What we—and AI—can learn from nature's intelligence

Artificial intelligence is powerful, but what about natural intelligence? This hour, TED speakers explore the intrinsic genius in animal language, insect behavior, plant anatomy and our immune system. Guests include neuroscientist Greg Gage, computational neuroscientist Frances Chance, social psychoneuroimmunologist Keely Muscatell and environmental researcher Karen Bakker. Original broadcast date: March 8, 2024 See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 0:25Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 0:45Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 0:55Manoush Zomorodi?

  I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and on the show today, natural intelligence. And we're going to kick things off by going back in time to the 1750s and a marshy, swampy, subtropical wetland in North Carolina, where a man named Arthur Dobbs lived.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I like Arthur Dobbs.

• 1:21Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is our tour guide, Greg Gage.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  He was the governor of North Carolina. This is back in the 1750s, still under British rule.

• 1:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  And Arthur, he says, was a curious man, a bit of a gentleman scientist. So when Arthur started to hear a rumor about a very unusual plant growing not that far away, he decided to go check it out.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  And he heard these stories about this plant. He says, well, I'm the governor of this land. I should go investigate.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  He went out to the swamps, and so there's a little, small area. I think it's about six square miles.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  And then there, low to the ground, are these little, tiny plants in that if you watch them long enough, a bug will eventually fall into its little, or walk across its little leaves, and it snap shuts and it eats this bug. And so, of course, he's pretty fascinated by this.

• 2:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  Understandable, because, well, no Europeans had ever documented a plant like this before. So...

• 2:25Speaker 01

  He does what scientists do at the time. They take out a letter and they write to their colleagues in Europe.

• 2:33Speaker 07

  The great wonder of the vegetable kingdom is a very curious, unknown species of sensitive.

• 2:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  He writes, "It's a dwarf plant. Leaves are like a narrow segment of a sphere consisting of two parts, like the cap of a spring purse."

• 2:49Speaker 07

  Upon anything touching the leaves or falling between them, they instantly close like a spring trap. To this surprising plant, I've given the name of flytrap sensitive.

• 3:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  The flytrap sensitive, or as we call it today, the Venus flytrap. The news of this remarkable, animal-eating plant took off across Europe. And 100 years later, Charles Darwin would write an entire book called Insectivorous Plants.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Eventually, the great Charles Darwin got to study this plant, and this plant absolutely blew him away. He called it the most wonderful plant in the world.

• 3:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  Here's Greg Gage on the TED stage.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  This is a plant that was an evolutionary wonder. This is a plant that moves quickly, which is rare, and is a plant that's carnivorous, which is also rare. It's in the same plant. But I'm here today to tell you that's not even the coolest thing about this plant. The coolest thing is that the plant can count.

• 3:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  So let's pause for a moment. Greg Gage is not just an amateur flytrap historian. He is actually a neuroscientist and educator. And on the TED stage, he conducted a live science experiment.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  So I'm going to pretend to be a fly right now.

• 4:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  Surrounded by monitors, microscopes, and of course, plants.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  And here's my Venus flytrap. And inside the leaf, you're going to notice that there are three little hairs here, and those are trigger hairs. And so when a fly lands, I'm going to touch one of the hairs right now.

• 4:14Manoush Zomorodi?

  Attached to the flytrap, EKG sensors, measuring any electrical signals generated by the plant.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Ready? One, two, three.

• 4:23Manoush Zomorodi?

  And there, the monitor lit up as Greg grazed the hairs inside the flytrap.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  What do we get? We get a beautiful action potential. However, the flytrap doesn't close.

• 4:34Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's because it's waiting to see if it gets touched again within 20 seconds or so. Venus flytraps don't want to be hasty for several reasons.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Number one is that it takes a long time to open the traps back up, you know, about, you know, 24 to 48 hours if there's no fly inside of it. And so it takes a lot of energy. And number two, it doesn't need to eat that many flies throughout the year. It only needs to eat a handful. It gets most of its energy from the sun. It's just trying to replace some nutrients in the ground with the flies. And the third thing is, it only opens, uh, then closes the traps a handful of times until that trap dies. So therefore, it wants to make really darn sure that there's a meal inside of it before this flytrap snaps shut. So how does it do that? It counts the number of seconds between successive touching of those hairs. I'm going to touch the Venus flytrap again. I've been talking for more

• 5:27Speaker 01

  than 20 seconds. And then if I'm a fly moving around, I'm going to be touching the leaf a few times. I'm going to go and brush it a few times. And immediately, the flytrap closes. So here, we're seeing the flytrap actually doing a computation.

• 5:44Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, that sounds like this plant is pretty smart.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, uh, well, I mean, it definitely is competing. I always think that plants are, are kind of cool because, you know, humans, if there's a rough situation, we can just run away, right? We can just kind of like get out of Dodge. But these plants, they're stuck there. They're in the ground, right? And so they're got, they've got nothing to do except for try to feed themselves. They come up with very incredible ways of doing that.

• 6:12Manoush Zomorodi?

  We hear a lot about the powers of artificial intelligence. But all around us, nature continues to find extraordinary ways to survive and communicate that we are still just beginning to understand. So today on the show, natural intelligence. New findings about the brilliance of dragonflies, our immune system, and whales, and how they are influencing human behavior.

• 6:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  First, though, back to Greg Gage. He brought another surprisingly sensitive plant onto the TED stage.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  I'll lead you to the mimosa, not the drink, but the mimosa purica.

• 6:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  Greg, during your stage experiment, you also had this other plant that kind of looks like a fern, and it's called a mimosa.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  And this is a plant that's found in Central America and South America, and it has behaviors.

• 7:03Manoush Zomorodi?

  And you just lightly touch the leaves, and it kind of like wilted away from you.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  If I tap the leaf, the entire branch seems to fall down.

• 7:12Manoush Zomorodi?

  And my dad actually had a mimosa plant when I was a kid, and I was fascinated by this response. Like, I would touch it, and it would pull away from me, like, get off me, you know?

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's actually very, very similar to humans, right? So there's like a touch receptor, just like we do in our, in our skin, and when we press out on something, we feel it because an electrical impulse is being sent back up to our brains, and we interpret that impulse as the feeling of touch. Inside of this leaf, very similar cells are within there that will send an electrical current, only this time, instead of using muscles, it again uses water, flushes the water out and makes the plant move.

• 7:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  But why? Is it always about survival?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  I suspect so. And it's funny, because with mimosa, there's a couple of theories of why, you know, if an animal brushes past, it doesn't look as, I'm looking at mine right now, they don't look very tasty, right? Maybe I would eat a different plant if I saw that one. Or maybe it kind of freaks out some insects that would want to land on it. So that's a learning mechanism it can do, but that's kind of boring compared to some other experiments that have been done. Experiments where you can take a pea pod, and you let it grow in the dark. You have like a little tube that goes, it goes up, and it kind of goes like a Y. It's called a bifurcated tube. And if you shine a light in one of the tubes, say on the right side, and you blow a fan

• 8:36Speaker 01

  on the other one, you can do this protocol where you kind of, you blow the fan on the left, and then you shine the light on the right. And then the next day, you blow the fan on the right, you shine the light on the left.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Each day is kind of growing up this tube, trying to get to the top of it, right? And then on the experiment day, right where it's about to make a decision, you flip it again, but you only blow the fan. And then you ask the question, which way will the plant grow? Will it grow where it last saw the light, which makes sense, right? Or did it figure out the relationship between the fan and the light and grow to where the light would have been if it's going to come on soon, right? You get a majority of the plants to kind of figure it out. They kind of figure out that they have to go in the other direction and go away from where it last saw the light, but where the fan was indicating where we go. To me, that's, that's kind of flexible. And then that's starting to show some decisions, right? That's starting to show a little bit of intelligence.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  So it's the ones that made it are the ones that it can sort of live on to, to tell the story, right? And so then those genes get inherited and move forward.

• 9:43Manoush Zomorodi?

  So we have covered plants, which seem like a more simple life form than, say, mammals, yet kind of display some very seriously smart behavior. But you are also really interested in, it seems strange to say this, but you're really excited about slime mold, which is not a plant, but...

• 10:04Speaker 01

  No, but a mold is a cell, right? A slime mold is a single cell. They, they kind of sit in a, in a Petri dish and you feed them, you feed them little oats and they kind of wrap around it and they kind of suck up the nutrients and they kind of can go dormant for many, many years and they can come back alive again.

• 10:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  Wow.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, they're absolutely fascinating, but they're, uh...

• 10:22Manoush Zomorodi?

  You can see them though? Even though they're single cells?

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Oh, you see, they could be, yeah, they could be, a single cell could be like, you know, a meter long. They're, they're, they could be big, so they're macro. And so, uh, we, we were doing an experiment, one of the experiments we did was we put a piece of food in there. We watched how often would it go towards the food? And not surprisingly, it goes towards the food a lot, right? But slime molds are kind of a, uh, they don't want to be dried out, so they don't like sunlight. And so if you shine a light there, you know, then they will shy away from it. They'll try to go around it, but they won't go through, they try not to go through the light. Um, that would make sense if it was an animal. You're like, okay, well, their eyes are seeing it. The eyes are sending the message back to the brain and the brains are telling the muscles which way to go. But then you realize, well, wait a minute, there's no brain, right? There's no, there's just, it's just cells, right? So they have these sensors on the outside of the cell that's sending back information,

• 11:09Speaker 01

  but that information's being processed inside the cell itself.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  And so I think there's a lot to be said about the about the cell. I mean, the cell is basically a little computer. It's got a little Turing machine inside of it, and it has goals, right? It tries to do things. And so it has a lot of, a lot of things in its resources to be able to do.

• 11:32Manoush Zomorodi?

  I recently went to a lecture about the crows that are the only birds that we know that use or fashion and then use tools.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Oh, corvids, yeah.

• 11:41Manoush Zomorodi?

  They're amazing. And just every so often, you hear this incredible story that shouldn't blow our minds, but does, about how the natural world is so incredibly smart. And I guess I'm wondering, you know, should it, should it expand our definition of intelligence? How, in simple terms, how do we define what intelligence is?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the simplest way, given what you've got, right? You've got to figure out how to be able to get to what you want, right? And so that's kind of my, kind of the back of the envelope sketch of intelligence, is being able to get to what you want, given what you have. And that's what intelligent things do. You look at a dog trying to get through a door, it'll kind of go check the other door. It's doing, it's trying to figure out what it needs to do. And so you could look at these, these plants, you know, in the, in the case of these plants that are trying to find the light, they're doing, they're taking what they, what the information they have to figure that out. You know, you could look at, uh, single cells doing that. I think the joy of intelligence is really in every living thing. I think every cell is intelligent. I think everything that comes from cells is intelligent.

• 12:53Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's Greg Gage. He's a professor at the University of Michigan and co-founder of Backyard Brains, a company that builds neuroscience experiments for kids. You can find all his talks at ted.com. On the show today, natural intelligence. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

• 13:30Manoush Zomorodi?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are no antibiotics in their meat department, ever. So carve up turkey and spiral-cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 Brand. And all their delectable pies are made with no high-fructose corn syrup. Gourmet Thanksgiving flavors with the quality you want, only at Whole Foods Market. This message comes from Schwab. At Schwab, you can get everything from self-directed investing to full-service wealth management, all in one place. No matter your investing goal, life stage, amount to invest, or know-how,

• 14:14Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 14:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, natural intelligence, which is actually where some computer scientists are looking for inspiration to design the next generation of artificial intelligence.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so African dung beetles, they roll up balls of feces and balls of dung and roll them away as quickly as they can.

• 15:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  Because even the smallest creatures on Earth can execute some amazing feats.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  So they're standing on their head. They're rolling the ball of dung with their hind legs. And they're using various cues to roll in a straight line. If they're nocturnal...

• 15:16Speaker 02

  They're known to use moonlight to be able to make sure that they're going in a straight line. And I wouldn't be able to roll anything standing on my head.

• 15:24Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Frances Chance.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Sahara Desert ants, when they find food and they want to bring it back to their nest, they know how to calculate the straightest path back to their nest.

• 15:34Manoush Zomorodi?

  Frances sounds like an entomologist.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Oh, and honeybees, you know, they also forage.

• 15:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  But she's actually a computational neuroscientist. At Sandia National Laboratories, she researches how natural intelligence can help develop new security technology. For example, what missile defense systems might learn from the dragonfly.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  So they're very good at what they do.

• 15:58Manoush Zomorodi?

  These graceful, fluttering creatures also use a very special technique to hunt.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Dragonflies are really good at hunting. We know that they fly to intercept their prey. They fly really fast and they're very successful. It's known that dragonflies catch up to 95% of the prey that they choose to go after. And even though they're really fast, they don't just fly straight at their prey. They fly on an interception pathway, which means they're aiming slightly ahead of where their prey are.

• 16:34Manoush Zomorodi?

  So is that like Gretzky, the hockey great, saying like, don't go to where the puck is, go to where the puck is going to be?

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Exactly. We need to aim ahead of where the puck is going to be. And so the dragonfly is constantly reacting to changes of the prey's direction or the prey's speed to calculate how far ahead of the prey they need to aim.

• 16:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  By understanding how these nearly instantaneous calculations happen in the dragonfly's brain, Frances hopes to build AI that mimics it and is just as efficient. Here she is on the TED stage.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  When dragonflies are hunting, they do more than just fly straight at the prey. They fly in such a way that they will intercept it. They aim for where the prey is going to be. To do this correctly, dragonflies need to perform what is known as a coordinate transformation, going from the eyes frame of reference, or what the dragonfly sees, to the body's frame of reference, or how the dragonfly needs to turn its body to intercept. And dragonflies are fast. This means they calculate fast. The latency, or the time it takes for a dragonfly to respond once it sees the prey turn, is about 50 milliseconds. So in the brain, a computational step is a single neuron or a layer of neurons working in parallel.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  It takes a single neuron about 10 milliseconds to add up all its inputs and respond. The 50-millisecond response time means that once the dragonfly sees its prey turn, there's only time for maybe four of these computational steps or four layers of neurons working in sequence, one after the other, to calculate how the dragonfly needs to turn. In other words, the neural circuit that I need to understand can have at most four layers of neurons. This is a small neural circuit, small enough that we can identify it and study it with the tools that are available today. And this is what I'm trying to do. I have built a model of what I believe is the neural circuit

• 18:42Speaker 02

  that calculates how the dragonfly should turn. In a computer simulation, I can predict the activities of individual neurons while the dragonfly is hunting. To test the model, my collaborators and I are now comparing these predicted neural responses with responses of neurons recorded in living dragonfly brains. These are ongoing experiments in which we put living dragonflies in virtual reality. Now, it's not practical to put VR goggles on a dragonfly. So instead, we show movies of moving targets to the dragonfly while an electrode records activity patterns of individual neurons in the brain.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  If the responses that we record in the brain match those predicted by the model, we will have identified which neurons are responsible for coordinate transformations. The next step will be to understand the specifics of how these neurons work together to do the calculation. But this is how we begin to understand how brains do basic or primitive calculations.

• 19:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  So you are building computer models based on the dragonfly's brain that can intercept things in just a few steps. The dragonfly, it must be doing really complicated math really fast. Is that what you are trying to figure out? Those calculations?

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what I'm really interested in are what are the fundamental operations that neurons are capable of? Or what are the fundamental operations that neurons do? And that's what I want to bring to a computer. It may be something like basic trigonometry, or it may be something that's kind of a different type of math than we're used to thinking about. But that's what we're trying to understand. Because if we can understand the operations, then we can begin to understand what the algorithms or, say, the computer programs of the brain are.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  The way that these neurons compute may be different from anything that exists on a computer today. And the goal of this work is to do more than just write code that replicates the activity patterns of neurons. We aim to build a computer chip that not only does the same things as biological brains, but does them in the same way as biological brains. This could lead to drones, driven by computers the same size as the dragonfly's brain, that capture some targets and avoid others. Personally, I'm hoping for a small army of these to defend my backyard from mosquitoes in the summer.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  The GPS on your phone could be replaced by a new navigation device based on dung beetles or ants that could guide you to the straight or the easy path home.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  And what would the power requirements of these devices be like? The human brain is estimated to have the same power requirements as a 20-watt light bulb. Imagine if all brain-inspired computers had the same extremely low power requirements. Your smartphone or your smartwatch probably needs charging every day. Your new brain-inspired device might only need charging every few months, or maybe even every few years. You know, computers touch us in all sorts of ways that we totally take for granted. But one resource that limits what computers can do today is being able to power them.

• 22:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah, and you you mention a future scenario where maybe we wouldn't need to charge our devices every day. Maybe we could go months or even years. Could we potentially scale back big time from using all the energy we need right now to run massive servers and data centers all over the world?

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that it could have long-reaching impacts by decreasing just human carbon energy footprint on the world. Definitely. As it is, a lot of these data centers need to be next to some natural resource like a river to be able to generate enough power to use these algorithms like Google Search. So I think that there's a lot of potential there that we may be able to bring that cost down.

• 22:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  So bring this back to what you do at Sandia for us. I mean, I know you can't get into the details, but when it comes to national defense, it makes me think of Israel's Iron Dome. And leaving aside the politics, is the aim to find ways to make missile defense systems like those more efficient?

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Well, I, you know, Sandia is interested in national security missions. That requires a lot of computer power. I'm not necessarily going to talk about what those are. But, you know, if we're doing our job, you won't necessarily see the impact of that. So being able to understand how neurons do what they do for low power means that the cost of each of these individual operations, or the cost of each of these interactions of a human with, say, something in the cloud is going to come down. And so what I'm interested in is how the dragonfly brains are able to do this calculation with low power and really remarkably fast.

• 23:57Manoush Zomorodi?

  There is a debate about whether artificial intelligence can actually be intelligent. What about the dragonfly? Do you think of it as intelligent?

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think there are a lot of different definitions to what intelligence is. When I think about human intelligence, it's our ability to adapt or take in new information and behave differently based on new situations. For dragonflies, they're examples of neurons solving a task in what I would say is maybe even an optimized way. You know, the dragonfly has evolved to do this particular task very well, very fast, very efficiently. So I call them clever, you know, clever solutions. They're examples of what intelligence could produce.

• 24:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was computational neuroscientist Frances Chance. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, ideas about natural intelligence. So far, we've heard about plants that can count and dragonflies that intercept their prey in milliseconds. But what about our own natural intelligence? The one in our bodies?

• 25:17Speaker 06

  How are you feeling?

• 25:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  I'm feeling not so good. That's our senior producer, Sanaa, and her daughter, Mina. I feel a little nauseous, like there are...

• 25:34Speaker 06

  Pebbles or rocks in my stomach. And my head just occasionally it hurts.

• 25:43Manoush Zomorodi?

  Mina is homesick with a virus. And she doesn't want to do much of anything.

• 25:49Speaker 06

  Right now, I'm sitting on the couch. I just want to watch a movie and like watch something on my iPad.

• 26:03Manoush Zomorodi?

  As we know, these symptoms are coming from Mina's immune system that is trying to fight off that virus. Leading the charge are molecules called cytokines.

• 26:14Speaker 06

  They're basically like the the chemical messengers of the immune system.

• 26:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  Keely Muscatell is a psychology and neuroscience professor at UNC Chapel Hill. That's where she studies the links between our physical and mental health. And she says these cytokines float around in our bloodstream looking for anything suspicious. And when they find something, they sound the alarm.

• 26:41Speaker 06

  It's like, oh, there's a problem here. We need to do something to try to contain this. And it's trying to signal to other immune cells to come and like try to figure that out.

• 26:53Manoush Zomorodi?

  And that causes inflammation.

• 26:56Speaker 06

  And that's what we tend to experience when we have, you know, been infected with a virus or some sort of other pathogen is that widespread systemic inflammation. Now, in doing this, cytokines cause the physical symptoms we commonly have when we're sick.

• 27:13Manoush Zomorodi?

  Keely Muscatell continues from the TED stage.

• 27:16Speaker 06

  Things like fever and achiness and fatigue. So even though we usually think of those symptoms as being caused by a virus or a bacteria itself, they're actually caused by our own immune systems activating to try to eliminate the pathogen.

• 27:35Speaker 06

  But in addition to those physical symptoms, decades of research, both animals and humans, clearly shows that cytokines also cause changes to our mood and to our social behavior. So inflammation in the body can signal to the brain to cause us to feel down, depressed, and even hopeless. Inflammation can also make us want to socially withdraw from other people, to avoid interacting with individuals in our social networks. So this research shows the powerful influence that the immune system can have on our mood and on our social behavior. Changes in inflammation in the body

• 28:20Speaker 06

  can signal to the brain to cause us to feel depressed and even lonely.

• 28:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  You know, earlier we heard from our colleague's daughter, who was homesick. And she loves school, she loves sports, but she did not feel like doing anything that day. And that's exactly what you're describing. That when we are sick, it is actually our immune system saying, "Stay home. Yeah, it's okay that you're a little depressed. Just lie down."

• 28:51Speaker 06

  Exactly, exactly. So your body is gonna send signals to your brain that cause kind of a loss of joy or a loss of interest or pleasure in things that normally would bring you tons of joy, like going to school or, you know, whatever it is that makes you really happy. And the idea is that that's a really good thing, right? Because if you're sick, then you really should be staying home and letting your body recuperate and recover, letting your immune system do its job. And also kind of containing the possibility of spreading whatever you have to other people.

• 29:30Speaker 06

  While we can't know for sure why this happens, evolutionary theory provides some good food for thought. The fact is, revving up and running the immune system takes a lot of energy. Getting cytokines to swim through the bloodstream and send signals to immune cells takes calories. And what else takes calories? Pretty much everything. Especially things like going out and seeking pleasurable experiences, interacting with strangers, and just generally moving about the world. So the theory is that the immune system is telling the brain to feel depressed and to withdraw from socializing

• 30:13Speaker 06

  because it wants you to stay at home and rest. And if things that would normally sound fun just don't seem all that fun, and if interacting with other people seems exhausting and maybe even a little threatening, then we'll be less likely to do those things and more likely to stay at home and let our immune systems use our calories. But it turns out the influence of inflammation on our social lives isn't as simple as always making us feel more disconnected and socially withdrawn. One of the most important discoveries that we've made in this area of research recently

• 30:55Speaker 06

  is that inflammation might actually make us more motivated to seek some social interactions. Specifically, those with the people who we're closest to. So it's not that inflammation makes us less social across the board. It may just make us more motivated to seek interactions with people who could provide us with comfort or care. Those who could be a shortcut to chicken soup.

• 31:23Manoush Zomorodi?

  This all feels incredibly intuitive, but it's also fascinating that there are evolutionary reasons why my body is making me feel this way when I don't feel well.

• 31:36Speaker 06

  Totally.

• 31:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  Would it be fair to say, though, that our immune system is smart?

• 31:42Speaker 06

  Yes, I think it is. I think it is smart. I think it evolves to do its job and do its job very well. And what I think is really interesting for for humans is that it's also evolved in the context of having this brain that is able to ignore it. And there's kind of that push and pull there where I think the immune system sends those like appropriate signals to the brain, but we have this beautiful prefrontal cortex that can say, I hear you, immune system. But no, I'm not going to take these steps to help myself recover. And that's the cutting edge of of being a human and having the brains that we do.

• 32:26Manoush Zomorodi?

  The brain can be the idiot, no matter how smart the immune system is being.

• 32:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, kind of. I kind of think that's true.

• 32:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  In a minute, Keely Muscatell explains what can happen when inflammation doesn't go away and becomes chronic. On the show today, natural intelligence. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

• 33:08Manoush Zomorodi?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are no antibiotics in their meat department ever so carve up turkey and spiral cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 Brand. And all their delectable pies are made with no high fructose corn syrup. Gourmet Thanksgiving flavors with the quality you want only at Whole Foods Market. This message comes from Schwab. At Schwab, you can get everything from self-directed investing to full-service wealth management, all in one place.

• 33:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  No matter your investing goal, life stage, amount to invest, or know-how, you can invest your way with Schwab. This message comes from TED Talks Daily, the podcast that brings you a new idea every day. Learn what's transforming humanity. From balancing AI in your critical thinking to surpassing discoveries about the adolescent brain, find TED Talks Daily wherever you listen.

• 34:17Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, ideas about natural intelligence. We were just talking to Keely Muscatell. She's a social psychoneuroimmunologist, which means?

• 34:33Speaker 06

  I study the relationship between the immune system and social behavior.

• 34:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  Keely says that over the years, research has shown that inflammation in our body affects our mood and our behavior.

• 34:49Manoush Zomorodi?

  So we hear about inflammation, I feel like, all the time right now. Like, you know, the hot thing is to be on an anti-inflammatory diet and to eat blueberries and almonds rather than processed foods. But are we talking about a different kind of inflammation? And if you don't eat healthy, we think of that, you know, you're not consuming the right fuel to give you energy, and maybe you do feel depressed. But are those different?

• 35:15Speaker 06

  No, exact same, exact same process, same, same inflammation that you have in response to like, an acute infection is part of what's contributing to chronic disease, and that is responsive to the types of things you put in your body, the amount of physical activity that you engage in, the amount of sleep you get. I'm a new mom. I've been chronically sleep deprived for the last 11 months. It's been great, but also I often wonder, you know, how much of an impact is this sleep deprivation having on the levels of inflammation in my body? And how is that influencing, you know, my mood and my ability to think clearly and engage with others?

• 35:59Speaker 06

  So yeah, it's not to say that these responses that the body has to acute instances of sickness or infection, or even stress are, I think, adaptive. But if they play out over a long time course, that could be really tough for people. And I think especially in the face of chronic stress, it's sort of this spiral, right? Where stress can cause inflammation, then inflammation can signal the brain, you know, for people to maybe disconnect or withdraw, which can lead to more stress. You don't have the same support network that you had or that you need. And that can be a really tough cycle to break.

• 36:41Manoush Zomorodi?

  So it's not just a matter of come on, go and get yourself out there. There's a lot more going on behind the scenes.

• 36:46Speaker 06

  100%.

• 36:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  All right, so this baby that you've got, when they grow up and they're like, Mom, I don't feel well. I want to stay home. What will you say?

• 36:54Speaker 06

  Oh, my God, that's such a good question. I've thought about this a lot. I mean, because this is the other thing about human brains, right, is like can also be deceitful. And I guess I hope that little baby Archer doesn't want to just stay home to hang out with me and watch cartoons or whatever. But what I hope is that we can teach him that signals from our bodies are important to listen to. And the other thing this makes me think of is that I'm so fortunate to have a job and a position where I could stay home with him. I would be able to accommodate those signals.

• 37:38Speaker 06

  And I really feel for people who don't have that safety net and who might have to push their kids to go out and go to school, even when they're not feeling well. So maybe Archer can also push for some broad scale society change in terms of giving people the sick time they need.

• 37:57Manoush Zomorodi?

  No pressure, Archer.

• 37:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 38:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's Keely Muscatell. She's a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. You can see her full talk at ted.com. And many thanks to Mina Meshkempur Agdam too. Do you want hugs from mommy? Uh huh, and kisses.

• 38:30Manoush Zomorodi?

  To close our show on natural intelligence, we want to talk about how animals communicate to each other and what they're saying. Scientists are using new technologies to try and translate different species' conversations, specifically using artificial intelligence to interpret their sounds. Environmental researcher Karen Bakker explained how these technologies work and what they're revealing in a talk she gave in 2023. Tragically, Karen died just a few months after giving her talk. And so we want to share with you now the entirety of it. Here's Karen Bacher on the TED stage.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  So we're in the middle of a fierce debate about how artificial intelligence will change human society. But have you thought about how AI will transform your relationship to the non-human world? So these are bioacoustic recorders. And I've spent years studying how scientists use devices like this, combined with AI, to listen to the hidden sounds of nature and decode non-human communication. Hidden sounds, because much acoustic communication in nature occurs in the high ultrasound, above your hearing range, or in the deep infrasound, below your hearing range. So I'm going to play a sound. I want you to listen

• 39:56Speaker 03

  and try to guess who or what this is.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  So that was a bat. That was bat ultrasound, recorded above your hearing range, but slowed down so you could hear. So that was an advertisement call from the peak of the mating season. Scientists can decode these calls. So a sample bat-to-English translation would be, and I quote, "Pay attention. I'm a pipistrelis matouzi bat, specifically male. My name is X. I am landing here, and we share a common social identity and common communication pool." For a pick-up line by a bat, not bad. So scientists have recorded millions of bat vocalizations like this, and they've decoded many of them using AI. And they've revealed that bats have dialects

• 40:54Speaker 03

  that they pass down from one generation to the next, and that baby bats learn to speak just like you did by listening to the adults around them and babbling back until they speak adult bat. So bats have far more complex communication than we knew, and they're only one of many examples. Listen to this.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  So those are orcas. Scientists can decode individual orca calls using AI, and they've revealed that orcas also pass down their dialects from one generation to the next. So when we first learn about these secret sounds of the world, we're often surprised because humans tend to believe that what we cannot perceive does not exist. And so we miss a lot. One of my favorite examples is this peacock. So to you, this looks like a visual mating display, and it is. But this peacock is also making very loud infrasound with its tail, which you cannot hear, but female peahens can. And it is an important factor in their mating decisions. So this peacock is giving a rock concert.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  Now, we have lived with peacocks for millennia, but we only just figured this out.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  Even creatures without ears are exquisitely sensitive to sound. So this is a coral larva. When coral larvae are born, usually at a mass spawning event, a few days after the full moon, they wash out to sea. So scientists used to think that these little larvae, these tiny dots that you see here, were helpless, randomly pushed around by wind and waves and currents. But it turns out that coral larvae are acoustically attuned. They can hear the sounds of healthy reefs. They can hear the sound of their home reef, their mother reef, and they swim back home across miles of open ocean. So these are tiny creatures with no central nervous system. But we think they do that with these hairs that you see on the outside of their bodies.

• 43:01Speaker 03

  They're a lot like the hairs inside your ears that are enabling you to listen to me right now. So you can think of a coral larva a little bit like an inside-out ear, except that its sense of hearing is profoundly more sensitive than your own because they hear with their entire bodies. Even our planet makes sound. Volcanoes, earthquakes, sound so low and strong and powerful, they travel very far, passing through soil and stone and even solid walls. So in nature, sound is everywhere, and silence is an illusion.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  So scientists are also listening to the vast extent of interspecies communication. So this bat is using ultrasound to hunt this moth. Its echolocation beam is locked onto its prey. But the moth is also emitting ultrasound. It's jamming the bat's sonar in an attempt to escape. This plant is also emitting ultrasound, which varies depending on its condition. Scientists have trained an algorithm to listen to this plant. Simply by listening, it can detect with about 70% accuracy whether the plant is healthy, dehydrated, or injured. So this is peer-reviewed research, by the way.

• 44:27Speaker 03

  So, we cannot hear these sounds, but we think many insects can. Does this mean that humans could use digital tech to one day communicate with other species? Well, some scientists think so, and they're using machine learning to try to decode the acoustics of other species. So there are teams of computer scientists and linguists and biologists working on decoding sperm whale bioacoustics. They're also building entire dictionaries. So there's an elephant dictionary with thousands of sounds. Elephants, for example, have a specific signal for honeybee. So I'd love to share just one of these sounds with you.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  It was recorded at a moment of great joy and celebration: the birth of a new baby.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  So the further we listen across the tree of life, the more complex interspecies communication would be. Listen to this honeybee.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  Now, listen to this honeybee queen.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  So you thought you knew what honeybees sounded like? Okay. Honeybee communication is incredibly complex. It's acoustic, positional, spatial, vibrational. The queen has her own signals. So scientists are encoding these signals into robots. This robot is attempting but not succeeding to communicate with the hive. The bees mostly ignore or attack it. But, one day, we hope, the inventors hope, that this robot will communicate well enough to allow scientists to monitor the health of the hive. Now, would that be a good thing? Some believe that interspecies communication would help foster respect and empathy for nature.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  Others believe that it is profoundly disrespectful and unethical to eavesdrop and engage in this way. Interspecies communication needs strong ethical guardrails. And anyway, maybe it's a bit self-centered to think other species would even want to communicate with us. So, what if we were to use bioacoustics for something of immediate practical value? Like, doing something about our massive biodiversity crisis? Let's go back to the coral reefs. Listen to this healthy reef sound.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  Pretty lively, right? But coral reefs are disappearing. If you were to go to most coral reefs today, you'd hear something like this.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  It's like a ghost town of the sea. When we lose species, we lose voices. When we lose landscapes, we also lose soundscapes. There is a ray of hope. The healthy reef sounds that you just heard can be used to regenerate coral reefs. Scientists are doing this. It's a bit like music therapy for nature. So this is not going to solve all the problems coral reefs face, notably, climate change. But, if we can address the massive epidemic of noise pollution that is harming and killing marine creatures, we could use bioacoustics to restore some biodiversity. Bioacoustics could also help protect animals on the move. So, this baby whale was killed by a ship, tragically.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  This is a common cause of death of North Atlantic right whales, one of the most endangered species in the world. So, to address this, scientists are now launching a new bioacoustics program off the east coast of North America to triangulate the locations of whales and convey the information to ship captains in real time. The ships then have to slow down, stop, move out of the way. Not a single right whale has died of a ship strike in this zone since this program was launched.

• 48:54Speaker 03

  Así que esto puede ser lo que salva a esta especie. Así que piensa en ello. Hace unos años, estábamos arrojando estos orcos casi a la extinción. Hoy inventamos una tecnología que permite a una comunidad de menos de 400 orcos simplemente cantando, guiar el movimiento de decenas de miles de barcos en un agujero que es el hogar de decenas de millones de personas. Un día, estos orcos en el mar pueden estar en todas partes en los océanos. Para los orcos que viven aquí en el Mar de los Aseres, esto sería justo en el tiempo porque solo quedan unas pocas docenas. Un pensamiento final. Hace unos 400 años, los inventores del telescopio estaban mirando hacia las estrellas

• 49:38Speaker 03

  sin saber que su invento permitiría a la humanidad ver en el tiempo los orígenes del universo. La óptica descentra la humanidad dentro del sistema solar, dentro del cosmos. La bioacústica descentra la humanidad dentro del árbol de la vida. Nuestra comodidad es mayor que lo que sabíamos.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  Hoy estamos usando la bioacústica para proteger a las especies y descodificar su comunicación, pero mañana, creo que usaremos la bioacústica combinada con la inteligencia automática para explorar las fronteras de la inteligencia biológica. Muchas inteligencias biológicas son muy diferentes de nuestras propias, pero no son menos dignas de exploración. Y tal vez un día, en un futuro especulativo, en lugar de un humano aquí en el escenario, tal vez la bioacústica permitiría a un orco dar un TED Talk. ¿Por qué no? Compartiendo historias de orcos sobre esquivar barcos y explosiones seismicas y cazadores humanos, historias sobre desesperadamente buscando el salmón restante,

• 50:42Speaker 03

  historias sobre tratar de sobrevivir en este hermoso planeta en este momento loco en nuestra era de creatividad humana sin límites y emergencia ambiental sin precedentes. Esas ideas serían valiosas para difundir.

• 51:03Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was Karen Bakker. Her latest book is Gaia's Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth. And we want to dedicate this entire episode on natural intelligence to her. Thank you so much for listening. This episode was produced by James Delahoussaye, Harsha Nahada, Katie Monteleone, Matthew Cloutier, and Fiona Guerin. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkhanpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Rachel Faulkner White. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Our audio engineers were Robert Rodriguez and Gilli Moon.

• 51:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balarezov. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.