Renowned dolphin researcher Jack Kassewitz and his wife Donna Brewer Kassewitz, founders of the not-for-profit organization Global Heart, are currently conducting research as part of SpeakDolphin, the largest project in recent years, Talk to a Dolphin
Its ultimate goal, in fact, is indicated in this title. On the way to it, the enthusiasts seriously expect first, to decipher the language and understand the conversations of the "intellectuals of the sea", or rather, their twitter. And then - to communicate as equals. So that dolphins can understand people.
An honest conversation with dolphins is thirsty and thirsty for many. But numerous attempts of scientists from different countries to delve into the secrets of their language have not yet brought tangible results. Nevertheless, Jack and Donna are confident of success. They promise an early breakthrough in decoding. It should be provided with a fundamentally new approach to the language of our sea brothers in reason. After all, for the first time, researchers have discovered graphic equivalents of dolphins' words. A kind of hieroglyphs. Essentially - writing. The Kassewitz spouses are going to deal with it, calling for help from fellow scientists.
They went to sea and never returned
Dolphins, like us, are mammals. They appeared on Earth several tens of millions of years earlier than humans. The brain is large and developed - in some species the relative size exceeds that of a human.
Many believe in the beautiful hypothesis that dolphins were generally the first intelligent creatures on the planet. For some reason they moved to the sea. They stayed there - in an environment that has everything for a carefree life. And it left an imprint on their minds. He is not burdened with heavy thoughts about housing, clothing, politics, wages and technological progress. But the intellect remained in the heads of the dolphins. The ability to communicate was also preserved. And the language has changed. Evolution has adapted it for talking in water. Dolphins lead them by exchanging rather narrow sound beams. Both high and low frequencies are used.
- Before establishing communication with extraterrestrial civilizations, it is necessary to establish communication with another civilization on Earth - the Dolphins, - called the famous American neurophysiologist John Lilly 50 years ago. And then he was the first to announce that dolphins are intelligent. Their language is highly organized and worthy of close study. I wrote books about this. Than charmed most of humanity. Except for the Japanese, who still eat dolphins, killing thousands.
Stupid animals
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For half a century, a lot of arguments have been found, both for and against the dolphin mind. Some researchers have argued that their large brains are not indicative of intelligence. Like, it increased only because additional "convolutions" were required to memorize the coastline. In other words, dolphins use it mainly for navigation.
Someone thinks that a large brain is needed no more than to keep the head warm. They say that dolphins are actually stupid. The main reason: intelligent beings would not get entangled in fishing nets. And dolphins get entangled and die from suffocation. Opponents object very wittily. Imagine, they say, bystanders, such as aliens, who question the intelligence of humans. And they refer to the fact that they - people - constantly collide on the roads in cars. And they die. Stupid, huh? How are the dolphins?
Someone in the sounds made did not hear absolutely any reasonable speech. Scientists from the Atlantic University of Florida, for example, argue: by sending impulses, dolphins banally jam the herring, which loses its orientation and becomes easy prey.
“If dolphins have a language, then they make great efforts to hide this fact from us,” Jay Morton, a physiologist and authoritative expert on acoustic communication of animals, once said.
For dolphins' conversations, a whole broadcasting system is adapted. By the way, they hear not with their ears, but with an antenna in the lower part of the jaw.
Hello, my name is…
Yet there is more evidence for the intelligence of the sea brothers. For example, Laela Say of the University of North Carolina, along with colleagues from other universities, noticed that dolphins call each other by name. And when they get acquainted, they introduce themselves. They understand appeals as words, and not simply as signals from relatives. They can determine who is who without any connection with recognizing the interlocutor's voice.
Experimenting with bottlenose dolphins off the coast of Florida, scientists broadcast synthesized messages to them - impersonal. More than half of the dolphins turned around when they heard that it was them who had called. Moreover, by listening to the "conversations", scientists have discovered that two dolphins can talk about a third, calling him by name.
Other details were also revealed. If you believe the scientists who highly value the intelligence of our sea brothers, then dolphins have at least six levels of organization in speech: sound, syllable, word, simple phrase, complex phrase, paragraph.
It's full of information
A decade ago, American researchers - Lawrence Doyle of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, along with animal behaviorists from California State University in Davis, California - recorded several hundred dolphin communication signals. And they applied the so-called Zipf method to them. It was developed back in 1949 by George Kingsley Zipf, a professor at Harvard University.
The method is based on mathematics - a statistical analysis of the frequency of occurrence of words and letters. It allows you to determine how informative, orderly and, therefore, reasonable any, even a completely unfamiliar language. The analysis result is a graph. And if you go to it right away, without going into the wisdom of the method, it turns out that modern human languages, for example, English, Russian and even Japanese, give a straight line with a slope. Some kind of gibberish - no tilt.
So the "dolphin line" is the same as ours. Conclusion: their language carries information. And the researchers Jack and Donna Kassewitz were the first to write it down graphically.
Hearing like sight
Images of dolphins, either letters or words, were discovered by the original CymaScope, developed by British acoustic engineer John Stuart Reid. With the help of a special membrane, it allows you to see and transmit to a computer how the frequencies are distributed - down to the smallest detail - in the sound beam that the dolphin emits. As a result, each "squeak" appears in the form of a picture - a kind of hieroglyph. Or "Simaglyph" (CymaGlyph), as scientists call this ring sign.
It is already clear that the hieroglyphs-simaglyphs are different, like our words written on paper. Perhaps dolphins generally speak and hear in pictures. As if they "write" with sounds and "read" what is written. They encrypt into pictures and decipher into concepts.
“I have long believed that the dolphin brain processes audio signals in the same way as the human brain processes video information,” said project consultant Dr. Horace Dobbs, a physician specializing in dolphin therapy. - Now we can consider that it is proven.
- We are not surprised that with the help of an ultrasound ultrasound device, you can get images of internal organs or a fetus in the womb? says Jack. - It should also be normal that dolphins have a communication system based on visual images. And from this their speech "looks" much more sophisticated than ours.
For people, semantic meaning arises from the third level, that is, from the word. And in a dolphin, it seems that from the first, that is, from the sound, the scientist believes. After all, each - graphically - is complex enough to carry information.
You can't do without an intermediary
Scientists - both Kassewitz and Reid - believe they have found something like a Rosetta stone - with a key that enabled Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Jung to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. They say that now it will be possible to create a kind of visible dictionary of the dolphin language. And using it, make up whole phrases suitable for communication - broadcast pictures transformed into sounds.
Alas, humans will never be able to click, twitter and whistle like a dolphin. Even approximately. There are no relevant authorities. And dolphins have a complex broadcasting setup located at the top of their heads. And in it there is not one, but four sound generators that can be turned on simultaneously. Where are we to them? With our primitive vocal cords …
Sincere direct conversation - so that one-to-one - will still not work. Therefore, the mediator - the translator, translator-synthesizer and receiver - will be the computer. The current ones are so powerful that they could already provide a dialogue. The case is for the dictionary.
FACTS ONLY
Man is not capable of this
* We distinguish changes in sound over time if they follow at a rate of no more than 50-70 per second. Dolphins can reach a pace of up to 2000 per second.
* Dolphins pick up a ten times wider range of sounds than humans. Man perceives vibration frequencies up to 15–20 thousand per second, dolphin - up to 150–200 thousand per second.
* A dolphin is able to hear sound ten times weaker than that which is accessible to the human ear.
* The ability to analyze sound, separate some frequencies from others in a dolphin is 4 times higher than in humans. All this provides the "brothers in mind" with a sound palette, incomparable with what we have.
Jack Kassewitz and his wife Donna still hope to learn a lot from the dolphins. For example, how they ended up at sea.
BTW
A military secret
In the former USSR, almost all research that involved dolphins was one of the most secret. First of all, because the military worked with them. They strove to adapt for reconnaissance and sabotage. But it is possible that even then - under the Soviet regime - scientists were convinced: dolphins are intelligent. And this only added the desire to the relevant authorities to hide the information received from the public.
Already in the 21st century, in an interview with a researcher at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences (formerly the Institute of Evolutionary Morphology and Ecology of Animals), Doctor of Biological Sciences Vladimir Markov said that a group under his leadership had studied the writing of dolphins back in the 80s of the last century. Scientists have put on paper and tried to systematize tens of thousands of their signals. They did not get to the hieroglyphs, because they drew graphs. But we understood: the dolphin's signal is something more in its meaning and informational content than our lexical unit of language - a word. And the vocabulary of these signals is huge - about seven thousand, which dolphins use in everyday conversations. For comparison, a person costs 800-1000.
“In my opinion,” Markov said, dolphins are intelligent creatures with highly organized intelligence, capable of receiving, processing and using information, the volume of which goes beyond the biological need … Such a feeling, a little more and we will understand them …