Getting Salty with Speakers: James Nestor – DSP 235

James Nestor, a science-adventure journalist with a focus on reporting about humans relationship to water. He is speaking at the Conference this year and Ashkahn took the time to ask him about some of the research John Lilly did on dolphin communication back in the day. He shares cool stories about Lilly’s work at that time as well as the impacts it’s had throughout the scientific community since.

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Ashkahn: Hey everybody, this is Ashkahn here. We have a slightly different episode for you guys today. Instead of doing our normal thing of answering questions, I am here with one of our Float Conference speakers, James Nestor. We just did an interview over on our Float Conference Podcast and we thought we’d ask one more little bonus fun question to air here on Daily Solutions. Okay James, welcome to our Daily Solutions Podcast. Thanks for hopping on here.

James: Thanks for having me.

Ashkahn: Yes, so we just did an interview over for Float Conference POdcast, but I had kind of one other question for you that I thought would be fun to air here. You had done this work in your book about freediving and like we discussed, you’d come across John Lilly in this kind of other direction, not through the lens of floating, but through the lens of his dolphin research which arguably I think he’s almost better known for at least in certain many circles than any of his float tank stuff. In the float industry, we get to hear a lot of cool stories about John Lilly and float tanks and know a lot about that history and I was just wondering if you came across any interesting John Lilly dolphin stories in your research that you think would be fun to share.

James: Oh, there’s too many. But one in particular I thought was pretty fascinating was when he had set up the communications research project in the Bahamas. This was a sweeping laboratory, huge, with different tools and different rooms and all the modern technology at the time. He built this dolphin telephone system that allowed two dolphins to talk to one another in separate tanks across the laboratory and it was very interesting because dolphins have two different modes of communication. They have these whistles and these buzzes, they’re called clicks and so the animals would have these interactions and he recorded them and he found what he thought was two different completely formed languages.

One, that they could hold these simultaneous conversations on these two different frequencies and they would never ever talk over one another. It got to the point when he started getting really nervous, I think this is one of the reasons that he shut down that whole program, was when every time he would press the recorder, the dolphins would talk a bit and stop and they would stop at the same exact time and he was certain that they knew when he was recording and when he was eavesdropping on them and he started to think that perhaps they were plotting their escape. What’s really interesting about his research is the early stuff he was doing, all of it was published in the top scientific journals at the time. These things were published in Science and the Nature.

He was really considered the preeminent dolphin communication researcher and it’s only later in his years when you started doing some more wacky stuff that that reputation was a bit stained. But all of that early work is phenomenal and to me it’s the most interesting interspecies communication research that I’ve ever come across.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Still surprisingly referenced, I mean, I went and saw a talk from a current dolphin researcher a few years ago. There’s like a little guest lecturer here in Portland and like she was referencing John Lilly’s work and it’s still a big part of that entire field of research. It really didn’t seem like a huge piece of the foundation for all of that.

James: Yeah. It’s kind of sad that so much of that communication research both went away and went underground. The Navy has been doing tons of it. They continue to do dolphin communication research. We just don’t have access to it. So maybe they’ve carried on where Lilly left off and they’ve continued to develop this but I don’t think we’ll ever know. He was just at a place in time where he had money, he had equipment, he had all the resources he needed and very few ethical quandaries in his research to just do whatever he wanted to do. That was both good and bad. It was bad for dolphins because a few of them committed suicide in his presence because they were so miserable, but scientifically speaking, it’s provided a foundation upon which so many researchers have built their own communication research initiatives.

Ashkahn: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, definitely, near the end of his life. One of my favorite John Lilly stories is him trying to form the Cetacean nation and actually have a seat for Cetaceans in the United Nations to give them rights which-

James: Yeah. I mean, I love it. I love that idea, but this is the sort of stuff that really put dolphin communication research in the trash bin for awhile, at least in academic institutions because Lilly was trying to figure out how to televise dolphin ballets and dolphin pop songs. When scientists heard that they just kind of threw out all of his research and luckily now people have gone back through it and have looked at that early stuff and realized just how groundbreaking and legit it actually was.

Ashkahn: Yeah, I bet it was surprising for him too. I mean, there’s like a section in Programming and Metaprogramming, his book, one of his earlier books where he’s doing some of his early dolphin research and there’s a chapter in there that’s literally just a plea from him to the scientific community to have other people researching this. That’s like the whole chapter is just him being like, “This, there’s some crazy stuff going on here and more people need to be researching dolphins and dolphin communication,” and it was him just like trying to get that out there. So, at the very least it’s been nice to see that that work has continued. I mean there’s definitely some ongoing continuing dolphin research, especially around communication that’s been happening and proving really, really interesting. I don’t know. Everything I read about it shows a kind of development of language that we don’t usually see in other areas of the animal kingdom.

James: Yeah, that’s exactly right. He was a true scientist in that sense where science is supposed to be the exploration of the unknown. Other people are supposed to to test this stuff and for people to make up their minds and make assumptions about things that they’ve never tested, I think is just so ridiculous. It was part of this that got me personally so interested in Cetacean communication and I’m working with David Gruber now who’s a Harvard fellow and we have put together and it’s mostly him, he’s doing all of the academic work here. We’re now looking at all of these huge database of sperm whale clicks and using machine learning algorithms to try to crack into the whatever language code is within there and we’re hoping in the next six months, we’re building a machine right now and we’re going to probably go into the Mediterranean to record cliques in a fidelity that they’ve never been recorded before and then to try to figure out what these animals are saying with the AI and machine learning.

What’s amazing is I’m a journalist, right? I’m not a biologist. I’m not a scientist, like what business do I have doing this? But the fact is nobody else is doing it. There’s so much technology now that we have that Lilly did not have that can make all of these translation automatic, you put it in computer, come back the next morning and it’s all figured out and nobody’s doing it. I just find that that’s pretty offensive, but we’re really excited. The one good thing about it is the reaction we’ve gotten from some of the top guys at Harvard and MIT, real engineers and scientists who have looked at these clicks and are just saying obviously there’s something very profound and interesting going on here. Hopefully soon we’ll be able to tell everybody what that is.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Very cool. Yeah, we’ll to check back in in six months and hear what the results are.

James: I’ll be speaking dolphin by then so maybe we could have the conversation that way.

Ashkahn: Awesome. Okay, great. Thanks so much, James. Nice to have you on here and excited to see you at the conference in just about a month.

James: Thank you. See you soon.

Ashkahn: All right. If you guys out there have more float tank questions that you want us to answer here, you can always send them into us at floattanksolutions.com/podcast. If you want to hear a longer interview with James Nestor, you can hop over to our Float Conference Podcast, that’s at floatconference.com. I will talk to you guys tomorrow.

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