Animal Language

00:00:02 [Music] test. Okay, we're going to get started. Welcome to the Helix Center for Interdiciplinary Investigation of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. I'm Rob Penszer, associate director of the center. Uh before I turn the program over to Beth Hayes to introduce this the last Helix round table for this calendar year, I wish to entice you and entreat you. First the

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00:01:05 the works some extraordinary roundts coming your way in calendar year 2013 on synthetic biology the topography of fear known and unknown complexity and emergence love icons God in different religions to name but a few. Follow us on our website on Facebook and Twitter for announcements about these roundts and next year's poetry, music and film events too. If you're not on our mailing list, please go to our website, sign up with your

00:01:37 name and make sure that you also enter your email address. Now, I'd like to turn things over to Beth Hayes of our executive committee who deserves great thanks today for developing and single-handedly organizing today's round table on animal language. Thanks, Beth. [Applause]

00:02:08 Okay. So, I'm just going to introduce the panelists. Having communication issues over Okay, this is the best I can do. Um, this is Chris Clark here on my left. Chris is the director of the bio acoustics research program at Cornell's lab of ornithology and is a senior scientist in the department of neurobiology at Cornell. Um, he works at

00:02:39 the interface of science, applied engineering, industry regulation and NOS's. Um, Dr. Clark's work includes monitoring of large whale distributions and other oceanographic studies using passive acoustic detection and aerial surveys and genetic and photo ID data. He and his staff have developed a suite of analytic procedures and metrics for understanding the acoustics of ocean ecosystems and their loss through human interference. And he uses these collaboratively with other research departments and institutes also. And then over here we have Dr. Ray Doerty,

00:03:11 associate professor of linguistics at NYU. Um Dr. Doy completed his PhD combining electrical engineering work at MIT with studies of coordinate structures and recursion in language at the linguistics department at NYU under Nam Chsky. Interesting lighting. He went on to write two a number of books. The first two of which were signal digital signal processing which uses uh code to design microcircuitry for speech recognition and natural language computing which is on the use of Chsky's universal grammar to represent English,

00:03:42 French and German in a prologue computer language. And most recently he's been working on the evolutionary biology of the inner ear using some mathematical representations and analog digital converter models to understand human sound processing processing and how it's evolved over millions of years. Over here we have uh Dr. James Fuller. He's now Dr. James Fuller as of a few weeks ago who uh recently defended his doctoral dissertation at Colombia. His research focus focused on the evolution and expansion of vocal signal

00:04:13 repertoires focusing on the communication systems of blue monkeys. He has also lectured on the evolution and usage of communication systems in birds and mammals and the sensory systems of vertebrates. And then we have Dr. James Higum over there. the is an assistant professor of biological anthropology at NYU. Um, is it Higum or Haim? Hyam, but it's okay. All right. So, I am my His research interest is sexual selection and communication and primate signing signaling behavior um from a variety of

00:04:44 perspectives that he uses genetic, neuroendocrine, behavioral and morphologic. He studies everything from the Cox, baboons, and guanons. Guanons. Yeah. Uh uh to game theory, signing signaling models and computational models of primate perception. He's author of a number of dozen post publications and the guest editor of a number of journals on primate signaling, primate coloration, and multimodal animal communication. And then finally, we have Dr. Diana Ree uh who is a cognitive psychologist and

00:05:14 professor in the department of psychology at Hunter. and uh the department of biocsychology and behavioral neuroscience at the graduate center of CUNI and Dr. Reese develops or directs the dolphin cognition program at the national aquarium in Baltimore and studies elephant cognition at the Smithsonian National Zoo. Um I had the great good fortune when my kids were little of having a special backstage dolphin tour with her at the New York Aquarium where she was then the director of the marine mammal program. And um so in addition to her scholarship in

00:05:46 citation and animal cognition and the evolution of intelligence including pioneering work in the investigation of dolphin abilities through underwater keyboards and responses to the mirror. Dr. Reese is known for her protection of dolphins in the tuna industry and the rescuing of stranded marine animals everywhere such as Humphrey the whale. Um her most recent book is the dolphin in the mirror. Um, so those are our panelists and I will just route to the question of what do we mean when we say animals communicate and let you guys go from there. Is that what you want to say? Maybe a good way to start off is to sort

00:06:17 of define the word communication and in the essence I mean there are many different definitions but it really comes from the Latin word meaning to share to exchange and share signals. And I we all agree pretty much that's a real basic about as low as we can go sharing signals. And I think the one thing that I'd like to throw into throw out there today is that, you know, we used to think that we were the only communicating species. We really did. We thought we were the only species certainly with language and for a long time we thought that we were the only species that could think and and or

00:06:48 could communicate in any meaningful way. So um I think one of the things that I is is a is a big idea is that all animals communicate in some way. So maybe we can take it from here. So, um, a sort of caveat to that is the notion that the communication is intentional as opposed to is it a deer is not communicating as it rustles leaves as it runs through the forest. You can't hear me.

00:07:23 Do we have is that louder? And the great rustling begins. Yes, the rustling begins. So I was saying that the the one of the components of this notion of communication is that it's intentional. It's it's not some some byproduct of an action. But but there's a difference between evolutionary intentionality and cognitive intentionality in the way that we use it. I wouldn't say most animal communication is intentional. Like if a baboon has a large sexual swelling or a

00:07:53 little insect flashes a light to another. that speaking of communication that that um I mean you know evolution has acted to for signaling to occur over evolutionary time like it's not that a female baboon is thinking I'm going to grow that morphology on my on my hind quarters so that I can indicate my ovulation right I mean but there's still clearly communication going on there so I wouldn't say I mean there's a difference between signals which have I

00:08:26 think there's two different issues. Like if you're talking about a deer rustling in the forest, you could you could argue that that's a Q rather than a signal, right? And there's the whole Q signal debate. But then there's a separate there's a separate argument, I think, about the difference between signals that have been selected for over evolutionary time and what goes on in here when animals signal. Mhm. So you brought up something very interesting. some signaling right here.

00:08:57 It's going to happen every few minutes only only when very good points are made. So I think I think one of the points actually that Diana said is that that people um I think what you said was that people didn't realize or didn't at least accept that animals that non-human animals communicate until relatively recently. But I I and I think one of the problems with communication is how difficult it is to talk about it in that the word humans are an inherently linguistic species. We use language. We we think linguistically. We communicate

00:09:29 linguistically. Just about every example we ever give has a linguistic framework to it. And so we can't imagine any other way of communicating. And so when we find that nonhumans animals are communicating in non-linguistic paradigms or non- linguistic frameworks, we can't make sense of it and therefore we dismiss it. And I think and I think what James may well we don't because we're learned scholars, but I think a lot of people a lot of people have a tendency to dismiss it. And I think what James was was was referring to was the fact that from an

00:10:00 evolutionary perspective, there's a lot of communication behavior um that's been that takes place on many many different levels. And I would assume that very few of them reach the cognitive complexity of human language or human communication, but that doesn't make them any less or more um fascinating or evolutionarily important. No, I would I would throw out this idea. Again, I'm throwing out ideas here that we don't know. I mean, we often say it's not as complex as what we do. And I

00:10:31 think there's this vast sort of amount of ignorance about what we really know about the content of the signals, what it's actually conveying. And I'll give you a good example. When I was in graduate school, I was I was actually a linguistics major. I was really interested in studying communication in humans and other animals and how they how they use these signals. And I I found that there was a man named Renegi Biznell who'd been studying the human human whistled languages in the world. Now these are languages where people

00:11:02 send whistles back and forth much like you hear birds bird whistles or dolphin whistles but it's based on the spoken language. So in that very nice way we know what the content of that those whistles are. and you hear sounds like, now if I heard that coming from a dolphin or a bird, I might just think that's really simple because what can you put in a whistle? But when you look at these whistle languages, they're conveying the words that we whistle. And that was a real lesson, I think, and a humbling that you can pack a lot of

00:11:32 information into what looks like perhaps a very simple set of signals, three whistles, and those are actually words and sentences. So I I actually would argue that we simply don't know in many cases what's encoded in those whistles. So do you assume that or do we assume that if to to qualify as having language or linguistics that it has to follow the the syntactical and the grammatical rules of humans. Um and so do you want to import the distinctions

00:12:03 made now or later? Now would probably be good. Sure. Are you between signs and signals on the one hand and symbols on the other hand. I'm going to guess we're not going to actually um solve anything. That's that's just my prediction for the day. Just came out of his PhD. So um no, I think I think that that what I I think as as I was saying earlier that one of I think one of the inherent challenges in studying communication is is terminology and specificity and what

00:12:35 we mean by it. I mean, I I actually got about halfway through a book before, and I won't mention who it is in case they're here, um, on language and whether or not apes have language or the capacity for language. And not once in at least 150 pages before I threw it away did he define language. Correct. And I I find that fascinating that we can actually question whether or not a species or even a a group of organisms has the capacity for for something without actually defining what the criteria of that are. And so I' I've

00:13:06 read very very very simple simplistic definitions of language that speak to refer referential semantism syntactic capacities. Um and if that's the case then then we may have some evidence of nonhumans using it but I don't believe that that's the case. So to answer your question again to readress it so the whole world of semiotics and zoomiotics the sign the study of signs and symbols. So let's take the case of um an animal that has a

00:13:37 swollen rear and it's red. That could serve as a signal that's been selected for to attract other a mate during a certain time. A signal if we think about uh or a sign perhaps if we think about a symbol and and the way symbols are defined if we all agree is it's something that represents something else. I think we have evidence in the animal world at least that certain animals can be taught to use symbols. It may not qualify as language the way we define it, but certainly we've seen with

00:14:09 um with dolphins in training at University of Hawaii and there's some evidence in some of the work I've done, although I haven't called them symbols and in Alex the African gray parrot work that's been done to train him on functional communication skills and some of the chimp language studies and the chimp communication studies. those animals under double blind conditions without any queueing from the from the uh people who work with them can use the word symbolically. So I think we have some evidence for that and it doesn't mean we know how they use it in their

00:14:39 own world or if they do use it symbolically but they seem to have this capacity. I think that's an important finding. So I hope that helps. I mean the classic the classic functionally referential example in animal communication is the Cheney and Safeath vervet monkey alarm calls where vervet monkeys respond in one specific way to seeing a snake and a different specific way to seeing an eagle and a different specific way to seeing a leopard and individuals then everybody else has a

00:15:11 specific response in response to the specific call that's an appropriate anti-predtor response to that predator. Now, that's the standard like when that first came out, that was in a science paper in 1980 and it was a big bruha at the time. And when that first came out, it was called referential communication. Um, and then it got switched to functionally referential communication because they weren't sure, they didn't want to imply so much about the cognition of the vervet monkeys and they were saying, "Heaven forbid,

00:15:41 sorry, heaven forbid, right?" So, so they wanted to say more that look as long as as long as the monkey is I guess they switched the emphasis from the signaler and what the signaler meant to the receiver the perceiver the second individual what they could infer as a perceiver and therefore if you're walking through the forest as a vervet monkey and you see a snake and that makes you give a certain core because it arouses you to a certain level as long as there's a statistical

00:16:13 ical association with you giving that call and there being a snake such that whenever you hear that call as a perceiver, it always means there's a snake. You as a perceiver can create the referentiality. It doesn't it doesn't have to be a construct of the signal. It doesn't have to be that the vervet monkey sees the snake and thinks snake. The vervet monkey can just be aroused to a certain type of call by that stimulus. And the perceiver as long as that level of arousal is always associated with the

00:16:44 snake, it doesn't really matter what goes on the first vervet monkeyy's head. The second vervet monkey is able to infer snake regardless. So it became a more it shifted towards a more kind of referential view to a more functionally referential. You know, all all the discussion you have of communication is pretty much between adults with some internal mental structure of some sort. um almost all the work I've done just is on signal structures. For instance, I I think there's a lot of things that couldn't be explained using that kind of a model. For instance, the very first

00:17:15 coia that was in an inner ear uh was a very tiny little thing the size of a disc and it was kind of brittle and then it gradually turned into a cylinder and that's what dinosaurs had. And then that stayed with the mammals for millions, hundreds of millions of years until about 200 million years ago. And then you got the double helix which the human beings have which is a spiral. And I I told people I would work in the word helix into the so there it is. That's one already. Uh but in any event if you

00:17:47 try to account for why it evolved in these different ways. First it's hard to do but the cylinder is still what birds have. And now when it broke off from the cylinder and became a helix, what happened was there's an animal called a tenre wreck. T N R E C. It's worth looking up. It's a crazy little thing. It lives in Madagascar. The mother has 22 children. It's at the bottom of the food chain. It looks like a small porcupine, but that's the first mammal there probably was. Uh

00:18:17 the second one was something along the lines of a platypus. Now, the tenre evolved a cookia that's enormously big. uh ours is two and a half turns. This one's 6 and a half turns because it could hear an enormously high frequency. And the big problem was predation from lizards and snakes or something that could hear that high frequency like a bird. The way they communicated was not orally. They have porcupine things and they flick their quills and it goes and the mother can immediately locate where the child is and the child can

00:18:47 call to the mother. Since they're mammals, they must nurse. So the children must call to the mother and the mother must be in close contact. This is not adult. I think a large amount of evolution of the internal organs of the body that are responsible for many of the speech phenomenon in fact come from things like mother child interaction. Now the platypus which is a my favorite animal I think. Uh I didn't know there were so many. They're all over the place apparently in Australia. Uh, the platypus is a lizard-like animal and it lays an egg and then the mother hatches

00:19:19 the egg and baby has a little egg tooth and then nurses it. But the mother does not have breasts. The milk oozes directly out from her fur and her skin and the little animal licks it off. Now, they also have the bird coia. Now, why did the platypus not need to evolve a very big cookia to nurse the babies? Well, it's poisonous. Anything that crawls into a platypus nest becomes dinner. It's not going to eat something. It's going to be eaten if it eats. I don't know what it eats down there anyway. But it's a funny thing that this

00:19:50 kind of thing happens. And also, if you just look at very complex signal communications, I've worked a lot with insects because they're somewhat different. And the reason I studied the insects is because the bird cia evolved to hear a very highly specific sound. And in fact, it's the sound made by insects. So, let me just give you one example and then I'll be quiet. Uh suppose you look at crickets and I've started studying crickets for any number of reasons but it was in Santa Domingo. There's more crickets there than you can believe. If a cricket puts one wing up

00:20:20 like this and puts another wing out to the side and there's another cricket over there doing the same thing. If this cricket wiggles this wing the other one this wing wiggles. And if he wiggles this wing then this wiggles. And if he wiggles both of them then both of them wiggle on the other cricket. The cricket can send three completely different signals to another cricket across the room, but you will just hear it as they have extremely complicated communication systems. And when you think he's only got 80,000 neurons in

00:20:51 his head, and he is processing signals that are beyond the human capacity to process, there's something going on here. Evolution must have I mean, I I sort of agree with many of the people that say evolution goes in jumps. In fact, that's my main work. uh I mean just with the thing I told you about the cookia to transform from a cylinder cookia to a triple concentric helical spiral would work in the second time helix uh has to have happened overnight. It couldn't be that it took 20 million

00:21:21 years because the ear wouldn't work. It had to work and that's had to work overnight. And in fact in I can show it to you a little later on. I don't want to get too boring too fast. the the the distance in a mathematical space from a cylinder to a helix is trivial one tiny little thing away. So what happened was something instead of growing this way grew that way. And it's an interesting sort of seed to see how these signal complexities grew. And the other thing

00:21:52 that's kind of explicable is not only mother child for human beings that's very crucial because we're all mammals but the human ear is almost identical to that of a cat apparently and cats were the greatest predators of human beings in the early days apparently and I don't know how they do this but archaeologists anthropologists philosophy of the old I don't know saber-tooth tigers and find a human remains between them. Uh, it could very well be that the earliest predator, the human ear tuned itself to hear exactly like what the cats hear. And

00:22:23 it's my understanding that doctors that do operations on ears practice on cats. So, it's pretty close. Uh, it's not the case that all mammals or all animals have the same kind of frequency response, but the cats do. And in fact, if you look at the the way the human being responds to a specific kind of sound variation, which is called frequency modulation, which would be if I took a rubber band and twanged it and then went back and forth like that, uh, that would essentially be the kind of sound your ear is particularly tuned to.

00:22:55 And that's particularly the kind of noise that would be for a lion with a roar. But actually, l big cats have now been shown to have a very special adaptation for infrasonic. For what? infrasonic. That could well be. I mean, that's Oh, yeah. And that's actually pretty cat as well as big cats. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, the human ear probably just heard what it did. If you don't heard the localized cats in space, I mean, it's it gets very complicated mathematically because if you have something with a constant frequency

00:23:26 coming at you, the frequency goes up. So if a cat were roaring and running away from you, the frequency wouldn't go up and you might think he's standing still, but our ear is not fooled by that. See, it's a funny sort of thing. I know it's a little complicated. I don't want to get into it, but uh there's no simple example I can think of, but suppose I had just a rubber band that was swinging it and going back and forth like that. And now suppose I had a tuning fork and moved it back and forth like that. The frequency would sound like it was going up when I moved the

00:23:58 tuning fork towards you and low when it was going away. And it would sound like the frequency was going up when I pulled the rubber band apart and down when I pushed it together. Are those two sounds distinguishable by all animals? And the answer is no. They're not. They're very different some. And some human beings hear the big difference and other ones don't. And I think that's why there's people I don't know this at all. people have perfect pitch and some people have really of phenomenal sense that they don't like the sound of the of the hall because

00:24:28 there's too many reverberations or something like that where someone like me would walk in and wouldn't even know there was any difference. I mean I think we see matching of sensory systems to signals very broadly across the animal kingdom right you know all all sensory systems are are matched and there's a lot of talk about whether whether um the use of certain types of colors certain types of sounds etc are sort of hidden channels are targeted at

00:24:58 specific species. So for example, birds uh so humans are tri chromats. So we're able to see we have three cone classes in our eye um long wave, medium wave, and short wave. Red, green, blue vision. But of course birds have um an extra super super short um cone, an either a UV cone or an SUV cone. And um and they also um signal using a lot of ultra um lot of ultraviolet colors, a lot of UV coloration. And a lot of people in the

00:25:28 bird literature have discussed whether that UV might be a hidden channel, right? Um for for non-human primate uh for non-human primates, uh catarines, anthropoids, there's a whole host of red coloration used since we evolved tri chromacy and we can actually distinguish reds from greens from baboons to gelada to mandrils to vervet monkeys to the gwenons to all all these anthropoids use a lot of red coloration. And of course for their diromatic mamalian predators

00:25:59 it's um you can't they can't distinguish red from green. So maybe it's a very it's a particularly good color to use because um it's detectable to other catarine primates. It would be detectable to bird predators but not to other mamalian predators, not to large cats and things like that. They just wouldn't be able to see a bright red face in a in a green tree would just be all the same color. So, you know, another thing that we tend to not think about is the subtleties in our non-vocal signaling. I mean, we're

00:26:30 talking about colors and different kinds of visual signals, but for many of you in this room, if you if you're working with people and watching their behavior as they're speaking to you, you're paying a lot of attention to what they're doing. I mean, we know that about between 70 and 90% of what we communicate is non-verbal. From micro momentary movements to the tone in which we say something. So I can say Chris really nice shoes. We hear the words, we hear the order, we get the basic idea, but where what's the

00:27:02 meaning of that message? And you're looking at how I'm looking at you and really nice shoes, Chris. Yeah, you had a pretty strong a effect there. And to me that's the that that is the perfect uh example of the difference between communication um in terms of signaling system that's evolved uh and language that has meaning that has a shared you know cultural elaboration on on an understanding and and and and maybe I oversimplify it but I just I see that as if you had written

00:27:33 down Chris nice shoes and handed it to him he'd probably not be as annoyed with you you know I didn't really mean I like your shoes because the meaning in in language is based on a shared understanding of this symbolically referential um uh constructs whereas uh what we like to call body language but you you know gestural um chemical visual signaling uh is is in is intrinsic is is it's in our species to

00:28:03 some I mean there there are cultural variations it's still contextual even Even in even in um nonhumans, it's contextual. If you show a if you show a recess monkey a picture of a female reus monkey during the birth season compared to in the mating season, he treats it differently. If you show an ambiguous um face that could be interpreted as being a positive face, it could be interpreted as being a negative face. If you showed that to the same animal when the animal has just had a vet check versus when the animal hasn't

00:28:34 had a vet check, they treat it differently because if bad and it makes sense. It's it's a form of cognitive bias, right? It's emotion mediating attention. If if bad things are happening to you and you see something that could be good or bad, if lots of bad things have been happening, maybe it's best to assume this will also be a bad thing. And if lots and lots of good things have been happening and you see something that could be good or bad, maybe it's safe to assume it's probably going to be good. So there's an awful lot of context that goes on. I don't think we're the only ones that add a lot

00:29:04 of kind of context to this if you you can see the same signal given to the same individual and depending on recent experience, depending on things like this, it can be interpreted very differently. But I imagine and I I I fully accept that. I think though that there are certain examples where there's probably very little variation, you know, alarm calls, ex indications of extreme aggression, things like that, where there where there probably isn't so much where selection wouldn't favor variation in response, where selection would favor

00:29:34 high specificity in response. So, it it it doesn't, and I'm sure there are examples, but it wouldn't selection wouldn't favor one to spend a lot of time thinking about what just happened when you hear a predator alarm call. um selection would favor an instant and immediate response whether there's any and it's interesting because the term mental construct or mental uh you know cognitive awareness gets tossed around a lot and and in my work I don't actually need to know what the animals are thinking to know that they're responding and from an evolutionary perspective

00:30:07 what the animals are thinking might be the mechanism by which they respond but for the trait to be favored they just need to respond in a way that's beneficial. So, if an alarm call is given and animals come raining out of the trees and that keeps them from being eaten, that's going to get passed on. Um, whether they think that there's an eagle or whether they think that trees have suddenly become uninhabitable is is a secondary question. I have a question about that. Sure. I saw a movie once. Uh my my wife's father was a movie maker and I saw a lot a lot of documentaries in my

00:30:38 life and oh my wife's father was a movie maker and I've seen loads of documentaries and there's this gigantic tree in Africa I think it is and the the the monkeys or the whatever they are at the top uh see the eagles first and the ones in the middle see the pythons first and the ones at the bottom see the black cat. Now, each one had a different call. Yes. And so the guy at the top goes yelling in German, let's say, and then the guy in the middle speaks French and the guy

00:31:08 at the bottom is English. So they recognize each other's calls and you hear them all yelling, but each one in their own thing. So they're triilingual monkeys. Well, well, there's there's a whole there's a whole um like particularly in West Africa, um there are these kind of communication networks. So actually not even just monkeys a range of monkey species and monkeys on the ground and various other so you get monkeys and some I think it's mangab on the on the ground and the various um they share each other's colors and basically every single species rec

00:31:40 so they have a different call for a leopard from an eagle from a snake and every single species recognizes every single other species specific call. So if one if a Diana monkey gives a leopard call then you'll hear the black and white colibus monkey start to give its leopard call. Then you'll hear the they all start to give so they all recognize all of them. That was one of they come up with a common word when I was doing playback experiments. Yeah. And then yeah with and actually in even that's a that I think that's an

00:32:12 even more interesting and bigger leap is when um hugely diverged tax such as primates and birds can actually respond to the alarm calls of the other. And and and I'm not familiar enough with the literature to know if if anyone has any great opinions on whether or not those are learned responses or whether they're they're um evolved responses, but either way it's it's a pretty impressive they're they're learned they're learned responses. Um, so if you look through development, individuals are very very poor when they're young and they show perceptual narrowing as they get older.

00:32:43 So if you take a young vervet monkey, they give an a eagle call to any bird basically. Yeah, but they're they are predisposed to this. They're predisposed to do it, but they're terrible at it. There's percept there's perceptual narrowing. And you can see you can see we can say the same about our taste buds, though. Sorry. We can say the same about our taste buds. There's perceptual narrowing that isn't necessarily based on learning. that's that's there's anttogyny is involved in it but I'm not necessarily convinced that it's that we can distinguish clearly that uh these are

00:33:13 all learned behaviors versus their innate behaviors and and probably like almost everything there's there's a combination of the two where you've got an inate innate predisposition that is then um affixed through anttogyny and development as as a little monkey grows up and is making wrong calls everyone ignores them. No, but is there like a day and they all say I think he's not pulling our leg or is it or is there does it a slow thing to say maybe? Narrow in three development and they do tend they go from all birds to all large

00:33:43 birds to all large bird. But when when would the rest of the people decide to fall out of the tree? Because if this guy calling bird bird every other day, call them people. They just they just ignore them when they're they tend to ignore the older they start to pay. They'll look up and then they'll look at the juvenile and they'll go back to feeding. But one but one of the interesting things we're talking about the con or the heterospaccific responses. I do playback experiments in the species that I study to to look at responses and one of the hardest thing I was had was that I would play back the the um the eagle call of blue monkeys to

00:34:16 a group of blue monkeys to look at their response and then every other species in the forest would start responding and it would just throw everything off. It was really interesting but I wasn't looking at their responses. So kind of I mean animals have are going to s live or die by the information they can take in. I mean the way animals have to learn what to eat. I mean they're going to learn fast and whether it's learned or somehow there's some hard wiring and it's been selected for I mean you've got to figure out what the what information you know what the contingencies are basically. And I think one of the things that's was very compelling about some of

00:34:47 the work we heard in Vervet Monkeys was something called the audience effect where you know you might argue well the vervet is hardwired or she's hardwired there's a marshall eagle up there and it's going to just do this emotive call because at first people thought it was these were just emotive react responses they weren't what's actually they didn't call them referential calls they called them semantic signals meaningful signals so they weren't fixed action patterns at least right right yeah exactly and there was some control, which is a big thing to think about that animals can control what they're doing.

00:35:18 And so the vervettes, if you if it's an is if it's a single vervet and that marshall eagle is there, that snake is there, they don't call. They only call if there's an audience, if there are other vervets around. So that's interesting and very important when you think about it. So, but but it could just be that they're only aroused to that level when there are other individuals around, too. I mean, there's you can always simp I mean, it's Morgan's cannon, right? You can you can always What about mircats? Yeah. Uh but really cute. Well, some of their alarm calling.

00:35:49 They're sentinels and they stand up and they have jobs and they you know Well, and I think it's it's interesting. I I recently sat in a room uh full of um people who looked at animal communication from a psychological perspective. Uh and I sat there and discussed my work from an evolutionary perspective. And there was a lot of uh confusion, I think. But we worked it all out. It was lovely. But uh I I think that that's one of the thing is that that from an evolutionary perspective we look so much at is this behavioral

00:36:20 pattern or is this trait adaptive in any way and the mechanism by which it becomes adaptive isn't necessarily part of the equation in terms of is it adaptive and and I personally when I when I read some of the literature I I see a lot of people uh wanting to make cognitive draw cognitive conclusions based on behavior. Uh and so when that and I think that was and I mean to their credit scar and Cheney actually you know pulled back and

00:36:50 the whole functionally referential took over for semantic but the very first thing anyone thought when they said oh they they use a different call for eagle and snake and the animals respond as if there's an eagle or a snake when they hear that call in the absence of the predator. we immediately went to a linguistic cognitive explanation and and I think what what James was alluding to is that that there are so many more parsimmonious evolutionary explanations that don't demand that degree of cognitive awareness. It's not saying

00:37:21 that they aren't there and I think people have heard me say things like this suggesting well there there is no absolutely not. I just don't think we've necessarily proved it simply by see when an animal does something. We can't necessarily um assign the same mental state that we would have when we did the same behavior. We just say they did it and we'll have to try to figure out what they're thinking. Have any of you ever watched hunting spiders? Mhm. Like Porsche or something like you watch

00:37:52 this animal which you typically would want to step on. Yeah. Right. Watch it hunt. So, these are animals that actually hunt other spiders, and you look at what their actions are, and they'll they're basically figuring out where from what position they're going to jump onto the their prey, how they're going to do it, and you watch them, and you're going, "Wait a minute." They use they use um acoustic camouflage. They'll wait till there's wind blowing and it'll shake the the web of their prey so that the prey can't necessarily detect them on the web. and

00:38:24 you're going this is a spider is a spider thinking right it's the same with I mean some of the most complicated communication at all occurs in the social insects I mean the honeybee waggle dances honey bee waggle dances are phenomenally complex where depending on how they when they the honeybee gets back to the nest after finding a food source depending on how they um dance in the nest the angle and the and for how long it tells exactly the distance the angle you should fly with respect to the sun So do we agree that that's language?

00:38:56 Absolutely not. You do or don't? I don't. And here and and and one reason I will say it's fundamentally different from well again I would just want for the record we still have not defined language. So I can say it's not language but I won't tell you what I think language is. But one of the big differences is that um you can raise a bee in isolation uh or a novice bee, a juvenile bee that reaches maturity and stick it in with the hive and it will do the dance the same way as its um fellows. Not right away.

00:39:27 Are you sure? Mhm. All right. I will I will bow to your experience then. Um my reading of it was that they were you know that bees go through a whole series of changes in their lives to adapt to different roles in the hive. No. Absolutely. Just take any old bee and stick it in there and it's going to do what you want it to do. True. My reading of it was that novice bees were still capable of both interpreting and and producing um the correct waggle dance, the correct nectar dance if they've been put into the right state

00:39:57 of mind. Delicious. But whereas but no, I'm challenging you. Bring it. Um, but there's no but I am not aware of any human that has ever been raised in isolation that no matter what his state of mind could ever spart start speaking a language that they had not been taught. So the capac and this goes back to your friend Nam Chosky. I mean the capacity for language is very different from the language. If I dropped you in a beehive, you wouldn't do too well. I would do a very poor job of of at most

00:40:28 things actually. Yes. Um but I I think one of the one of the things that really distinguishes at least my view of language versus um inherent or evolved or inherited uh communication uh modalities of communication is that language not language the capacity but language the is there another word what what would we call French an example of a language rather than language well language language in in the field I'm in is is very specific finding and

00:41:00 all these concepts of meaning play no role right all these concepts of what meaning there's no particular reason to assume it has a meaning uh but it does you know it happens to when we use it but in the theory of chsky that communication is a secondary role for language uh and in fact what it is it's a it's a series it's just a very complicated series of strings of symbols that people recognize and they know some of them are good and some of them are bad you know and you stop to think about what a person knows is these are standard examples. If you went

00:41:31 to a major library in New York City and opened up any book, I don't care what it is, and put your finger on a page and took that sentence and wrote it down. How many more books in the library would you have to read till you came to that very same sentence again? And the answer is you. It's not in any other book. If it's 20 sent 20 words long, it's not in any other book. Now, where in the world is there anything that human beings can do that they can immediately recognize a 20-word sentence and tell you whether it's grammatical English or not

00:42:04 when there's a bazillion trillion gadillion of them. Uh, and the thing is it's a very odd capacity. It's probably related to the concepts of numbers and it turns out every human being is a prodigy for that particular kind of symbolic logic. But the people that are particularly good at this unfortunately tend not to be articulate and in particular Allen Touring and the people you know it's very difficult to understand what they have but it is very odd to see that human beings have this

00:42:34 odd ability all around the world with no particular instruction. Look, suppose I say just to give you I don't want to give you too many linguistics things, but suppose I say he is tall. He is not tall. He isn't tall. And I can say you are tall. You are not tall. You aren't tall. And I can say I am tall. I am not tall. I amped tall. Now, none of you is going to go home and say, well, he's a professor and he said amped. So, I'm going to start saying I am tall. It's not going to work. Amped became ain't in

00:43:07 English. and why I nobody has any idea. But why don't people use amp? Nothing wrong with it. And why did they pick up ain't? And then once they picked up I ain't, they would say you ain't and he ain't and they put it everywhere. And then in some dialects you can say I haven't have not a book. You can say I ain't a book to it moved from to be to have. There's very strange generalities. If you take the word himself, uh John saw himself. Everybody knows what it means. Shakespeare never used any reflexives. This came in in 1600. You

00:43:37 can date it precisely. But then you said she likes herself and two dialects came off. One said I like myself and the other one I like me self. See since himself was the first one, you don't say his self particularly. What you should say I like me self. But you don't. Why? I don't know. It's just uh it's just strange. There was nobody saying you should say this and not say this. There were huge in the United States there were huge arguments as to whose dictionary was the best dictionary. And the Miriam Webster won because he gave a

00:44:09 free copy to every editor of every newspaper in the United States. It had nothing to do with academia. And the other went to Colombia, didn't give anything away. So nobody uses the Colombia spellings or anything. They all think it's weird. Colombians know how to spell. Yeah. Didn't know how to make money. That's what they sort of thing. But language is a very formal kind of thing. when you stop to think of what you know uh it's if I gave you a big long sentence everybody could correct it and everybody has razor sharp intuitions about these things and take a word like eek out I can say I have a

00:44:41 student that just barely ees out a living and I can't say but he's been ekking for years he's eaked for 30 years and now he's trying to work it out now how in the world do you know that you can't say eek you can say eek out your mother didn't tell you come on nobody said always Eek out kid. If you're saying eek, it's just something. Is there some pattern to English that has nothing to do with the hood that right? Wait a minute. You're saying that the that somehow there's inherent rejection

00:45:11 of the phonetic inherent there's an inherent pattern to English. We don't know what is not acceptable. So if you raised someone in a cage in Borneo and taught them this, but then they'd never heard the word eek. Then if they heard eekking, they would say, well, you could probably teach them that eek meant something else. But take you go back to the one that's really hard, the amped. No, I don't think if I used AMP and told everybody you'd be a dollar if you use it too. It's not going to catch on. Well, not now because it's not socially acceptable. Oh, that's No, it's much more than it's not socially acceptable. It's doesn't match a pattern. There's some Well, you

00:45:42 got to remember you sent the syntax. There's some syntactic pattern. Uh, look, I I'm not tall and I can say I am. Oh, you tell you you you you aren't tall and you're you're not tall, but I can't say you're aren't tall and do a double contraction. I bet you could say that and that if that became socially acceptable, it would be fine. We do that all the time. We we develop new Look at rap. I'm from North Carolina. You should hear what people say. You You could make up anything you want and tell people they're going to have You think language is deterministic? No.

00:46:14 I think it's like mathematics. I think it's nobody's going to come go come up and tell me there's a new integer between three and four nobody's ever seen before. It's not going to happen. And language is very much like that. I I think I'm not sure that I fully agree with you, but I do think there are rhythms in I mean human human language has this biodal um this biodal rhythm and all human languages have a rhythm of between three and eight hertz which is the the um the rate at which at which all languages um everybody

00:46:44 communicates within all languages and and it has this biodal kind of um syllable boom boom boom boom boom problem kind of thing and that is very very unique. Like um non-human primates don't show that biodal rhythm in any type of So that doesn't mean that they can't have language, right? No, but I think No, but I'm I'm just saying that whether I agree with that or not, I do I do agree that there are rhythms to human Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, there's a there's a Macak study. Um so since you shot down my B argument, I'll bring up Macak study and hopefully

00:47:15 you haven't read that. Just challenge me. Um there was a Macak study that that that um I'm one of those people who really get very uncomfortable when people start talking about captive studies um because I do all field work. But I really glad that the information is available to us. But uh they raised macaks in captivity uh without ever I think they took them from their birth mother at you know at one hour old and they were never exposed to the vocalizations of their own

00:47:47 species and by adulthood they had developed the entire we already discussed repertoire uh whether or not that was a real thing but they had developed the entire um vocalizations and used all the vocal signals. I'm not sure if they tested whether or not they used them uh in appropriate context, but they used them all. And and again to go back to your friend in Borneo in the cage, there's no human that could ever develop um any of the known living languages um without ever being exposed to them. They are fundamentally different things. But I think where the where things get

00:48:18 interesting is that try birds. Hm. Try birds. Well, oines I mean there's different there are different taxa that have that that show different um degrees of learned versus not learned and having these windows and all these different things but I think I think one of the things that's really interesting is that that my understanding which is extremely limited about human linguistics is that and and this may be a horrible simplification is that language the the spoken language or the written language or or any sort of symbolic language that

00:48:48 we use as a species reflects our cognition. We have this sort of inherent thought or maybe it's not inherent but we have thoughts in our head for for one of a better term. And then language is a way we use to express that. And I think that as a result when we look at nonhumans when they uh vocalize or gesture or any other way we assume that there must be something similar going on. Um and I don't know if that's true or not. I I don't have an opinion it's not. Well, but I think Diana does.

00:49:19 I think I do. I I want to jump in here because um this is one of my favorite subjects right now because again you go back to ancient times and the idea was that language and speech was inextricably linked or ratio and ratio is what they talked about and that because we thought that no other animals were communicating they or they didn't do anything that we could recognize as anything like our speech. Even though birds are singing and dolphins are doing things and bees are doing it. We didn't know enough about that. We made the

00:49:49 assumption and it's continued to be an assumption that language that other species are devoid of thought. So I'm gonna I mean I think one of the things that's really in important to realize is that you know the brains of most animals are are composed of the same building blocks. There's nothing that different about it. The organization may be really different. The number of neurons, even the cell bodies may be different sizes. Elephants and dolphins actually have bigger neuronal bodies than do many other animals. And we don't really know

00:50:20 very much about the our even our brains now. But we've tended to make this assumption. It's almost like a religious or cosmological assumption that we are different from the rest of the animal world. We're at the top of the pinnacle and everybody's below us and nobody else is thinking. We're the only ones who think. We're the only ones who communicate using language. And language, the word language comes from the tongue. You know, we have a tongue. We use it. We're we think about speech more than any other body language as we said before. And you know what? As we're finding more and more details, as we're

00:50:52 discovering more details about other animal systems, we see that there's there is more going on than we ever thought before behaviorally, acoustically, in terms of sensory systems. And I just think we're kind of pompous at assuming that nobody else is out there thinking. We used to say the question used to be do other animals think and I think the question has shifted and I think it's no longer a question do they think? It's how do they think? Yeah. Or how do they communicate? One thing on that most of the I mean I

00:51:23 I've worked in a lot of this stuff long before I got into linguistics. And uh most of the people that worked with chimpanzees and things treated them very nicely. The Georgia Institute of Technology one time decided they would put a monkey in an overwhelmingly deprived situation and instead of giving it a banana if it got the right answer, it would loosen the cage or open a window or let it breathe a little bit. And they tried like crazy to teach the animal what's called grammatical relations. No animal apparently can differentiate John touched Mary from

00:51:54 Mary touched John. This is also across the board in all web browsers. you could be rich if you could figure out a way for a web browser to do what's called uh thematic relations. Uh and you can't no no you can do it for trivial cases but it doesn't work in most in all cases. And so what happens is they were never able to teach an animal to differentiate John kissed Mary from Mary kissed John and they did it by having a Mary was a triangle and John was a square or something and they would try to get it so that they would put the things up. Now, some animals could learn

00:52:26 verbs, like chimpanzees could learn verbs like kiss, touch, and things like that. Most animals can't learn a s a sign for verb for a verb. But every child in the world immediately from the time they're born knows it's not his fault and it's it's somebody else's fault. And they use grammatical relations all the time. He hit me. I didn't hit him. He hit me first. And the thing is, no animal even with all the attempts they've to teach them grammatical relations, it doesn't work. And this is a huge thing right now because I I don't know if this is true,

00:52:56 but it seems to be the entire web is going to be English and they're going to have when you put a question in in Spanish, it'll translate it into English and answer it. But in English, if you say John took Mary the book, Mary has the book. But in German, if you say Johan, it means he took it away from her. So now when you're doing translations from one language to another, you have to know all the grammatical relations in all of these languages. She gets to be very I'm gonna challenge you on that one. Yeah, this is wonderful. I was thinking about

00:53:27 this idea of translation and then I'm a writer who was decided to age 64 to study the language that was traditionally language from my culture. A language that had been rejected by my parents speak that language. you're in America to the top. So at the age of 64, I said, you know what, let me see what that bubble has to say. And I it was a word, there were two

00:53:59 words that came up and I thought, well, in English, these are two completely different concepts, but in that language, this mother language of mine, it's the same word. What is that word? Praying and resting. So I said, oh, so that's what they're doing when they pray. and the idea of the passive resting and supposedly active. Hey, I'm talking to God. I'm really gonna get something done here. I thought that was a tremendous

00:54:30 breakthrough in terms of understanding my culture. Yeah. And the activity and the inactivity and how things get done. And to me, as a writer of hope, I'm interested in the organization of my thoughts and how What? What's that next word? What's that thing called? What's that next thing I'm going to write? And the most exciting thing about being a writer is you're not supposed to know. It's supposed to come from inspired, right? You're supposed to be inspired. The news is supposed to

00:55:01 kind of direct you. But what was interesting is here now looking at language, the mother of tongue is now giving ideas that are seem to be very contradictory, resting and praying. But it's a wonderful kind of breakthrough for me as a writer to start looking at other languages for clues about where to go. Well, each language is has its own little idiosyncrasies to be much more mundane than prayer and resting. But uh suppose you want to ask uh you're interested in painting something. You're

00:55:31 interested in painting a wall. The web browsers will soon have dialogues with you rather than tell you. So if I said I want to paint a wall, I suppose I could go into a paint store here and they'd give me wall paint. But if if in German the word for vand here, that's a vand and a mau is outside of the house. But the word wall in English is both of them. So it could very well be if I'm dealing with some German guy, he'd say, is the wall inside the house or outside the house, which is not something he he might ask me down here because he give me a different paint. But it doesn't make any sense to ask, I want to paint a wall. And there's words in different

00:56:03 languages that they'd have to ask you a lot of context. I mean the farthest out one I know of American but some American Indian languages most languages make a difference between IU and B and the singular and the plural but some American Indian languages make a difference between whether you're standing up or sitting down when you talk to me and that's because the chiefs I don't know what it's all about but something like this the chiefs never ate until everybody else ate and so if I'm standing up and talking to you that means I'm higher than you in the social order and so I can imagine somebody would say John said to Mary what time is

00:56:34 it the guy would say was John standing up. What was was very standing up or sitting down? And this is going to happen to you in the future as Google tries to get data out of other kinds of things because in some we have a a student from a I I won't mention the culture, but it's a culture where he cannot come in and just say, "Ry, would you please sign this?" He has to say, "How's your wife? How's your dog? How's your how's your ch child? How you know what are you going to do later?" And I say, "What do you want?" you know, you but they have to ask all these questions about your

00:57:05 family before you can get down to things. And it's very interesting because that's that's it's a it's a cultural thing. It's learned. That's certainly learned, I should think. You know, you just said something that I just want to I just want to set a record straight here because I don't think that this idea that no other animal can learn anything grammatical through training. They may not use grammatical structures. We don't know enough to say they do or they don't. Yeah. But the study I think you're referring to was by Dwayne Rambol, Van Glosservald, and Gil. Is that the one? I don't remember it. so long ago. And that that is a study I actually I'm pretty familiar with. And what they did is they took a chimpanzeee named Lana

00:57:37 and they trained her to use an interactive computer system and she was trained to order do to either accept or don't not accept grammatical sentences and they were either grammatical or non- grammatical. She actually could do it. It was was it those blocks she flex and she actually did it. She was trained to do it and to reject non- grammatical. It was a science paper and then she actually used it in some novel ways to manipulate and get the one of the trainers into this very sterile environment that you described as extremely sterile. And then years later,

00:58:07 um, H Lou Herman out at the University of Hawaii. And again, it was it was a fairly rigid system, but he actually trained dolphins using food to respond to, uh, a set of rules and they were they were, you know, take hoop to, you know, to window or take ball to hoop and they had to do the correct behaviors. So animals can be trained to do it. We don't know if they do that in their own forms, but they have that capacity, you know. So I think I I don't think it's completely accurate to say that no other animal shows it. And the other the other

00:58:38 point I just want to make since we're talking about animal communication and language is that you know we used Chsky and others have argued that we have these spe special syntactic structures some module in our brain and that that makes that propels us to learn language with very little effort and that no other animals do it. So if you're a human, very young children can distinguish between paw and ba and ca and well that was evidence that we have these special structures. But guess what? Other animals do the same thing. You can play birds and you can play

00:59:09 gerbles and other animals ba pawa and ca and they learn to they can distinguish those sounds too. So the view has moved. I think in my in my world at least the people what I've learned that we don't have we certainly have veri and broker's area in the brain for production comprehension but this idea of processing sounds that happen to be language sounds may be much more due to general mechanisms for acoustic perception specific and a lot of the studies if you did the reverse of that I mean I I

00:59:40 always have a a quizzical opinion of of tests of nonhuman in animal cognition when they give them animal tests, you know, because they I I saw the study where they they had this puzzle and they they got a four-year-old human girl and they said, "How long will it take her to do the puzzle?" And she figured out the puzzle and she got the treat out of it. And then they got a bunch of chimpanzees through and eventually they did that and they said, "Aha, we figured out that that chimpanzees are about as intelligent as a four-year-old human girl." And I said, "Stick that four-year-old human girl out in the

01:00:11 forest and see how intelligent she looks in a chimpanzeee context." And I think that's so for example, we've done the same studies with with non-human primates in terms of their ability to distinguish what are acoustically practically identical. Green did a study on Macak where he kept seeing these different responses to what he thought was the same call. And then doing using spectrographic analysis, he found that there was this minute difference that we couldn't perceive acoustically, but that

01:00:41 the macaks were responding to categorically. And so in the same way that that people in even among humans people have a hard time I lived in Thailand for a while and people it's tonal language and I never could understand the difference but to them it was very categorical that we're in the same species. So imagine the differences how each species is is genetically and and physiologically uh tuned to the specificity of of their own communication systems. And when the when tests are fairer and more

01:01:13 appropriate, they typically do much better. So So there was a whole host of studies in uh recess monkeys where that looked at pointing as a as a gesture where the human observer pointed towards something and then and then they tried to see whether the recess monkey would would look was capable of kind of following the attention of uh another individual and they didn't get any results of course. But of course Reese's mechanics don't point with their arms and actually when they started doing it with gaze and with heads and things then

01:01:44 they started to do much much better because they they are actually interested in where other research mechanics are looking but of course it's not a very fair test to um show how they point. Um just to come back to your point on the um brain mechanisms of some of these things. So I mean I think I broadly agree that a lot of the central structures are the same. There are some some of the and this comes back to what you were just saying before some of the some of the properties of human language that we do understand like the bi like the biodal rhythm and stuff. We do

01:02:15 understand kind of the mechanisms that that's a coupled oscillation between neurons in the brain, right? And that that's pretty much a unique human um thing as far as we're aware which and that gives human the human language that unique um rhythm cognitively. I'd like I'd like to come back to what you said. Yeah. You said the the those poor monkeys in the cages where they weren't feeding them very well and they had to do with a minimal thing to even get some water. Uh it wasn't that they just did grammatical sentences. They were trying to teach them the difference between

01:02:46 John kissed Mary and Mary kissed John. But in children, very young ones even, that extends far beyond that. For instance, suppose there was a big ink stain on the floor and somebody comes in and says, "Who put it there?" I can't say I confess he did it. Say I I it doesn't make any sense. I can say I confess I did it. I can accuse him but I can say I confess he did it. But now suppose it's in my class and the dean comes in and says professor who put that ink stain I can say I confess it was one

01:03:16 of my students. Then I can point to him. All right. Now suppose the president of the college comes in and he says who put that ink stain there? I can say I confess the dean did it. See, as long as there's a hierarchy of people, you can confess for all sorts of people if you're vaguely related to them. Now, take something else. Suppose I walk out of the building here and some woman comes up and says, "I just won the Van Klyburn competition and piano." I can't say I'm very proud of you because I don't have anything to do with it. You know, now if she had been one of my students years ago and I'd said, "Oh,

01:03:48 why don't you pick up the piano? Linguistics is dead." You know, and she went to the piano, then I could say, "I'm very proud of you. You But I can't be proud of somebody. They don't even know who they are and I can't confess for a large number of people but in every I don't know if this is true but we tried it out on dozens of languages the word confess is the same in every language of the world that sort of tells you there's something about who did it and the other thing is there's a word for blame because the concept of agency to a child is suppose you're a kid you spill it on the floor you said who did it the kid will say I did it but he made

01:04:19 me do it so it's not his fault it's transference of agency or something But very surely this is after a certain age. I mean up till they're three up up to their three or four they don't even capable of of conferring mental states at all. Yeah false belief test but it's one of the very first things that's emergent in an intelligent brain and it it's not in any computer. You can't program this. It's impossible to even think of how you program it and it doesn't seem to happen in any animals. We we don't know what's happening in the brains of other animals though because

01:04:50 we're we have no way to know other we can do is observe behavior. So you can look at some of the work that Fran Dubal has done with primates and look at this idea of inequity you know and think about you know what's fair. I mean we can sit there and you can have we can do two tasks and if you Chris I'm going to pick on Chris again. And if Chris has us do two tasks and he gives you a cappuccino for doing that and I get that crappy glass of glass of water, I'm going to be pretty ticked off that I didn't get the cappuccino. And you can

01:05:21 see primates will also feel that way. Some the great apes will. The monkeys may not, but the great well monkeys do as well. And so they have a sense of inequity. They have they're they're animals that seem to show empathy. They don't talk about it like we do in a way that we can understand. Maybe they do communicate it in some ways, but we don't understand that. It gets us to the point of us being blind and deaf to what these other animals are doing. I, you know, because we can talk all about the I mean, what we're what we're doing here is we're still talking about human language. We understand human language. We're humans. We're talking about animal

01:05:53 communic other animal systems. What do we really know about those systems when we can't decode them? But, and I think that's why putting in an adaptive framework is a is a good place to start. even even if the ultimate objective is to understand cognition and understand a way of thinking. I think putting it in an adaptive framework first sort of levels the field because when it again to go back to that poor little girl that I wanted to throw in the forest with the chimpanzees to prove that that intelligence equation wasn't wasn't appropriate is that that animals evolve

01:06:25 within the social and ecological context of their species or sorry species evolve within their e ecological and social niches. And so if if if a particular trait wasn't beneficial or wasn't adaptive, it's not we have this sort of hierarchy. I think humans have this sort of sense of of well we say words like intelligence and whether humans have superior or inferior intelligence and and I just think we have uh species that have adapted appropriate strategies for dealing with their ecosystems and their

01:06:57 and their social context. And if language or the ability to communicate through complex syntactical structures was never necessitated or was never selected for we would likely see its absence. And I think one of the things and just because I'm talking I'll keep going. Um one of the things I noticed that we haven't mentioned is that when we we tend to distinguish between human communication and we call it and we say language and non-human communication which we you know vocalization whatever.

01:07:28 But what about crying and screaming and laughing and smiling and all the innate blushing? That's true. It's right up James' alley. Um, he studies coloration of faces. Not not that he blushes a lot. He might blush. Now he's blushing. But, uh, a lot of communication, but no words, right? And there's an enormous amount of what I consider non-llinguistic communication evolved non evolved uh inherited traits in in terms of human

01:07:58 communication that is utterly outside of the scope of of linguistics and language. And when I look at non-human communication systems, they tend to to appear to me a lot more similar to things like laughing and crying and screaming and smiling and blushing uh than they do to Shakespeare. So, you said something before that made an assumption about why we're sitting here, and that was that we're interested in cognition. I thought because Beth invited us,

01:08:28 but I thought we were talking about animal communication. Well, and actually it's well, I think that's I and maybe I'm I'm creating a straw man here, but I think that a lot of the communication literature that I've read um and I I tend to be very focused on communication from an evolutionary perspective. I think there is a tendency to uh inappropriately and often unintentionally conflate a cognitive mechanism for a a a behavioral or evolutionary explanation. Um but I think

01:09:00 it's so I think that that happens a lot but then I think another thing that happens is that people who are interested in cognition look at communication. So in the same way uh that humans uh infer the cognition of fellow humans based on self-reporting. So we use communication to understand what one another is thinking. I think part of it is a terminology problem because people people in animal communication talk about signalers and receivers. So you have a some sort of signal or sender, senders and receivers.

01:09:30 You have a sender and a receiver and and you communicate between the sender of receiver and then the receiver somehow changes their behavior. As as soon as you have senders, you have a message that the sender has constructed, packaged up and sent to the receiver. So there's thisformational package somehow that's a product of the sender. Now, I'm happy withformational constructs in animal communication, but I think they're a product of perceivers, not a product of senders. So, if if an individual if I do anything right now,

01:10:05 what it communicates depends on you. It depends on what you extract and perceive from what I'm doing. I I can say all the all the words I like. I can make all the gestures I want. I can do everything I want now. the information that's in my communication that goes to you as the as the perceiver is not a construct of me at all. It's a construct of you. So, so I think I think that the whole I'm happy with information being extracted from animal communication, but I think it needs to be as long as we're talking about it as a construct of perceivers

01:10:36 rather. So, I think senders and signalers and words like this are unhelpful, right? because they give the idea that somehow the message is a product of me rather than a product of you. And and the a big mistake I think that people make who don't study communication theory is that there's some inherent meaning in the message is what you're saying. There's nothing in the message itself. It's how it's perceived. It's in the meaning. It's in the that's what you're saying. But a message can be extracted from it. But that's that's the perceiver. But it's not there's not an inherent message there that you can objectively look at.

01:11:07 It's in the Yeah. So, so because of that, some people would argue that therefore we should just cut information as a concept out of communication. Look, information isn't really h don't talk to me. Doesn't want to talk to me either. We've been around on the information can't be contained within animal communication because it's not it's not a thing that's packaged up by by senders. But as long as for me as long as the perceiver is able to extract something from something that they've

01:11:37 observed and have a reduction in uncertainty about the state of the world which is a true definition of kind of information you know a kind of Shannon Weaver type definition then I don't see what how how can they not have been informed in some way as a perceiver because I well yeah this is going to get long but I think one of did this recently I I just did this but I failed miserably then. I don't expect to do any better now. But I actually had to pull that out of my introduction chapter, my whole my

01:12:08 whole diet tribe against information theory and animal communication. I think it's it's it's a question of interpretation. And I think there there's different uses of the word information. I think most lay people use it as sort of synonymous with data, you know. So you're wearing a blue shirt. Well, that's some that's a piece of information. And then mathematics and linguistics, right? But that's a function of you because if you can't see blue, then you don't know that. It's nothing. It's nothing to do with me. It's about you. There's nothing inherent in if you weren't wearing a blue shirt. We wouldn't be talking about But interesting that you talked about the reduction of uncertainty, which is an

01:12:39 inherent I I take to believe and I was I was wrapped on the knuckles for this firmly, but I still take to be uh a cognitive state that uncertainty is a is a is an is a state of awareness to some degree. Um and and so information theory in the way it's used in communication is really talking about a predictability or a state. And I think a lot of communication doesn't necessarily have anything to do with predictability. So, so you wouldn't think that u you

01:13:11 wouldn't think that a bee drone that's just seen a waggle dance and now now is capable of totally flying straight to a food source that they were completely unaware of previously has obtained any information about the state of the world from the waggle. It depends on how we how we how we constru you really don't think they've gained information. This is I I told you I would lose this fight and I would keep fighting and one of these days I'll figure out how to articulate it. So what do we what what's the word we use other than information we if you would like to look at the chapter

01:13:42 in my dissertation that I pulled out I've I I've said that that signal content actually is a useful construct and that um the way I define it and and some would say that there's really no difference and I use a a rather sophomoric example but you know the whole if a tree falls in the woods and no one's there to hear it does it make a sound? Absolutely it makes a sound. The laws of physics say it makes a sound. And the weight of the tree, the angle of its trajectory, how hard it hits the ground, what's on the ground underneath

01:14:12 it will determine characteristics of that sound. How the amplitude, the frequency, the degree of crackle or whatever you want, however you want to describe that sound. If no one's there to hear it, there's no information gained. There's no uncertainty changed. But there is content in that. If just to use the analogy of a signal, the sound that that tree makes has characteristics that relate to the event. So in the same way my voice is has inherent as indexical properties about my body size.

01:14:42 So if I holler out, there will be formance and all sorts of things you can measure and it will relate to my skeletal length. But if none of you are here to hear it, there's no difference in in uh in your understanding of my body size. But it doesn't take away from the fact that that's signal. That's fine. We can distinguish potential information from perceived information. I mean, it's fine. I think it's the same. That's what we talked about then. But then to go just to push that a little bit further, if in a lingu in a linguistic model, if I were to say to you, um, there's a person

01:15:13 outside with a birthday cake just for you, um, that would be information to you. I've been told that before. Could we could we you know it's very important that we have an audience participation but we really want to hold that question. Well, we're going to go for about another we should probably not end on information theory because everyone will

01:15:45 end saying that James character really just lost it there at the end. But I I the one thing I would distinguish I think is that and I have softened my my objection to this somewhat. The I think the distinguishing characteristic is that in from a h human linguistic and cognitive framework. We process information very specifically. We think there's a birthday cake out there and that will change. Now I'm no longer uncertain as to what's waiting for me and now I will my behavior will be based on my

01:16:16 uh conscious awareness of that outside thing. When we look at non-human uh responses there there can be evolved responses that have absolutely nothing to do with a conscious awareness of anything that was related to the signal itself. And so that to so I don't I think probably as you said earlier one of the problems is terminology. So depending on how we want to define information I don't necessarily have a problem with it but what I have a problem with it is the assumption that animal responses have to be based on

01:16:49 some sort of awareness necessarily of the quote information in in the signal. I I actually don't think most people start there because I'm a cognitive psychologist. I think we look at animal signals and try to look at you know when we talk about you can look at communication from the order in which the signals occur the structure of the signals how they're used pragmatically in terms of how do they function and then when you look at those things there are times at which you say I think I'm seeing something systematic here and then you can then design an experiment

01:17:22 to test it further but I don't really know that many scientists who have looked at signals that animals produce and say, "Oh, they're there's some heavy duty cognitive underlying thought there." Without doing some pretty hard studies. I mean, too much of it in the alarm call. Yeah, you should read the primary people bystander interaction. They get worked up about it in the that alarm the alarm calls, but a lot of the other I'm talking about outside of that. The people actually know what they're talking about. Well, so I don't think people are really

01:17:53 putting all that heavy cognitive stuff in. See, I think that's one of the problems here is that when you were I think you were before describing this whole sort of uh movement or the distinguishing between communication and cognition. I think one of the problems is that first of all, I think some of this these arguments are basically culde-sacs. They're they're going nowhere, right? They're infatuations with our own self. That's right. Right. And that cognition is a projection of our own abilities onto these other systems. And so you're

01:18:25 you're never going to find it because we'll always argue about whether it is or it isn't and we'll come up with new terms and whatnot. So the question is are we actually talking what are we talking about? Are we talking about do animals communicate? What level what depth do they communicate? I think we impose a value system so that a Porsche when when you know when um uh Stim Wilcox actually shows these animals look like they're thinking right and they are they are anticipating what's going to happen in

01:18:55 the future in the past we go oh but it's a spider right but if we have a a non-human primate we go through all these elaborate you know expectations etc etc so we impose a value system on it if it has cognition it must be greater value. Whales, primates, greater value, right? And I think that is a a really false paradigm for looking at life, right? Because anywhere you look on this planet, there are just amazing things going on that have gone through the evolutionary process that we can't

01:19:26 really explain. How can how can you any of us here understand? Imagine being in a system where the animals are working over over a 100,000 hertz bandwidth. They have three si simultaneous sound production mechanisms. They can perceive sound through multiple channels at the same time. You and I can't even appreciate it. And yet we're trying to make a distinction of whether it has cognition or doesn't have cognition. You mean different sensory systems? H no within the same sensory system auditory.

01:19:56 You know sitations will be receiving signals through multiple places in their in their heads. But but then but then is it all does it all feed in through the same kind of sensory system in the central nerve? Well, eventually presumably it ends up somewhere in in auditory cortex. I'm asking because there's I think there's interesting questions here about what we consider to be universes multiensory in communication because we have quite specific we have quite specific sensory systems. Mhm. Um, so if I if I see you and I hear

01:20:28 you talking at the same time, I've have my auditory and visual cortex, etc., etc. But there's plenty of animals, insects, for example, have a completely separate completely separate system for detecting um chem the same chemical signal if it was sent through the air than contact chemo, reception, right? So then do we define do we define a signaling modality on the basis of its production like it's a vocal signal that's sent through the sea or if if if there's more completely

01:21:01 separate multiple sensory systems for detecting it does that then become a multiensory signal is my question. Um but but in the initations it sounds like that so they have um it's just actually one sensory system but just multiple ways of they have mult they have basically receptors into the physical entity called their body that are coming through different parts of their skull. Right. Right. And and I I almost want to this is sort of challenging but I almost want

01:21:31 to say well does it really matter if we define that they have a multi-ensory system? I think it does matter. Yeah. Why does that matter? Because multi-ensory communication is different. Well, who cares if it's different? Yeah. Um I think it's different cognitively, functionally that it evolves differently. So does that mean we place a different value on that system? It has multi-ensory somehow inflate ourselves and say, "Oh wow, we found something that's more complicated than us." Why can't you just enjoy the fact that there's an animal

01:22:02 that works at a up to 220 kilhertz, right? that has receives through its jaw, receives through the back of the head, receives I I can appreciate that from an aesthetic sense, but as a scientist, I'm also interested in studying it and asking questions in terms of but also they're visual. They're tactile. They those are all like we are and actually we've had a lot of commitations aren't very visual. They are they change their positions and they have hourgl they have a visual phobia that works in the air and in the water you know. We've talked a lot today

01:22:34 about human language for example and you started touching on gesture but actually human language is completely multi-ensoral from the start like it's impossible to make the words that we make without conccommittent movements of the lips and the this from looking at people we get a much much better understanding of what they're saying even if you can only see their lips if you cut the rest of the head off everything you can just see their lips you get a much better understanding and and this visual ual signal of following the lips is not

01:23:05 something that's sort of piggybacked on that humans have evolved a vocal communication system and then we've added on a bit of kind of visual signal. It's right from the start the visual signal of watching the lips and the and the vocal signal coming into the ears integrated at the very very first step of cortical processing and and it's the same in non-human primates as well as in humans. Um, and your dolphins don't have any facial gestures, right? No, but they have they change their body position.

01:23:35 They have body positions. They But half the most of them can't even see each other when they communicate. So there's right acoustics. Well, that's a I mean the species I study, they have a series of what are called loud calls, which I think is rather uninformative, but they have they have calls that can be heard almost a kilometer away, and then they have calls that can barely be heard more than a few meters away. uh and they use them in different contexts and and presumably selection has favored them for having different functions. Um so there are I think so what James was

01:24:06 saying there and and clearly with the whales you know we're looking over a thousand you know kilometers of the ability to communicate the ability to produce and perceive a signal with no other uh with no additional information no other modality to accompany it no other visual or gestural chemical etc. And then we have others that are evolved within this very close multi-dimensional or multiodality space. And I just think that that selection favors them for different reasons and in different ways. But

01:24:36 they're probably built on some fundamental underlying um foundation of of perception and reception and then diverged over time. Great. Thank you guys. I don't know from the audience would like to come up. I would ask the gentleman who had to interrupt perhaps to be the first to speak. [Music] Really? Because I think he's going to yell at me.

01:25:08 He might be yelling at me. No, he's the young verbbit that needs to be a young um No, what I wanted to clarify that's on was this um you said that the understanding is created in the receiver, right? Well, that's true unless the sender and the receiver have previously agreed a set of signals. If the sender and the receiver have previously agreed what the various signals mean, then it's the sender who

01:25:39 constructs the semantics and not the receiver. So if I have a very simple system which is to tell you to turn on a light switch or turn it off and we agree before that when I raise my arm like this you turn it off and when I do this you turn it on then I'm the one who's giving meaning to the signal. Now that's important because we may facly have assumed that built into each of us is some standard set which is biologically determined. And therefore

01:26:11 we have agreement built into us before. And therefore when an animal sends out a signal, it's the sender who is generating the information and not the receiver. Namely, if we're all hardwired to if animals were hardwired to respond to when the tail goes up, there is something hardwired in an animal to say, I know what that means. Not know in the cognitive sense, but but to know the response, then indeed it would be the reverse of what you were saying. So I

01:26:41 just wanted us to be careful about the about the fact that we're we're sort of giving up on information information theory as it was originally created by Shannon was exactly this notion that you have this pre-arranged set of signals from which you are choosing and so if you're going to use the word information theory you know that does presuppose this and so it's I think you do need to worry about that. Sorry. No, I was just going to say so if you look at basic like communication books for human communication, you see

01:27:12 these diagrams and we talk about a transactional model. So you've got sender receiver both being both because it's a highly dynamic system. You know, you're sender receiver at the same time and then the meaning the sender has a an understanding like you're saying. They have an idea of what this message is in their head and the receiver has an idea. But those the message there's not an absolute message. They both have a meaning in their heads. in terms of the information that's going out, but it may not be the same. That's why there's no inherent meaning in any one message. It's in what they both

01:27:43 perceive. Here's an animal communicating. Perfect. This is what we needed. And there it goes. I I have an interesting I'm not sure if it it's all gone. You bring a cute puppy in and it's all I should have brought a cute puppy to my defense. it would have gone a lot faster. But h how would you how would you I mean this is all for behavioral signals but most most animal communication a lot of

01:28:13 animal communication is not about behavior. I mean, how would you how would you consider the bright red sexual swelling of an olive baboon? Something that grows and arouses the male and because it's associated with fertility and blah blah blah blah blah like we can, you know, the male gets excited and this and that and the other and he copulates and blah blah and and for from the male's perspective, it may be that he he has some idea about that in terms of um where it's going. Maybe he

01:28:44 doesn't. But but then certainly there's nothing going on in the female's head, right? It's just a morphological growth. I said anything to do with cognition. It's simply to understand that we do have wired into us some standard patterns that are common just from from our genetics. Then there is information that can go from one to the other which is valid and clear and and is not subject to all this. We don't know what's going on inside their heads.

01:29:16 That's that's the point I'm trying to make to you. That's right. But the but the but the precise information that the receiver would take from it will always depend on the receiver on on their ability to on their ability to perceive it, their sensory systems, their experience, the all these things are going to nuance how they're going to interpret the signal. Not necessarily. It could be that you always do exactly the same thing when you get it. I think it can be but I think a lot of animal communication is not like that.

01:29:47 [Music] Oh yes. Um, I always thought that um, what distinguishes language from other forms of communication that there language has underlying grammar and I was just wondering is it true that all human languages have an underlying grammar and that has anyone found underlying grammar for any form of animal communication? And if not, is anybody even looking into that? Well, we talked a little bit about the animal communication stuff earlier with chimps and teaching them is there any grammar? Is there any um, well, let's go to the human language

01:30:18 stuff. A very interesting thing to read is this fellow Jimmy Button. I don't if you've ever heard of him, but he was a whenever the Darwin went down on the Beagle, they kidnapped Jimmy Button, the young boy about 10, and took him to England and taught him everything. He went to Cambridge, you name it. And they taught him all sorts of foreign languages and everything else. And so, one of the things that was very popular in the United States also in the 1600s was to kidnap an Indian and bring them to Europe and teach them all sorts of different languages. The most famous one was Samuel Aam who apparently was a

01:30:50 genius of all imaginable sizes and he's the one that actually scared up the money for all the Ivy League colleges because they said if you can do that with an Indian what's next you know so apparently any human being from anywhere in the world can learn any language anywhere with no trouble at all. The most complicated language most linguists agree is a language called Walpiri which is spoken at Ayers's Rock in Australia. It has cases beyond anybody's imagination for what cases could be. Children learn it flawlessly with no

01:31:20 effort whatsoever. Adults have one hell of a time. There are two people that I've met in my life that can learn that they're both deceased now, but they can learn any human language on exposure for about a year and be totally fluent. This ability usually disappears in most people, but it doesn't in all. So it seems to be the case that there's an inherent thing in people's heads that enables them to learn languages that are really honest to god spoken by other human beings. Now when it comes down to animals, we were talking about this earlier. What kinds of symbol systems can they use and can they use

01:31:51 mathematics and can they use symbols for different sorts of things? Uh just offhand it's my own feeling on this is they don't tend to symbolize their activities. It's no particular reason why they should symbolize their activities. I think with all the things you're talking about, they do gestural sorts of things and interpret each other's gestures rather than noises and human beings tend to be visual creatures that like sounds and so uh I mean I've seen movies of animals that watched people do things and then they started doing them too, you know, and maybe they

01:32:22 learn that by that kind of a system. But there's something very unusual about the human being that it's a total symbol using creature. And in fact, we talk about the messages and the message content. In Shannon's thing, there's no message content at all. In fact, he has a sentence in there that gets many people mad. He says, "I don't even care if there are messages." He just wants to know how many tele if you have your if your cell phone breaks and you take it to the dealer, he's not going to say, "What do you talk about?" He doesn't care. And he's not going to say, "What language do you use?" He

01:32:52 doesn't care. He's going to plug a bunch of gizmos in and get it back working. If your TV breaks, the guy's not going to say, "What do you watch? John Wayne movies." It doesn't make any difference. He's going to make he's going to put a bunch of signals through that thing that are going to be jagged lines, big round balls, you know, crazy colors. And if it abs if it absorbs all of those weirdo things, then it works perfectly. And that's what most syntax of Chsky type stuff is. It's finding those structures that define the boundaries, the outer boundaries of human language structures independent of what the meanings might

01:33:24 be. Are any of those structures found in language animal? Yeah. Well, there's a huge, as you can see, there's huge amounts of debate about this kind of stuff. Maybe the closest thing is the putty nose guon. Say you're going to bring up Zuber, unfortunately. Um, so the the the Putty nose guon has a system. I mean, we we're just starting to explore these systems, right? They have a system where they use one particular call, a POW call for a leopard or groundbased predator at least

01:33:55 and a hack core which they use for aerial threats. So they're two different predator type responses and then they combine those two calls in specific form um when they want to travel. So they use they use some combination of between two and five POW calls followed by some combination of between two and five hack calls in a sequence. They go pow hack hack and then and then they all move out. Um so that's quite

01:34:26 interestingish but um quite quite exactly what's going on in those kind of systems. I guess we have no idea but but the the the the vocalizations themselves seem to be sort of at least some sort of functional referentiality in what they do. And then they're also combined in other contexts. I think we've made a mistake here today that we we're confusing in my terminology language and speech. Well, that's speech is what humans do, right? Bees have language.

01:34:56 Other species have language. Do we can we define language? Did we do No, you said you couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. But I think what the question there was about was speech. No, it's about grammar. No, grammar. Grammar. Grammar. Grammar. So bees don't have language. I I don't know how would you define language if I might interject. But I mean so now so what you've done is you've invented definitions that exclude anything but humans. Exactly. So that's a useless concept. But no but how do we but I have a

01:35:27 excellent evolutionary or behavioral ecology definition of communication. But I don't have a definition of language. But people have talked about language as a set of agreed upon symbols that are used conventionally and people like Hockett and others have listed based on human language certain design features that we do such as grammar such as productivity such as using symbolic forms such as arbitrariness. I mean they're like 18 things just as an example just to say how can we com

01:35:58 compare what other species do with what we call language? Do other species show any of the properties of human language? Not forcing it into a language game, but just saying this is how we do it. So we do have metrics like that and many animals do show many of those design features. It again if we what if we throw out the word language just as throw out the word language and say that's what we do, right? And other animals may use and that's our kind of communication system and it could be non-verbal or verbal. Okay? And then we've got other animal communication systems and we can call

01:36:29 that X Y and Z. It's not better or worse. They're just different. Certainly not high. That would be a little bit more. Would you would you distinguish the dialogue that we've been carrying on here, which is through the modality of speech and the kind of almost universal awe sound that went out when the puppy came in. I would distinguish between those two. I would I would consider one a kind of a vocal communication, a vocal signal that is probably to some degree inherent or or uh inherited arousal based. arousal based and reflexive and and inherited and

01:37:01 therefore probably has an evolutionary tract whereas the words that are coming out of my mouth are have to be learned. So we have emotive signals, right? And we have something that's non-emotive signaling, but then but it doesn't have to be speech. It doesn't have to be acoustic, right? Right. Doesn't have to be emotive can be non-intentional. Right. Blushing. You have an emotion, you blush. So there's this realm of all these signals. But I think we're still stuck with this idea that what we do is we that we call language. No other animal can have it. As Chris is saying, we're prior we're a priority saying

01:37:32 that, you know, this is language. is better and no other animal can really do it because we've already said what it is, right? We're letting I mean we do this with all sorts of things. I don't have to circular. Yeah. And I would never put language on any sort of hierarchy to say it's, you know, better or worse, but just an ability to somehow distinguish it, which is why I continue to bring up the uh in human inhuman non-llinguistic communication of crying and laughing and things like that, which are evolved traits that have a communicative function. And I would I would have no

01:38:03 difficulty distinguishing those from spoken or written or or sign language that is learned and there's based on a shared understanding of these symbols. So I since I don't find that difficult to distinguish between crying and laughing and and the use of of written or spoken language um I'm not sure why then we'd have such a hard time distinguishing human language from non-llinguistic forms in other species. [Music] Please,

01:38:35 [Music] I would like to make a comment on complexity of the communication systems and I happen to know a guy who was saved by dolphins. So, and I'm going to tell about this. So uh one they they with friends they have a boat sometimes they go to particular island and from there they put boat there and swim to the smaller island

01:39:05 where they have where there is very good beach and uh a lot of dolphins also near nearby. What? Once he he stayed by himself too long on this smaller island and suddenly weather changed and uh and he decided to go as as fast as possible to the boat. But in the middle waves became bigger and bigger and wind became bigger and bigger and he got the panic

01:39:36 attack and he did not know where to go back to to the this small island to be saved or to the boat because it was something in the middle. And suddenly he felt something above below below him and it was dolphins who created the wave. They did not touch him. They created the wave and very fast moved him to the boat. So this panic

01:40:09 attack was like a message for them and they know where to go. They understood where he wants to go. although he already was in the doubt. So, and when they brought him to vote, they just left and that was it. And um I don't know how how and actually I could give anyone the contact information of this guy. So, you could you could know he had by him by

01:40:39 yourself. So um and that's uh these um um this event u uh saying uh telling us about that there is very complex system of communication it was complex message for them this panic attack they understood what's going on what they could do and where this whatever creature it is should go and why they did not help him as they probably help

01:41:12 their own their their um their own know the member of their own species. So one of the questions maybe our languages that we consider very complex and they actually help us to develop very uh complex technology that for example um uh improve only one hour function to um

01:41:43 like like like iPhone maybe they much more primitive that what actually um animals using in their communications and actually one of my other friends saying that uh animals don't need to develop these symbolic languages because they don't need them. They just don't need it because their life is much more complex than ours. We sitting here without anything around except only

01:42:15 humans and we with using these uh our languages that we destroying we creating complex technology which is destroying environment and actually it's not very smart. So there's the question what is more complex and what is they are living and we are sitting talking and I'm not saying that I'm like I don't dist distinguish myself from the I'm also uh choosing to live in city not in in

01:42:47 nature and whatever it could be said about this but anyway what's the system of communications and more complex well you know I'd like to respond to that real quickly because You know, historically there have been reports of dolphins saving people even again back in Greek times aren being rescued by the dolphin. And I get a lot of letters from people who say they've been rescued. You know, one of the things we've seen in not just dolphins, but in in other animals like elephants and certainly primates uh where a child will be fall a

01:43:18 child will fall into an enclosure at a zoo and uh it was I think a gorilla that held this child till the keepers could get out. France Duval who's a well-known primatologist was just giving a talk this weekend about this and it seems that whether it's communication per se it may not be communication but there's some awareness on the part of the animal perhaps of the plight of that organism and you know well you're going well you know what wild dogs just did to that kid in in the zoo I mean that's a very but those are wild hunting dogs those

01:43:49 are predators these are these okay so that may be different it may not be all animals are the same but nevertheless Um, there are several animal species that show helping caregiving behavior that's not hardwired. Our colleague Ken Norris has shown that with dolphins and whales, they their behavior is flexible. If you, you know, one could argue that a dolphin that's a land that's an air breathing animal, it could have been selected for that. They would hold up anything that's air breathing at the surface because that would save an

01:44:20 organism that they're related to or or another dolphin. So, it's hardwired. But, they don't do it. It's not hardwired. You can see them not holding up all flailing animals. I mean, we've all watched that. So, there's some there's some selection there. I don't know what that selection is, but you do hear about it. So, I just want to argue that I think there is something that may not be based on communication, but on perception or the plight of another that we would call empathy. And I think there's a high degree of learning there too because I think the examples where uh nonhumans step in and and are are somehow protective or or or indicate

01:44:51 some sort of protection response to human infants um tend to be very highly publicized. They also tend to be in zoos or with captive not with wild dolphins. That's not the case. There are many cases and I have a whole collection of them of wild dolphins. We don't know their whole history of their wild but have done this kind little Ilon Gonzalez famous case. He was he was hanging on that inner tube and he told a colleague of mine who was with him and Diane Sawyer in an interview that as he slid off the inner

01:45:22 tube dolphins pushed him much like you were saying back up onto the inner tube. So of course the skeptic in all of us says the kid's hallucinating. He's been out there you know the whole thing. But the fishermen who came on the res at the rescue boat saw the dolphins and they left when he approached. Interesting. So let's not jump too fast. No, certainly not. My question um is related to um whether um studying disorders

01:45:52 uh in animals could help us uh to learn about their communication or language. Um I just remembered how uh some people were suggesting um that it's helpful to understand schizophrenia as a disorder of language for example uh and how um many many things that we understand in the field of psychiatry or neurology we we reach there by seeing uh what's wrong what doesn't work actually not not what

01:46:23 works. Uh so my question is does how how is this applied into the animal communication and what are is there limitations for this or Thank you. I I think there's loads of different ways. I mean you mentioned mental kind of mental disorders but there's also a lot of sensory disorders. So people are interested in you know sort of color blindness in Macaks and understanding sensory perception according to uh where is he

01:46:53 according to things like this. So so I think there's there's a whole there's people that are interested in individuals with um sensory defects and trying to understand communication um from those perspectives. Um and that's quite interesting particularly in vision because um color the way our luminance and color vision works which I'm not going to go into in great amount of detail but but um basically we have a um a sort of corruption of how light and dark we can detect things as a consequence of our

01:47:24 evolution of tri chromacy. So di chromats um di chromatic anthropoids, diromatic humans supposedly have better kind of depth perception than various other things. And dur in the second world war the RAF used to have a a colorblind man in every squadron apocryphily possibly. um the in terms of kind of um I mean I think there's a lot of models of depression um uh negativity bias things like that

01:47:55 where people are interested in understand animal communication so they're they're looking at you know in mice and rats but also in non-human primates rearing individuals that have had different types of upbringing um then can get the we can see types of effects that we would classify as being depression. So you you show depressed individuals are characterized by by negativity biases essentially like when you show them things that they should be happy about, they still think it's really really bad regardless. Um and you

01:48:27 can you can get similar effects you get very very similar effects in um in nonhuman animals depending on their prior experience. And I I think they also use um non-human primates of some of the new world monkeys to look at stress and monitor through the the vocal modifications, right? I don't know. I don't know if that's what sort of what I'm saying to the question. Yes. I mean in general because somehow some people were saying that you can

01:48:58 animals cannot have schizophrenia for example like this was my basic because they're they're like they don't have our language and schizophrenia is a sort of language. So crazy animals are not like our our friends. So I mean they could still they can I mean they're used extensively as models of things like anxiety and depression and things certainly and and it's important I think for our own studies that we understand these things for for animal

01:49:31 communication but also for kind of human medicine like we we often we're often trying drugs on testing drugs on rats and mice and things that are actually not normal mice and rats like depending on how they've been reared. they they re will react completely differently to the same kind of the same medicine, right? Or if they're males or females because of time constraints. I'm sorry. We're uh these three gentlemen are going to have to be our last question. We'll be more succinct. Sure.

01:50:02 Many years ago, uh myself being not involved much with animals, I found myself uh running a mental hospital in a rural area and uh they provided a house for me to live in. Uh somebody gave me a a a pet. It was a bird. It was a cockatil. And I had no real relationship to this bird. Uh, it flew around this big cold

01:50:32 place and I sort of sat around, you know, wondering what the hell I'm doing there. And there was this bird. One day it snowed. Now, apparently this bird had come from Brazil or some jungle area where there was no snow. And I was a city kid, was always fascinated concept that snow was covering everything up. So I look out the window and everything was covered in white. All the fields,

01:51:03 all the campus, everything, trees are white. And just looking at this and suddenly right beside me, perched on a little bookshelf, uh, Irma, the bird, is also looking at this. I didn't know Irma was looking at this. So then I looked at Irma and Irma looked at me and we both knew that we were seeing something very interesting that

01:51:36 we had not seen before. And not only did we know that we were seeing something that we had not seen before, but we suddenly knew that each of us was knowing that we knew each of us was knowing that. And I was shocked. And so was Herma. I bet she was. As soon as her as soon as she realized that I understood what she was seeing and she understood what I was seeing and that we both understood what either of us was seeing, she flew away in panic

01:52:07 uh to the next floor of this place I was living in. Now I I that was a a to me a a terribly emotional experience. I had never never conceived that a a an animal would look at something the way I was looking at it and knew and know that I was looking at my whole view of animals changed in that momentary flash. So I I would ask this now you comment about

01:52:38 receivers and senders. uh are there any experiments in which uh animals perceive something and communicate this to humans in such a way that there's a mutual understanding going on and is this has this document is is any of this documented that's my question I hope you don't uh get to birds too much time on it I mean there's there's plenty of examples of humans and birds having a communication system again what goes on

01:53:09 in their head is unclear so the The really the really classic example is the honey guide. You know, you know the honey guide. It's a type of African bird that it it finds honey and when it finds honey, it flies to the village and it does a little song that means I found that people interpret to mean that it's found honey. The people from the village then come out and the bird flies and it stops on a branch and then it and it keeps doing the call and then the people move towards it and it leads them to the honey because the bird is not capable of

01:53:41 getting the honey out of the bees nest. It needs people to smoke the bees out. The people then smoke out the bees. Um they get all the honey out the nest. They take most of the honey and then they leave a big comb and then the bird comes straight down and eats all the comb. Um, so it's an amazing kind of um interspecific communication, but but what's actually going on in the bird's head is quite another matter. Maybe you can know that, but I think it's worthy of exploration. It's all Sure. Could I can I take one second tell

01:54:11 story? I tell this in my book. It's called the timeout. I was working with a dolphin in the south of France. It's part of my PhD thesis. And I was using a technique the trainers will often use. I was training her to stay in front of me and eat fish that had been frost defrosted and thought and cut into three pieces, right? And she was uh she was a fairly young dolphin. She didn't have much experience. Her name was Cersei. And she learned very quickly within a day to stay in front of me. But when she did, so I'd put the bucket up and if she was there, I'd give her a fish. If she swam away, I gave her time out, which

01:54:42 meant walking away about 10 feet away from the pool and just standing vertical and breaking the social contact. So, I was cutting the fish into heads, middles, and tails because it was big mackerel and she wasn't eating the whole mackerel. She ate the heads, she ate the middles, she was spitting out the tails. So, I cut the tails so that they no longer had the fins. So, now she's learned to stay by me using the timeout as a correction mechanism. And I was um I was standing at the tank after she had been doing this pretty long and she wasn't leaving the pool uh the position. And by accident, I threw her an uncut

01:55:13 tail and she went to the other side of the pool, looked up at me, spit out the tail, went to the other side of the pool and took a vertical position. And I'm you're laughing this is I was laughing too and I thought she couldn't possibly have just given me a timeout. Now that's an an because that's what we're talking that's an anecdote, but as a scientist, I could never report that. So then I turned it into an experiment which was the unplanned experiment as part of my doctoral thesis. I was doing visual discrimination on dolphins and all this stuff. So I waited and now I'm feeding her the next day. I'm giving her all the

01:55:44 properly cut fish and she stays. And then the next day on purpose I gave her another uncut tail and boom she goes across the pool does it again. So I think that's a beautiful example of how we synchronize our patterns of behavior and perhaps there is more joint attention and mutual understanding and how other animals can do it. So that I just thought I'd understanding growing up when I read these texts about animal behavior that um that you know the intelligence was defined as your ability to learn and then have to take whatever they learned

01:56:15 from the experience which is you know based on chance occurrences to then actively use it to solve problems. That was generally the accepted uh definition of intelligence and also relationship with communication and language. I think was I guess you say the language is a form of communication not all communication is language but uh was yeah some a lot of cases where language is used to discourage communication so we all know instant no instances of that and u also getting into is that with that the ability of of animals learning

01:56:46 from each other is I can think of the Japanese monkeys macakcata that they a couple went with the this thing with sweet potato dipping into salt water and running rinse off the dirt And also it mixed it makes it tastier for them. And the other thing is they would giving them hands full of arm full of uh you know set of rice mixed with sand and they figure one figured out to that if you drop it in water the rice will fall to the surface and the sand will sink and the other monkeys started pay and and they've been able to communicate

01:57:16 this to each other how to do how to do that and curious what what the mechanism was there does it just boil down to the old phrase monkey see monkey do go for that uh I think I think it probably is monkey see monkey Um there's teaching as far as we we know is not very commonly observed really. I mean depends on how you define it but but there's there's no real good proof of teaching as opposed to just kind of observational evidence and repetition

01:57:47 and things like this. And actually it's quite interesting because when you the definition between teaching and repetition um the the individual undertaking the behavior is doing it specifically with the aim of the other individual learning how to do it rather than they're just doing it and other indiv. So, for example, in the, you know, in the famous um Gome chimps with the getting the termites, people will watch the the adult female will sit there for hours and stick the stick in and pull

01:58:17 the ants out or pull the termites out. And the young ones will sit and watch very intently. And people first sort of casually say, "Oh, well, they're teaching the mother's teaching the young ones." Because eventually the older one learns how to do it and they go through a lot of trial and error and they do it very poorly. The the distinguishing characteristics is that if there were actual teaching going on, the mother would be or the adult female in that situation would be doing it nonoptimally. She wouldn't simply be optimizing her own ability to get the termite. She would be doing it slower. She would be changing her body position.

01:58:48 She would be correcting the young one. So there's thousands of examples in humans that we call teaching that go right with your second definition. So we aren't we call it teaching, but it's not teaching. if there's no if it's not intentional, if we're s I mean, I learned how to change a tire watching my dad uh before he actually took the time to teach it. So, when I watch a wild killer whale parent go and grab a seal off the beach and then take it and put it in front of their offspring and give it to the offspring and the offspring sort of

01:59:18 plays with it and whatever and the seal runs away, the mother goes and gets it again, puts it back in front of the seal, the baby and that she is, isn't she teaching? just win my points because I mentioned I'm a member of the cat family that handle right I sometimes mother disable it so we can't escape and set the stage for learning so that the young figure out how themselves how just tear you know like you know that so they set the stage for learning it's just like birds don't really learn to fly from their parents the parents just kind of sit down encourage them just

01:59:50 and I think that's the big distinguishing characteristic because in in the situ in both of it gets nuanced and I don't like all the terminology between teaching and learning and experiential opportunities. But the situations that you described and also with the cats is they didn't actually teach them to do the kill. They provided opportunities for them to practice the skills that were innate. So what do you call a a a a woman teaching 10-year-olds in a school? You don't call it teaching. I call it a stereotype. What? Sorry. What are we talking? So what you what

02:00:20 you what you just described what you just described is is a is a perfect description of what many humans do to other humans and we call it teaching. But you just said it's not teaching. I'm not sure I follow you. Okay. Well, just go through your definition. Go through that example again. You just described teaching, right? I mean I mean I I think when it get I think when it gets to some of these I think when it gets to some of these sorts of cases very close

02:00:52 and I think again there's another and I think it should be done over glasses of whiskey since we're running out of time I'll just there seem to be some interest in this whole animal saving humans thing and I there's not really any need to go to zoos or even talk about saving saving humans because there's endless examples of animals saving other animals of completely different species. There are lions that have saved baby, you know, antelope. There are lions that have saved fought off the other lions to

02:01:22 protect a kid that fell into the zoo. I mean, there's there's there's just countless examples. So, there's no need to distinguish predator or nonpredator zoo or not zoo. This is there's a lot of it. Thank you guys so much. Fantastic. [Applause]