Recent research by biologists has led to a sensational conclusion: dolphins are the most intelligent creatures on the planet.
Dolphin is an intelligent animal. New arguments in favor of this hypothesis were provided by recent studies by scientists from the University of Pennsylvania. For quite a long time, experts have been studying the language of dolphins and have received truly amazing results. As you know, sound signals arise in the nasal canal of dolphins at the moment air passes through it. It was possible to establish that animals use sixty basic signals and five levels of their combination. Dolphins are capable of creating a 1012 "dictionary"! Dolphins hardly use so many "words", but the volume of their active "vocabulary" is impressive - about 14 thousand signals! For comparison: the same number of words is the average human vocabulary. And in everyday life, people get by with 800-1000 words.
The dolphin signal, if translated into human language, is something like a hieroglyph, which means more than a single word. The fact that dolphins have a language that is more complex than that of humans is a real sensation.
Rare abilities
Nature sometimes makes amazing mysteries. And one of these mysteries, no doubt, remains dolphins. Despite the fact that they often live in full view of humans, we know very little about them. But even the little that is known about these animals is startling. Dolphins have truly amazing abilities. So amazing that the American John Lilly, who studied brain physiology at the University of Pennsylvania, called dolphins a "parallel civilization."
First of all, scientists are surprised by the volume and structure of the dolphin brain. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania placed the animal in the womb of a magnetic resonance imaging scanner and saw that the structure of the nervous system in dolphins is so perfect that sometimes it seems as if it is better developed than in humans. “The brain of a bottlenose dolphin,” says Professor Laela Sai, “weighs 1,700 grams, which is 350 grams more than that of an adult male. In terms of its complexity, the brain of a dolphin is by no means inferior to that of a human: there are even more folds, tubercles and convolutions in it”. The total number of nerve cells in dolphins is higher than in humans. Scientists used to think that the brain of a dolphin is so large because nerve cells are not as densely packed in it as in humans. However, we were convinced of the opposite: the brain in the cranium is located the same. True,outwardly, the dolphin's brain looks more like a sphere than the homo sapiens brain, which is slightly flattened. Dolphins have associative areas of the cortex that are identical to those of humans. "This fact indirectly indicates that dolphins can be intelligent," - say experts in marine biology.
The parietal, or motor, lobe of the dolphin's brain exceeds in area the parietal and frontal lobes of humans taken together. Why has nature endowed these creatures so? What is this - the result of centuries of evolution or, perhaps, the "legacy" of intelligent ancestors?
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Interestingly, the occipital visual lobes in dolphins are extremely large, but they do not rely much on vision. Then what are they for? As you know, dolphins "see" with their ears to a greater extent, emitting ultrasounds. An acoustic lens on the dolphin's head focuses ultrasound, directing it to various objects. Thanks to this, the dolphin "sees" with its ears. He "feels" the underwater object, determining its shape.
“The inhabitants of the deep sea have two organs of hearing: one is normal, the other is ultrasonic,” says researcher Mario Etty. - The external passage is sealed, which increases the ability of hearing in the water. Receptors of another organ are located on the sides of the lower jaw, they perceive the slightest sound vibrations. The dolphin hears with its lower jaw much better than we do with our ears. The hearing of dolphins and killer whales is 400-1000 times sharper than humans. Due to the many cavities in the blowhole (nasal valve), acoustic vibrations arise that propagate over vast distances in the water. So, blue whales and sperm whales can hear the sounds made by their cousins thousands of kilometers away!
As already mentioned, dolphins masterfully master their speech apparatus. Blowing back and forth the same portion of air, they give rise to such a range of sounds that their variations and quantity far exceed the sounds made by humans. At the same time, each dolphin has an individual voice, its own tempo and timbre of speech, manner of expressing itself and the "handwriting" of thinking.
It is quite curious that the organs of hearing and speech, working simultaneously, create an amazing richness of the sound palette. The capabilities of the mammalian brain are so high that it is able to analyze separately the spectra coming at a frequency of 3000 pulses per second! In this case, the time interval between pulses is only about 0.3 milliseconds! Therefore, for dolphins, human speech is a very slow process. They're talking at high speed. In addition, they know how to isolate in the speech of their brothers such details that people do not even suspect, since our ears cannot catch them.
But that's not all. Scientists have conducted a series of experiments proving that dolphins can exchange highly complex messages. Here is just one example. The dolphin was given a certain task, which had to be performed by his brother, who was in the next aviary. Through the wall of the enclosure, one dolphin "told" the other what to do. For example, take a red triangle and give it to a person. Both dolphins received a small fish as a reward. However, it was clear that they did not work for remuneration, they were carried away by the very process of creative experimentation. Researchers conducted thousands of experiments, assignments were constantly changing, and dolphins were never wrong. The only possible conclusion from this: dolphins perfectly understand everything that is happening and orient themselves in the world like humans.
The biologists who conducted the experiments were surprised to notice that often the subjects themselves began to control the course of the experiment and its organizers - people … The energy of creative search was transferred to the dolphins, and they suggested the experimenters to complicate and modify the task, while the scientists unexpectedly noticed that they were becoming an experimental model for dolphins who tried to switch roles with them. So who studied whom?
Cousins in mind?
One of the theories of the origin of dolphins says that they and other cetaceans evolved from ancient animals that left the land to the sea. The 20-meter basilosaurus and the fossil dorudon are named as possible ancestors. Neither one nor the other possessed as many brains as dolphins have today. Why did the animals that went to sea to live in need brains that are superior in structure to humans? After all, sharks calmly swim in the same water for hundreds of millions of years. They have a very small brain, and it is enough for them to catch prey.
There is another interesting hypothesis. Some scientists believe that in the process of evolution there was a period when the distant ancestors of man, for some reason, were forced to leave the land and live in water for some time. They had to get food by diving to great depths. Due to constant oxygen starvation, the brain volume of these creatures has increased markedly. Then, after another change in habitat conditions, our aquatic ancestors returned to land … But maybe not all returned, but some branch remained in the ocean and evolved into dolphins? And the current inhabitants of the depths of the sea - our "cousins in mind"? Not so long ago, Japanese sailors discovered and delivered to the shore an unusual bottlenose, which had an atavism - "hind limbs", very reminiscent of feet …
Why do dolphins need such powerful intelligence? They don't build houses, they don't create communications, they don't have television and the Internet. However, it may be that they do not need it. They have had enough of the colossal opportunities that they have. Perhaps dolphins already live in the virtual world of their consciousness and they simply do not need external signs of comfort and all that we call the blessings of civilization. And they look at us, humans, from the height of their intellect as backward creatures, unable to understand them or be of any use to them, and besides, in many cases, they act barbarously towards other creatures. Their community is the most real parallel civilization.
And therefore it may happen that humanity is looking for brothers in mind in the depths of the Universe in vain, while they are very close. You just need to take a closer look at them, and, perhaps, then the person will discover all the wealth of parallel worlds. Whole ant cities, bee cities and urban bird nests are located nearby. Isn't it outside worlds - with their own laws, daily routine, history? But it will be difficult for a person to come to terms with the fact that romantic parallel civilizations do not need to be sought, and all previous searches are empty efforts. Although from time to time astronomers record signals in the vastness of endless galaxies that resemble dolphins whistling.
Alexander Belov
OPINIONS
Brain work
Dr. Jerry Presley, Marine Fauna Specialist, Woodshole Oceanographic Institute (USA):
- There are hypotheses that explain the evolution of the brain of mammals by their aquatic lifestyle. In this case, the brain is considered as a cybernetic system consisting of neuron elements, the reliability of which can be increased by increasing the number of spare elements. In other words, if there is a weak link, then it is better to duplicate it. The reason for the increase in the dolphin brain was oxygen starvation. Deep diving is an abnormal brain activity. And therefore the advantage is possessed by the one who can hold his breath and whose brain does not suffer. For example, a sperm whale has a larger brain than a blue whale because it dives to a depth of about a kilometer.
Olga Silaeva, Doctor of Biological Sciences, Leading Researcher at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution. A. N. Severtsova:
- There is an opinion that a person differs from animals by the presence of a language system. However, it is not. Language as a means of communication between individuals exists in almost all animals and insects. Dolphin vocabulary is about a thousand words. That is, dolphins have a highly developed speech culture.