
[...]
“At some point we want to have a CHAT box with all the fundamental units of dolphin sound in it,” says Starner. “The box will translate whatever the system is hearing into a string of symbols and allow Denise to send back some string of fundamental units. Can we discover the fundamental units? Can we allow her to reproduce the fundamental units? Can we do it all on the fly? That’s the holy grail.”

Also of note, the lead on the CHAT algorithm is Thad Starner, who is also the Glass lead at Google. Which means that they probably have the ability to leverage some serious brainpower.
posted by chaosys at 3:54 PM on September 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

Also of note, the lead on the CHAT algorithm is Thad Starner, who is also the Glass lead at Google. Which means that they probably have the ability to leverage some serious brainpower.

...to create something else that no one will ever want to use?
posted by sutt at 4:26 PM on September 15, 2015

Maybe. Wearables and translation software are distinctly different domains, though. My point is that Google has a solid track record with translation software, and that seems relevant to the CHAT box. Especially since (IIRC) the visual translation stuff was a Glass app first.
posted by chaosys at 4:39 PM on September 15, 2015

“There is also no evidence that dolphins cannot time travel, cannot bend spoons with their minds, and cannot shoot lasers out of their blowholes,”

Christ, what an asshole.
posted by Bringer Tom at 5:10 PM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

Yeah, it's ironic when I was reading some paper about the lack of animal intelligence how much the author was trying to prove that simple instinct could explain all of the behavior.

Well so can human behavior be explained by simple instincts to survive. The cat that nursed the baby ducks was just acting on hormones!

What is it when human's do it?

Humans can assist other species as can dolphins/dogs/deer/bunnies... in fact fungus can assist trees and plants bringing nutrients to those in need.

The idea that human's are uniquely emotional and empathic is just plain ridiculous and unproven. Humans are destructive to animals and plants and commit torture and horrible suffering on their fellow beings calling it "progress" then claim we are uniquely more empathetic hahaha. I am unconvinced the fact that we create a lot of junk that pollutes the earth is innately "advanced"; or that we torture other species to get food and medicine and knowledge makes us any less self serving and sadistic than the rest of the beasts (if anything there are likely some animal and plant contenders who are far more advanced at promoting symbiotic relationships in the ecosystem of their area and between beings around them than we). We are more fragile and dependent on sucking up resources from the earth in a destructive way than many other species.

We are a parasite of the earth. I don't think we have to be... but... too often we are. The fact that we use fancy gadgets to destroy and hoard and consume does not advanced make.

If humans are really so much more emotional and altruistic, why don't we show it by actually treating other living creatures as innately valuable and sensing and worthy of respect for their lives and experience of being.
posted by xarnop at 5:23 PM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

There is also no evidence that dolphins cannot time travel, cannot bend spoons with their minds, and cannot shoot lasers out of their blowholes.

I'm not so sure this is true.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 6:14 PM on September 15, 2015

One of those things you pick up once you study much at all about nature is that herbivores are much more dangerous than carnivores, because their justifiable paranoia makes them short-tempered and vicious -- which is why the hippopotamus kills far more humans than any of the predator megafauna in Africa and a pet parrot is far more unpredictable than a captive hawk.

Humans, though, manage to be apex predators with all the worst traits of powerful paranoid herbivores at the same time. Combine this with our idiot savant technical skills and our monstrously overdeveloped egos and we are surely somebody's practical joke on the ecosystem.

The most likely reason that we haven't identified the components of dolphin communication is that we still aren't smart enough. Dolphins devote a ridiculous amount of brain mass to audio communication compared to us and even with our advanced mathematical tools and computers they may be using nuances that we haven't detected. Consider that we ourselves appear to use some form of time-frequency domain translation, even if it's half assed compared to real Fourier analysis, and we've been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years before we figured out the math behind it. For all we know the dolphins are drawing each other three dimensional echo portraits of what they see in their mind's echo-eye. We have only had the analysis tools to even consider such things for a decade or two, and they've only been fast enough to use in real time for ten years or so. And so far nobody has been funded to put a real effort into it.

But yeah, laser beams and bending spoons. Yuk yuk yuk.
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:19 PM on September 15, 2015 [14 favorites]

...our monstrously overdeveloped egos and we are surely somebody's practical joke on the ecosystem

I dunno if egos are a requirement. The blue-green algae did a pretty thorough job fucking the place up back in the day
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 7:20 PM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Modern neuroscience suggests that human sapience is just a trick caused by a story telling, talking machine being bolted onto an ape brain. The meat is making all the decisions and the consciousness is just along for the ride. The talky part isn't responsible for the output of the thinking part. It just thinks it is.

So, per the "If they're so smart" comments above - even if they can talk, that doesn't mean they're smart. It just means they can talk.
posted by mrbigmuscles at 7:29 PM on September 15, 2015

Consider that we ourselves appear to use some form of time-frequency domain translation, even if it's half assed compared to real Fourier analysis

Hearing is basically straightforward frequency analysis across the vibration of the entire cochlea (0-3000hz) or looking for stimulation at resonant frequencies on a surface that gets thinner and thinner (1500hz-whatever survives, up to about 18000hz).

And it's FFT's that are half assed; the brain is incredibly adept at actually extracting actual structure from audio. We're terrible at that in code, thus us having photoshop and not audioshop.
posted by effugas at 8:24 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

The algorithm uncovers recurring motifs that might not be obvious and that a human might not know how to look for.

But the human mind is the best language acquisition device we know - in fact it's the only one we know. Computers don't do meaning. If human beings can't learn a language by listening and watching, no algorithm is going to do it.
posted by Segundus at 10:18 PM on September 15, 2015

The computer doesn't have to decipher them, it just has to detect them. The process after that point involves analysis by human people, I'm assuming.
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 11:56 PM on September 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

There's a remarkable number of scientists who believe animals lack basic emotions (listen for the word 'Anthropomorphizing') in the midst of an absurd amount of evidence to the contrary.

The more interesting claim is that animals might have different basic emotions, especially non-mammals with significantly different brain structures. A non-human intelligence would be in some respects alien, interestingly so, even in the case of a creature as closely related to us as a dolphin.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 1:17 AM on September 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Um... Dolphins ARE mammals...

Sigh. What I was trying to say is that (a) the emotions of non-mammals (birds, octopi) which don't have amygdalae might not map onto human emotions very well at all and (b) even in the case of creatures closely related to us (mammals) making the assumption that their emotions are just like ours could blind us to interesting weirdness.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 2:22 AM on September 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

But the human mind is the best language acquisition device we know - in fact it's the only one we know. Computers don't do meaning. If human beings can't learn a language by listening and watching, no algorithm is going to do it.

We don't know that humans wouldn't be able to learn dolphin by listening and watching, if only we could hear all the sounds they are making. Give me a bunch of funding, a swimming pool full of dolphins, a newborn baby with gills and the ability to hear dolphin frequencies, and five years, and we'll see what happens.
posted by lollusc at 3:33 AM on September 16, 2015

This Give me a bunch of funding, a swimming pool full of dolphins, a newborn baby with gills and the ability to hear dolphin frequencies, and five years, and we'll see what happens. is a subplot of linguist Suzette Hayden Elgin's Native Tongue - whales and human babies in a in interface. nowt happens cos the whales wont play along, but baad things happen when they use alien whales. Ace, if Saphir-Whorfy, book!
posted by runincircles at 6:45 AM on September 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

all kinds of things happen between animals that we (humans) will never be privy to. that's fine with me...higher and lower as descriptions of intellect are human only not universal...
posted by judson at 9:56 AM on September 16, 2015

And it's FFT's that are half assed; the brain is incredibly adept at actually extracting actual structure from audio. We're terrible at that in code, thus us having photoshop and not audioshop.

No, the brain's FFT is certainly half-assed (or worse), just as the power-law response of our photoreceptors is half-assed. We are evolved to maximize pattern recognition. That doesn't make us superior to math, just because we can benefit from shortcuts.

Likewise, our fingertips are really, really good at some things - up to a point, human technicians examined large mirrors with their fingertips to identify surface defects. That doesn't mean that interferometry is half-assed.

And "audioshop" certainly exists. The Navy spends legally-uncountable millions of dollars on it. That the Taylor Swift and even Miles Davis fans of the world don't require it doesn't make our hearing better than our vision; to the contrary, it's because our ears are such crude organs that things like bluetooth speakers and earbuds even exist.

In fact, some of the brain's "FFT" processing is simply hardwired. We have optical neurons that detect when vertical and horizontal bands of receptors 'light up" in similar ways, which is a crude line-detection vital to our fast-processing of object edges.

Basically, if a camera could capture what your eyes see... you'd hate it. The actual picture from your eyes is mostly soft-focus (except in the fovea), the foveal area is mostly color-desaturated, there's a large hole in the center of the image, and straight lines (and some curves) are over-accentuated.
posted by IAmBroom at 10:11 AM on September 16, 2015

It seems unusual that dolphins would be able to learn a complex syntax that mimics human thought patterns. While dolphins may be sentient, they are likely sentient in an entirely different way than humans are.
posted by Nevin at 2:48 PM on September 16, 2015

thus us having photoshop and not audioshop.

Actually, you'd be surprised what can be done with software like Logic - AutoTune, for example, when it's not being used for that warble effect on lead vocals, is pretty powerful software, and software synthesizers are also kind of mind-blowing in terms of what they can mimic and what can be done with them.

Unlike most of the other arts, people have a strange attachment to old technologies and methodologies when it comes to music - we get icky feelings if we think a musician uses technology that's too new so most people are unaware of what even the inexpensive (Logic is $300) software does because they want to keep believing that their favorite musician only uses technology and techniques they have seen before.
posted by eustacescrubb at 3:33 PM on September 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Nevin, you've just stated a tautology; by definition non-falsifiable and without information. "I bet if dolphins think they do so differently than we do." = "I bet if you taste this soda you'll have a different reaction than I did."
posted by IAmBroom at 9:27 AM on September 17, 2015