Cosmic Queries – Interspecies Communication

Will we ever be able to talk to animals? Neil deGrasse Tyson, comic co-host Chuck Nice, and marine mammal scientist Diana Reiss, PhD, answer fan-submitted Cosmic Queries on animal and interspecies communications.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I serve as the director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, part of the American Museum of Natural History, right here in Manhattan. As cosmic hurries, you know who my co-host is, Chuck.

• 0:30Chuck Nice?

  What's up, Neil?

• 0:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for being there. Arms reach, digital arms reach.

• 0:35Chuck Nice?

  Digital arms reach, yes. I feel your zeros and ones kind of touching my face right now.

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. Base two, zeros and ones.

• 0:45Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what the topic is today? Interspecies communication.

• 0:49Chuck Nice?

  Ah, yes.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's creepy. I mean, it's beautiful, but creepy.

• 0:54Chuck Nice?

  It's gorgeous. Not as gorgeous as interspecies dating, but hey, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do?

• 1:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know what that means.

• 1:02Chuck Nice?

  Hey, dude.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What we have is one of the world's experts on this, who's a professor of psychology at Hunter College and is in the Animal Behavior and Comparative Psychology doctoral program at the Graduate Center of CUNY, the City University of New York, the one and the only, Professor Diana Reese. Diana, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Well, hi. Thanks for having me today.

• 1:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you've been out in our backyard the whole time we've been having StarTalk, and where you been?

• 1:30Speaker 02

  I'm here in New York.

• 1:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're just right there? You've been talking to other animals, I think.

• 1:35Chuck Nice?

  That's it, yes.

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Instead of your own damn species, alright?

• 1:38Speaker 02

  I've been hanging, yep, I've been hanging out with dolphins.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let me just get the audience to know you a little better. You have a TED Talk where you share the platform with others who were trying to create something big, and what was that?

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, back in 2013, my three colleagues, we say, my partners on this, were Peter Gabriel, the musician and visionary, Vint Cerf, who was the co-founder, the co-father of the internet, that's right, the co-founder of the internet, and Neil Gershenfeld, who's the director of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms.

• 2:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so no matter what you guys talked about in that TED video, it seems to me you have the power, knowledge and wisdom to make it happen.

• 2:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Given that list.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  It's, it's, they're, they're a great group of people to work with. And we've been working together with, with, where we have this idea. It was actually Peter Gabriel who started this idea and then approached the three of us. And the idea is, how can we use technology and our, our new technologies, along with ideas that we have, to bridge the gap into terms of communication with other animals? We share this planet with lots of other species, obviously. They have brains, they're all communicating. We just can't crack their codes. So one of the ideas behind the interspecies internet is coming up with new interfaces so that we can communicate with these other species.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Creating artificial codes or devices that allow them a voice is the, is the simplest way of saying it. And then we can use these shared codes to communicate. The other aspect of it is, is finding new ways to decode or to decipher the signals that they're all using amongst themselves. So that's the basic idea.

• 3:24Chuck Nice?

  So when, when you have to define communication first? Because, I mean, when you talk about all these different species, let's just take for instance, some insects. Their language is chemical. So, you know, what, what is language? What is communication?

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Chuck, you just nailed the big question and the, the thing that's under such debate. So the question is, first of all, are we the only species that use a kind of communication that we say is language? Where we use signals that are meaningful and that refer to things in the environment? We call those referential signals. So when I point to an apple, I'm using a symbol, I'm using a word that doesn't look anything like an apple, but it refers to that and we can use that in a shared way to communicate. Now bees, the little bees, were actually the first species in which that someone actually decoded some of their communication and got a Nobel Prize for it. This was a long time ago.

• 4:20Chuck Nice?

  Cause they twerk. That's how, that's how they talk to each other.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  They, they do.

• 4:24Chuck Nice?

  They're like, yo.

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, I didn't know that. Yeah. Chuck, thanks for letting me know, the bees twerk, okay?

• 4:30Speaker 02

  This is, uh, that's a new way of saying it Chuck, but it's true. They move their wiggle, they shake their bodies, they do this waggle dance.

• 4:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They shake their booty.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Dance, right? And they communicate not only where food is outside their hive, but the distance from the hive. And they, believe it or not, they, these little bees with just, you know, with a little brain, are communicating changes in the location of the food base, and they have to track the distance of the food from the sun. But guess what? As you know, what's happening with the earth.

• 5:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sun moves.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Well, Earth is rotating, so the dis- the sun is moving to them. And they have to track that, and they keep that in their communication. It's amazing, it's amazing, these little bees do that.

• 5:16Chuck Nice?

  That's why they're always following Cardi B.

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Diana, you literally wrote the book on, on some of this. About ten years ago, I have the title, "The Dolphin in the Mirror: Exploring Dolphin Minds and Saving Dolphin Lives." So your professional career is invested in trying. Now, now dolphins have way bigger brains than do bees. So presumably, you chose them because of whatever similarities you can align with humans? Is that right?

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. My background, believe it or not, was in theater. I was actually a set designer for many years.

• 5:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Theater.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Theater, a theater.

• 5:55Chuck Nice?

  Acting. Thank you.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  We won't, we won't go there in too much detail. But I, I was always really fascinated by animals, and I had an academic background. I wound up taking extra courses, going back for my PhD. And I was reading about whales getting slaughtered, about these, you know, the whaling in general. And I, I already knew I wanted to study animal behavior. And I started looking up what we knew about whales and dolphins. And at the time, it wasn't, it wasn't that much known. It was in the late seventies. And I, I never watched Flipper. I wasn't a Flipper fan, I used to watch Lassie. But the more I learned about dolphins, I thought, wow, these are really big-brained, complex animals, and we don't know very much about them. They seem to be complex in terms of these societies in the seas. We didn't know much about their communication systems.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  But again, they have these big, magnificent brains. What are they doing?

• 6:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's bigger than our brain, right?

• 6:48Speaker 02

  They're bigger than our brains, but their bodies are bigger than our bodies. So when we think about brain size and think about it relative to body size, it's called the, get ready for this one, the encephalization quotient, or EQ, it's brain size relative to body size. And our brain, the number-

• 7:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess these are probably the body weight, right? Because size would otherwise be-

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, body weight, yeah, body weight, yeah. So, our brains are seven times the size they would need to be to run a body of our size. Okay, because we're talking about body, body weight, body, the body weight, and the brain weight, okay? The brain size that way. So, our brain is seven times, think about it as our brain being seven times the size it needs to run a body of our size. For dolphins, they have a brain that's about four and a half, uh, 4.2 or 4.3 if you want to get really specific, times the size it needs to be to run a body of that size. Most animals are, have the value of one.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Their brain is just the right size to run a body of that size. Okay, in terms of metabolism and everything.

• 8:01Chuck Nice?

  So, so those butt heads on Star Trek? The guys with the big giant butt heads? They're-

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Really smart, right?

• 8:08Chuck Nice?

  I mean, they're like the smartest people in the universe.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Really big brains, okay? So, yeah, so it gives us a sense. Now, if we look at, you know, if we look, think about brains, though, it's still a huge mystery in terms of what the recipe is for being more intelligent, you know, more, to have more intelligent. Is it the number of neurons? Is it the organization of a brain? Is it, you know, how it's all connected? So that's still a mystery. But it turns out that if we look at animals that show complex social interactions and have a lot of complexity in their behavior, they tend to be these animals that have these really high values in EQ. So, those animals are animals like cetaceans, which are whales and dolphins,

• 8:55Speaker 02

  the great apes, elephants, along with us humans. And then, you know, it varies when you look at that sort of whole scale.

• 9:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I always thought apes were great. I always thought so.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Apes are really smart, yeah.

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I knew a great ape once. He was great. He was great. But did you get started in this right around the time when dolphins were getting trapped in tuna nets? And this was, there's a whole huge outcry in the fishing industry about this?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  I started a little bit before that. I started about, I started studying dolphins in the early eighties, actually even the late seventies. But I actually worked on that project to try to stop dolphins from getting caught in the tuna nets. That was a big issue. As a scientist, I do science for learning, you know, the basic, basic science. But then I think it's really important to apply that, to do what we call translational science, and apply it to really help protect those animals in conservation and welfare and stop these horrible situations.

• 9:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, why didn't anyone try to protect the tuna? Somehow it was okay to trap a net full of tuna.

• 9:59Chuck Nice?

  Because dolphins are not delicious.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Well.

• 10:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'm very serious, Diana.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Aren't you being speciesist here? You're saying, oh, protect the dolphin, eat the tuna. They're both big fish in the ocean. And you're dividing it up and you're showing preferences. What's going on here?

• 10:19Speaker 02

  You're making really good points, Neil. So first of all, dolphins are mammals. We know that. And what we know about dolphins right now, and I'm not going to say we shouldn't be protecting fish species, because it's really important to protect all species on the planet so they can continue to survive. I want to say that right up. But with dolphins, these are large-brained, highly social, self-aware, meaning self-aware and socially aware animals that feel pain and they can suffer. And they were treated in this way in the tuna nets where they'd get suffocated.

• 10:49Chuck Nice?

  They would drown.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Were trapped, drowned.

• 10:52Chuck Nice?

  They would drown.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  They would be hoisted up.

• 10:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, because they had to come up for air, unlike the tuna.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Like us. And again, it was, it was just a horrendous situation.

• 11:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you're, but you're admitting that you're, you, you.

• 11:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More highly value mammals than non-mammal vertebrates.

• 11:09Chuck Nice?

  No, it's just that canned dolphin does not sound or taste good.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  No, we're not going there.

• 11:17Chuck Nice?

  Canned dolphin is not a thing and it shouldn't be a thing, okay?

• 11:21Speaker 02

  Although...

• 11:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have some of this flipper salad, right?

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Although...

• 11:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mayo.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  People in certain countries are still eating dolphin.

• 11:30Chuck Nice?

  Oh, no.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  And eating whale, even though... Yeah, absolutely. So in Japan, I don't know if you saw the film The Cove? It won an Oscar?

• 11:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's on my list. It's on my list. Very important. Didn't that win an Academy Award for documentary?

• 11:42Speaker 02

  It did.

• 11:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or was it in the running if it didn't win it?

• 11:44Speaker 02

  No, no. It won the Academy Award for the best documentary. I worked on that film. I was a science advisor and I was actually the person that told the director about the situation because many of my colleagues and I have been trying to stop these horrible drive hunts in Japan where dolphins are herded, H-E-R-D-E-D, herded, using a method where they create an acoustic barrier. It's called oykomi. And they bang on pipes and they scare the dolphins into this cove when they're the... and afterwards they're slaughtered. Some of the dolphins are still taken to specific aquariums. Most aquariums in the world absolutely oppose this and have been working to stop it. But some aquariums in Japan, China, and a few other countries

• 12:27Speaker 02

  procure their dolphins from these drive hunts. And these animals are then taken and the rest of the group is killed. And they're killed absolutely in the most inhumane manner you can imagine. They shouldn't be killed at all, but when you see how they're killed, everybody who would see this would want to stop it. And it needs to be stopped.

• 12:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But let's say they found a humane way to kill them. You're still preferring to protect the life of fellow mammals than fellow non-mammal vertebrates?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  As a marine, let me say it this way, as a marine mammal scientist, I feel like I need to have a voice in this political arena. And yes, I think that for dolphins, they shouldn't, I can say clearly, these animals need protection. They shouldn't be killed.

• 13:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but if I'm a marine tuna scientist, then we duke it out at the, at the science conference. Cause I want to protect my tuna.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Right, and I want to protect.

• 13:17Chuck Nice?

  And the tuna scientist loses every time because tuna are stupid and delicious.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Well, let's, let's try this one. What if we could make sure that the population, that we're conserving tuna populations? And when they are captured, it's done in the most humane way possible. That's the win-win. So why don't we try for that?

• 13:42Chuck Nice?

  There you go. Love it. That's the way to do it.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a tough, so I think we have to be humane if we're still eating animals. And I think that's really critical. So.

• 13:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's true, across the spectrum of animals.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Across the spectrum, yes, absolutely. As a marine mammal scientist, I speak out about the dolphins because that's where my area of expertise is. But I really vote for all animals. I would rather that nobody's eating any animals, to tell you the truth. That's what my big push is, but you know.

• 14:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you have to deal with the people who want to protect plants, you know?

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Many years ago, I worked at the Wildlife Conservation Society, you know, with our five zoos. And I ran the animal enrichment program and I was running a dolphin research lab there. And my husband used to joke, he said, you can't have anybody she works with over for dinner because you can't eat anything, either they work with that animal or it's a plant that they're cultivating. So there's nothing going on.

• 14:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just have to live off the air and that's the best, that's the best you can do. Well, Chuck, I think we don't have time in this segment for Q and A. We'll start right up in segment two. You got your questions lined up, solicited from the internet?

• 14:47Chuck Nice?

  Got them right here.

• 14:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got them all there. Okay. So when we come back, more with behavioral animal psychologist Diana Reese. And Chuck Nice, bring in the questions. We'll be right back.

• 15:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk, Cosmic Queries, co-host Chuck Nice.

• 15:28Chuck Nice?

  Hey.

• 15:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tweeting as Chuck Nice Comic, still?

• 15:31Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, sir.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 15:32Chuck Nice?

  Chuck Nice Comic, yes.

• 15:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And our expert today on interspecies communication, Diana Reese. Diana, welcome back to StarTalk. Thanks. And we've got questions for you, solicited from our fanbase, all across the social media platforms. So Chuck, what do you have?

• 15:49Chuck Nice?

  Okay, well, of course, you know, we always start with a Patreon patron because they support us financially. And quite frankly...

• 15:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, they pay us, yes.

• 15:57Chuck Nice?

  Yes, there's no better support. Okay, no better support. There's no better nation than a donation. Anyway, uh, this is Kyle Marston from Patreon. "Hey, thanks for the kinda weird hashtag #CQInterspecies, and how could we use the periodic table of elements and chemistry to communicate with life that demonstrates the capacity for the classification of potentially intelligent as an alphabet person, man, woman, camera, TV, might be considered?"

• 16:39Chuck Nice?

  Not sure that reference...

• 16:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so let me, let me see if I can reword that question. All right, so we have the periodic table of elements, highly organized achievement of our understanding of the nature of matter and materials in the world. If we have an alien and we want to communicate with them, do you see value in organizing information in this similar way? Information that we overlap with them, so that we can possibly come to a common vocabulary? Is it that, I think that's what they're asking there, Chuck, is it?

• 17:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I mean, it's

• 17:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if we use the periodic table of elements as our own sort of reference

• 17:14Chuck Nice?

  That's our preference, right?

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:17Chuck Nice?

  And with that, I mean, that's, I don't know, I'm gonna follow up with a question, but I guess this is more for Neil, like, would that be the same everywhere? I mean, the stuff would be the same.

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, everything we understand about chemistry tells us that if they were far enough along, they would have the periodic table of elements, or have something more advanced that we haven't come to yet.

• 17:37Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 17:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they would certainly have that organization, yes. Okay, so Diana, what can you tell us?

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About organizing information and use that as a foundation to communicate?

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Right, so first of all, Carl, I want to thank Carl for that question, because it's a really cool question. So, if you're face to face, let's say we're coming face to face, or face to tentacle, with an alien, because we don't know, right?

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, aliens have tentacles, of course, and antennae, of course they do.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Well, as we've seen recently in some films, you know, one of the beginning things is we have to figure out what their sensory systems are, okay, if we're face to face. And what kinds of signals may be perceived by each of us. So, there's a lot, there's a lot of first steps that we have to take. Now, if, in communication, and we can come back to that in a minute, I'm assuming now that we're talking about that we've received some kind of signal, and we're not face to face, from what, from Carl's question, and that they've sent us something that we have deciphered as the periodic table, or an equivalent of the periodic table, is that?

• 18:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or, is the organization of the periodic table

• 18:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  useful to bring other kinds of communication to bear on that encounter?

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, I mean, if we know that we have some shared point of reference, that the universe is organized in this particular way, then we have to find a way of letting them know, we're perceiving their signal, it's meaningful to us in that way, and giving them a signal back to say, yes, this has been received, here is the equivalent for us, and now you're trying to align your knowledge bases, okay? The question I keep on, I think, I keep on having about this is, what is it in their signal that we've gotten, that lets us know that they have this organization? Now, the other aspect of it is, the question is, we can say, we are going to make the assumption

• 19:30Speaker 02

  And I think this is what you were saying, Neil, that we have a common knowledge base of the universe if we're both intelligent species. Then we can encode something in a way, or we have to try to encode something in a way that would be perceivable to another. We'd have to either use math and assume they know our math or know our chemistry and try to set up that communication where we're showing equivalence and use that as a bridge. It gets into a common knowledge or something that's shared and finding the right way to share it. And that's not trivial.

• 20:02Chuck Nice?

  Well, it's not, but I love the fact that, you know, as you guys are talking. So I'm seeing atoms and molecules as like a base. And so I'm asking this, would atoms and molecules look the same to everyone in the universe as they do to us?

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Chuck, you just said, one of the biggest questions for me is, look, what if other, this other intelligence doesn't see, doesn't even see? I mean, we're making the assumption that sight, that vision is going to be one of the main ways this creature would sense the world. I mean, it just seems, we're such visual creatures. What if they're not using sight as their main sense? Or it's not the same kind of sight? They have different receptors.

• 20:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we're very physiologically biased, is what you're saying?

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 20:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For our own senses, sensory. So how would you connect that to? Chuck, you probably have another question related to this, but when you try to talk to dolphins, we can't compare periodic tables of elements.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  No.

• 21:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can't say, this is an apple. What is your, what's your word for apple? We can't do that. So what is, what overlaps that even empowers you to even ask the audacious question? Let's start with something that we have in common and what would you, where would you go from there?

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Let me jump to the film Arrival for a minute, because I think that could illustrate the point.

• 21:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, there are a few, there are a couple of films named Arrival. You mean the one where the alien visited? I think they both were, but the one with the septapod.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  The heptapods, yeah. The heptapods come down and the scientist, the linguist.

• 21:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, Chuck, for that visual.

• 21:43Chuck Nice?

  If you like that, that was my, that was my heptapod.

• 21:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck put his fingers up into the camera and he's pretending like.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  You're not squirting ink, though. You have to squirt it.

• 21:51Chuck Nice?

  (laughing).

• 21:53Speaker 02

  But on this newer film, Arrival, which I thought was a brilliant film, I loved it. This linguist is approached by the government and they say, hey, decode these aliens, start communicating with them, find out what they want here. You know, because they're scared, this is an alien that's landed. A bunch of aliens have landed. And she says, wait, wait, wait a minute. We've got to back up, not that fast. And she's completely right. If you're trying to communicate, first of all, you have to have some sense of who they are, what their sensory systems are like. So she spent weeks just watching them, trying to interact with them, creating something in common, so they could start sharing.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  And that was critical, it was very, very important and insightful by the writers, the writer of the original story, that it's not just, oh, you start communicating. It doesn't happen that way, it doesn't happen that way with dolphins. Sometimes you'll have a breakthrough with a dolphin rather quickly. And I'm going to tell you a story about one of those breakthroughs that happened really quickly. Okay, in a few minutes. But, you know, she watched them and she started also imitating what they were doing. Imitation is a wonderful way to start communicating. So if we go to another film, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that's what happened when they started communicating with the aliens. Remember the sounds that the alien ship was producing?

• 23:22Speaker 02

  What did we do? The people who were on Earth started imitating that, that kind of musical note, that musical composition, and they were suddenly in sync, they were communicating. I recognize you, I'm repeating back what you do. That's the beginning of communication. I'm imitating you and repeating it back.

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Am I so wrong to think that I would not have sent a linguist and a physicist? I would have sent an astrobiologist and a cryptographer. Could you tell me what a linguist has over a cryptographer in that situation? That you... Because clearly they thought about that, as you say. They knew what they were doing for their storyline. It just would not have been my first thought.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  It wouldn't have been my first thought either. And I think personally, I would have sent a cryptologist and someone who studies communication in other animals. And an astrophysicist.

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean like you?

• 24:21Chuck Nice?

  How, how very Dick Cheney of you. I'm looking, I'm looking for a vice president. I have found your vice president, and it's me.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  It didn't have to be me, but it should be somebody who has some experience with other.

• 24:34Chuck Nice?

  Just like you, yes.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  But somebody, yeah, in that realm. I've actually, yeah, I actually, I actually did some work with, with the SETI project many years ago, talking about that this is a great training ground when we study species, other species and try to.

• 24:48Chuck Nice?

  Don't worry Diana, we would have sent you too, so don't worry about it.

• 24:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we got, we got your back on this.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Okay, thanks guys, thanks.

• 24:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's your, what's your dolphin story?

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we're talking about imitation and when I, I had what I call my first encounter with a dolphin mind. Okay, and I was a graduate student at the time and I was just starting my research and I was working with this young dolphin named Cersei and I was asked to teach her to just stay with me, in front of me and eat fish that had been, that were three times the size of her head. And they were frozen dead fish that were now defrosted so she could eat them. And I thought, well, this is too big to give this dolphin, so I cut them into heads, middles and tail sections. Little Cersei readily ate the heads, she ate the middles, she spit out every tail. And I looked at them and they had fins, spiny fins, so I cut off the fins thinking maybe they would be more palatable.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  And then she ate everything. Now, in the course of training her to stay with me while I was feeding her, if she broke station, that's this term we use that means they leave before you want them to, I would give her a timeout, which meant I would back away about fifteen, ten to fifteen feet from the pool. And, and it broke her ability to interact or get fish. And then I'd just stand there and look at her and then I would come back.

• 26:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You punished her, that's a punishment.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Well, it's a kind of a, it's a way to say you've done the wrong thing. Okay, you can think about it as a punishment, but it wasn't, I didn't think about it that strongly. I had to say, because I didn't have a shared code, you've done something wrong. And this was a technique that many people used with animals at the time. We don't use it so much anymore. You sort of say, you just back away.

• 26:25Chuck Nice?

  Negative reinforcement.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's negative reinforcement.

• 26:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's not, it's not that you're inflicting. Harm on her wrongdoing, you're just removing something that she was enjoying.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 26:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In that moment, okay.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Exactly. So I would back away and again, it could be for several seconds or, you know, ten to fifteen seconds, you know, five seconds. I varied it. And then I would come back and she learned, hey, something's wrong, you know, and it would get corrected. And she was a really smart dolphin. And she learned very quickly, don't leave until I go like this at the end and it means every, and I'd show her an empty bucket and everything's done. Again, she was young and I had to teach her this for, not for me, but for the people who, where I was working. So, everything's going fine. Cersei's eating all the fish. She's basically trained me to cut her fish just the right way. I used to joke about that. And now, one day by accident, I happened to give her an uncut tail. And Cersei looked up at me, her eyes

• 27:19Speaker 02

  got really big. She spit it out and she bolted across the pool and took a vertical position and just stayed there across the pool and stared at me. Oh, yeah.

• 27:31Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  And I'm-

• 27:33Chuck Nice?

  She gave you a timeout.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  I think she did.

• 27:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's where you need that music.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. And at the time-

• 27:42Chuck Nice?

  The Mexican, I mean, the, the western standoff.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  So what's going on here? I mean, is she, she's, is she really doing this? It's an anecdote. It's a one observation. But as a scientist, I thought, wow, if she's really imitating and using this to communicate to me that I'm doing something wrong, like I commuted, communicated to something, you know, something to her, that's really pretty amazing. So, but I couldn't do anything with one, an N of one. So what I did was I set up an experiment where I was very careful to feed her properly and give her all perfectly cut fish. Over the next couple of sessions, she never did it. And then on purpose- Three, on three different occasions, I gave her an uncut tail. And each time, she went across the pool and did this. To me, that's the beginning of communication. That's how it starts.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  And again, it's based on this idea I talked to you about. She's observing me, she's really smart, and she's using something I do back. And there have been cases like this.

• 28:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So she called a timeout on you, is what happened there.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  I think she did. And, and, and I actually wrote this up as well.

• 28:48Chuck Nice?

  You know better than to cut my fist like that.

• 28:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. I trained you to serve me.

• 28:52Chuck Nice?

  How many times I'm gonna teach you how to cut a fish?

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's so hard to get good help these days.

• 28:56Chuck Nice?

  No, stupid humans, they don't even know how to cut a fish tail.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  What can I tell you? So I learned my lesson from that. But I also wrote a chapter on this in my doctoral dissertation. It was probably the best chapter in the whole thing. I think that was the best one. And it was because I partnered with her. She gave me this idea. And it's really fascinating because I think these are really smart, smart, creative animals who are watching us, they're communicating back. And often, it's a problem that we just don't have the means or the system that we can look at it where we can show people scientifically, they understand these sounds, these symbols, and they can use them. And that's a lot of...

• 29:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw a comic once, it might have been in The New Yorker, where these two dolphins are swimming. And one says to the other, speaking of humans, one says to the other, you know, they face each other and make noises, but it's not clear they're ever actually communicating.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, right.

• 29:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The dolphin analysis of humans.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Yes, and that's very much what we do with most other animals, to tell you.

• 30:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta take another break. We only got to one question in that segment. Chuck?

• 30:04Chuck Nice?

  Who cares? It's such a great conversation.

• 30:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, all right. When we come back, we'll see if we can bang out more than one question in the segment on interspecies communication with Professor Diana Reese when we return.

• 30:26Chuck Nice?

  Hey, we'd like to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons. Carol Lee Wahab and Tracy S. Scrubbin. Guys, thank you so much for your support. You know, without you, this show would not be possible. And for those of you listening who would like your very own Patreon shout out, go to patreon.com/startalkradio and support us.

• 30:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Startalk, Cosmic Queries, Interspecies Communication, Diana Reese. Diana, do you have any social media handles you want to share with people?

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Okay, they can go to-

• 31:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whether or not they're human, by the way.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  I welcome all.

• 31:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So where's the best place for them to land?

• 31:17Speaker 02

  They can look at interspecies.io.

• 31:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a website.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  Yes, and for my research with my colleague Marcelo Magnasco, who's a professor at Rockefeller University, they can put in Reese, R-E-I-S-S, M2C2, and it will get them to the website, our website.

• 31:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. Well Chuck, this is a Cosmic Queries and you've only delivered me one and a half questions so far.

• 31:42Chuck Nice?

  Well, and they were so good.

• 31:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta up your game here, okay? All right, let's go.

• 31:47Chuck Nice?

  All right, let's get to this.

• 31:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's call the whole segment a lightning round, okay?

• 31:51Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 31:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, let's do it.

• 31:53Chuck Nice?

  Toren Wallinggrin from Patreon says, "What kind of nonverbal communication is already common between humans and other species? Is it more common than we think? I know my cat wants to go outside when he starts scratching the door. Better that than him scratching your face."

• 32:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we might split between domestic animals and the rest of the animal kingdom. So what do you say there, Diana?

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so animals are communicating with us all the time, and we're communicating back. These are not part of science studies. It's basic communication. They watch us, we watch them, and we get- the more familiar we are, the more we learn to interpret that. So your cat or your dog- Is watching you, it's reading your behavior, you're doing the same, that's communication.

• 32:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How about when they want to be subterfugal and they want to deceive you?

• 32:39Speaker 02

  That's a whole other situation. Deception, deception is not, it's not well studied in the non-human animal world yet, but it's a really interesting topic.

• 32:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The reason why I ask is, um, you know, I was visiting someone's home and they have a sign there. Cause they have a lot of dogs and the dogs always sit and beg while you're eating dinner. The sign says, "The dog has been fed, don't believe his bullshit."

• 33:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The dog will look at you like it's never been fed in his whole life.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Oh, I think our pets do this a lot. My cat goes to my husband and looks like I haven't been fed in five days. You know, I just fed the cat.

• 33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they know not to go to you because you don't put up with that.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  My cat also does it to me later. My cat does it when my husband has just fed them as well.

• 33:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, that's, that's the diabolical thinking.

• 33:27Chuck Nice?

  It's not just animals. I have three children and they all do the same thing, okay? So, all right, this is, uh,

• 33:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep going Chuck.

• 33:35Chuck Nice?

  This is Colton Judd. Colton says, "Uh, my question is on FRBs. Since we've detected them, we've gotten quite a few over the years. How confident are you that any of these could be communication from an advanced alien civilization in a different galaxy or solar system? Is that possible? I am also a huge fan of the show. I think it's awesome and you guys are doing great work. Okay."

• 33:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. So Diana, that turns out to be a question for me. These are, uh, FRBs are short for fast radio bursts. And so there are two things we have to consider here. Either it's a new phenomenon in the universe that we don't have prior data to inform us on. And so we should study it. Or it's intelligent aliens trying to send us a signal. Okay, and every time we have a new telescope that has new capabilities and and new powers, we discover stuff that we'd never seen before. That's very natural. So if I'm a betting person, I would say it's probably some new phenomenon that we have yet to classify and understand.

• 34:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that'll be, I'll think that it's that before I will think that it's intelligent aliens beaming signals at us.

• 34:45Chuck Nice?

  And that's why, and that's why we can't answer them. Because Neil is like, this is not for communication. And they're like, why won't you answer us? Because Neil will not let us answer you.

• 35:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all my fault, okay?

• 35:05Speaker 02

  I'm sure you have to check with everybody you know too on the planet who's listening. And make sure it's not coming from a source that we know.

• 35:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look, what'll happen is they'll, they'll check, they'll come visit, visit Earth and say, where's that guy Neil Tyson, we gotta have a word with him.

• 35:19Chuck Nice?

  Dude, how come you're calling, yo, I was texting you, man. How could you keep ignoring my texts?

• 35:27Chuck Nice?

  All right, all right, let's move on. Uh, let's keep it going, keep it going, keep it going. Um. Oh wow, this is a great one. Douglas Stern says, do we have any idea how swarms of fish communicate? Like when they form a tight knit ball to avoid predators? Well, at least the ones on the inside avoid the predators. Let me tell you, the ones on the outside of that ball aren't having such a good go of it. Uh, how do they know to stay in such perfect formation and dance and weave in unison? Hopefully, humans wouldn't need to mimic this behavior. Uh, hopefully, aliens wouldn't need to mimic this behavior when the aliens come.

• 36:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Diana, do we really know everything we should know about how even species communicate with themselves? Enough to give me confidence that you are making progress in interspecies communication?

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because if we don't know why birds flock and other kind of emergent phenomena, but you're trying to find out how we can communicate with another species? Is that putting the cart in front of the horse?

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a good question, Neil. So I think what they kind of go hand in hand with each other, looking, trying to decode communication, what we call intraspecies communication between the species.

• 36:49Chuck Nice?

  Right, because when I see a termite colony,

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  there's a million termites and they all seem to know what they're doing. Because at the end of the day, there's an 11-foot mound.

• 36:59Chuck Nice?

  They love gossip. That's how they do it.

• 37:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was that what that is?

• 37:03Chuck Nice?

  Termite.

• 37:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what's really happening.

• 37:04Chuck Nice?

  You cannot shut those termites up. They, uh...

• 37:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what's really happening.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  So, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of, there are a lot of studies right now that have been, that are going on now and that have gone on to try to decode this species' own signals. And we do that too with dolphins. We try to understand how they're using their own signals. And then when we make those steps into interspecies communication between us and dolphins, we try to incorporate signals that they may find meaningful or useful. Again, we'll develop a relationship with them. And then we're not using human words. I don't want to use words with them. They can't produce words. We've created, for example, we've created an underwater keyboard and now a touchscreen that gives them visual forms that we know they can see. And then we, if they touch those forms on a touchscreen, they hear a whistle.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Or that they can hear, they can imitate, and they get specific things. So we meet them halfway using more bear code.

• 38:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So...

• 38:05Chuck Nice?

  So you have a giant iPad for dolphins?

• 38:10Chuck Nice?

  You know what? You know that's going to lead to dolphin Tinder. You know that. You know there's going to be dolphins swiping right now.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  Actually, we've watched them do that movement, the swiping. But when we first gave them the keyboard, the touchscreen, it's a four-by-eight-foot touchscreen. It's actually an optical touchscreen. If they touch it, their touch is actually seen by cameras, so it's optically sensed.

• 38:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I got you, okay.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  First day they saw this, we did what we called whack-a-fish, not whack-a-mole, to see if it would work, and we had fish going across the screen. One of the young dolphins, who had never seen anything technical like this, just immediately started touching all the fish. He looked like a teenager going for the fish. He was great.

• 38:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just to be clear, in the technology, their nose touching the screen is not what you're sensing. You have cameras that are triangulating on where the nose touched, and that gives it a coordinate.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Correct. And just to be... It's not their nose. Their nose is actually their blowhole. That's at the back of their head. It's the beak or the rostrum that touches.

• 39:12Chuck Nice?

  Got one, right on. So let's go...

• 39:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so that's not their nose in the front?

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Nope, nope.

• 39:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's their rostrum?

• 39:19Speaker 02

  That's their rostrum or beak. That's their mouth and the...

• 39:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Diana, I'm never gonna call it their rostrum, okay? I would defy...

• 39:28Speaker 02

  How about beak?

• 39:29Chuck Nice?

  And you know what? Here's why nobody will call it that, because you got, well, not you, Diana, biologist named one of the dolphins a "bottle-nose dolphin."

• 39:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Wasn't me.

• 39:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so why don't we agree to call it "it's snoot"? How about that?

• 39:48Speaker 02

  It's snout. If they could call it a snout, yeah.

• 39:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Snout, snout. I'll give you that.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'll go with that. Okay, so we're now communicating, Neil.

• 39:57Speaker 02

  We have some Interspecies communication.

• 39:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's hope for us here, okay.

• 40:01Chuck Nice?

  That's just great.

• 40:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, give me some more.

• 40:03Chuck Nice?

  Okay, let's go to Tim Word. He's a Patreon patron who says this. "What tools or techniques are used to discover communication in the animal world? Especially, I wonder, how we really know what we understand an animal is trying to tell us?"

• 40:20Chuck Nice?

  So yeah, like it's pretty easy to know that an animal understands us. It's hard for us to know if we understand them, you know? So what are the tools that say this is how we know?

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it's not easy and we use cameras. We use video cameras. We use recording to other kinds of recording devices to record their sound, to record movement. And then we try to see how they use their, how they use sound and movement and perhaps smell the different senses in their social interactions. So that's one way, but it's laborious. I mean, people, it takes years to try to understand what signals, what signals go with what behaviors. And again, but these, this is what we use. We have to use our powers of observation. And sometimes it's just our eyes and our ears and watching. That's a good way to start, but then we use other recording devices. And then we use computers and we use big data analysis.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  Now hopefully will help us, you know, coupled with us to have breakthroughs in learning about the patterns that these animals use.

• 41:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And every time I see a nature documentary and the animals doing some weird behavior, they always say, oh, it's a, it's a mating ritual. Maybe, maybe they're just trying to order pizza, you know?

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 41:38Chuck Nice?

  It's so funny. You're right. It is always a great.

• 41:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's every single time.

• 41:43Chuck Nice?

  We see here the mating dance.

• 41:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of the.

• 41:48Chuck Nice?

  Right. And then insert species here.

• 41:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're just trying to order pizza. That's really all they're hungry.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  That's it. But you know, so animals communicate about mating. They communicate about finding food, but they always, they also are doing a whole lot more than we ever expected. And the more studies that we, we read about, we realize, wow, we never thought that animals have alarm calls and that other animals will listen to like who's in the environment, which predator is in the environment? And then it helps them know what escape route to go to. Or you know.

• 42:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're saying to each other, Freddie's back. Freddie the bully is back.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  There you go. Right.

• 42:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right Chuck, keep going, we've got time for a few more.

• 42:27Chuck Nice?

  Let's keep going, let's keep going, here we go. Beth Tomlinson says this from Facebook. Do marine mammals have different ways of communicating depending upon where they are in the world or their geography? For example, a dolphin in the Gulf Coast, does it make different sounds than a dolphin in the Pacific?

• 42:49Chuck Nice?

  Or does that differentiate itself across different types of dolphins? So, do dolphins have a universal language or do they have dialects?

• 42:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what it really comes down to, yeah.

• 43:00Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's really the simplest way to put that.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we think they have dialects.

• 43:05Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so if we have, and we've sort of seen evidence for that for many, many years. They also, so they have, we don't know if there's certain signals that they share as well. So, for example, that means across groups of dolphins. It's something that a lot of us are looking at. Humpback whales, for example, have, make these beautiful haunting songs. Many of you may be familiar with that. And...

• 43:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw Star Trek IV.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To save the whales.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 43:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good Chuck. Chuck, watch out, they'll jump on land and find you.

• 43:39Chuck Nice?

  I'll go to my door, it'll be a humpback there.

• 43:44Chuck Nice?

  Like you rang.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  I like that imitation Chuck, that's beautiful. But they change over seasons. In a group of whales, but in different parts of the world, the songs are different for the humpbacks. With dolphins, they not only may have different signals within the populations, but the range of the sounds they make, the frequencies are different. We did a study out of my lab several years ago, and we showed that bottlenose dolphins in Bimini use whistles that extend over a wider frequency range than in other groups. So it may have to do with their environment and what the soundscape, like you were talking about Neil, is. You know, the window that they use may be strange. Yeah. But where's the infancy of those studies still?

• 44:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And really, some of them just have Russian accents and have Spanish accents. That's really all it is.

• 44:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To them, that's all it is.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 44:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's, that would be amazing. You know, it's just a dolphin just like, "Hey man, how you doing?"

• 44:43Chuck Nice?

  Here we go.

• 44:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'd be the Cheech and Chong dolphin. That's a different dolphin, right?

• 44:47Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, that's.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Really? Do you know, real quick, you know dolphins can make two sounds at the same time? There's a little piece of information you might not have known.

• 44:56Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty cool.

• 44:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, is one, can they make one out of their blow hole and one out of their throat? Or the throat can do two things?

• 45:01Speaker 02

  The blow hole has two, it's like two, two holes that make up the blow hole. And each one, there are two sacs in each. So they can click and whistle at the same time. Uh, we showed in our lab too, that they can whistle, they could do two whistle and squawk at the same time. It's really cool.

• 45:17Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Is that their version of walking and chewing bubble gum?

• 45:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the same time?

• 45:22Speaker 02

  No idea.

• 45:24Chuck Nice?

  Alright, here we go.

• 45:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, time for like two fast ones, Chuck.

• 45:27Chuck Nice?

  Alright, here we go. Don Ream from Facebook.

• 45:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don Ream.

• 45:32Chuck Nice?

  Yes, and Don says this. It is said that math is the universal language, which is, um, the basis of which the numerals zeros through nine. The origins of that number system has to do with the digits that we carry on our hands. Would an intelligent species share our same mathematics, even if they had a different amount of digits or no digits at all?

• 45:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can comment on that, I don't know. Dan, can dolphins count?

• 45:59Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, there's been evidence that they can track numbers of items and they can discern quantity differences.

• 46:05Chuck Nice?

  And that's really all that counts.

• 46:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's really all that counts, correct.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Where's the food?

• 46:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The base system you use is actually doesn't matter if you can track of a number. And what we presume in my field is, since any other number base system would be arbitrary, based on, you have 12 fingers, 10 fingers, 6 fingers. If you were going to communicate, you would de-arbitrize it and just use base 2, which is the smallest base you can use where you can meaningfully count. And so, so base two, that's why all computing is base two, is one reason for that. Zeros and ones. So you'd say, no matter how many fingers you had, let's use base two. And that would be the fallback for what this would be. So Chuck, we have time for one more, just last one.

• 46:51Chuck Nice?

  All right, this is Varsha Chakari, I think, from Facebook. Hi, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Reese, greetings from India. Have we really been able to comprehend fully the ways animals communicate among one another? Truly owing centuries of evolution and sustaining very many calamities under the water, their communication would have been more complex for even the human brain to understand. So, you know, is it, the fact that they've been here a lot longer than we have, could that mean that they're speaking in a language that we're incapable of comprehending?

• 47:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're just too stupid to figure it out.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Right. We are not very far ahead with that, I have to say. So I tend to agree. I think we don't know how complex it is, is the best way I can say it. It may be quite complex. It's a challenge for us to decode. It has, people have tried for a long time. We're still trying, but I think we still have a long way to go. They're clearly communicating.

• 47:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As Carl Sagan famously said, we judge animals by how well they can communicate with us. Dolphin could, but we never judge ourselves for how well we can speak dolphin.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I actually think dolphins, you know, I have to say, I think dolphins have come a bit further than we have in terms of figuring it out.

• 48:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. And just, just to take us out, I think the whale has the biggest mammal brain. The elephant brain is pretty big as well. Where's the elephant on the encephal-

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Lization quotient, yeah.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The encephalitis quotient.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Sounds bad when you say it that way.

• 48:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know. What do you think of an itis as bad?

• 48:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. So, the elephant brain is about similar in relative size to its body as the a great ape brain.

• 48:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Great ape brain.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  So, great apes, great apes' brains relative to the size of the body are about 2.3. Remember dolphins are about 4.2, humans are 7, elephants are about 2.3.

• 48:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Diana, it does sound like you guys invented this EQ to give more credit to these other mammals, because for the longest while, while we all grew up, it was humans have the largest brain relative to our body weight to any animal, even dolphins, right? So, any other animal would look at humans as having these stupidly large heads, right? Compared to our bodies. So, then you come up with this other measure, which is, what is the minimum brain to run the body? Anything in excess of that, that's really your intelligence.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Exactly. Well, it at least gives us an idea of, it gives us a comparison, okay? It doesn't mean it equates with intelligence.

• 49:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Diana, it's been great to have you here on a topic that we've all thought about, but never had an expert to anchor us. And so Chuck, as you said earlier, we gotta do this again. We gotta... Yeah, it's great stuff. I bet we have many, many more questions we didn't even get to. Tons.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, they were great questions. Thanks so much for having me, and thanks, everybody out there.

• 49:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. So, Diana Reese, and again, your book, give us the title of that again?

• 49:57Speaker 02

  It's called The Dolphin in the Mirror.

• 49:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Dolphin in the Mirror. Let's look for that. And Chuck, always good to have you. Always good to be here. All right. This has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries, the interspecies communication edition. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, bidding you to keep looking up.