John Lilly, M.D.,
Ph.D., first delivered this paper at the Fifth
Annual Lasker Lecture at the Michael Reese Hospital in
April of 1962. At that time, Dr. Lilly was involved in
his early pioneering studies of dolphin behavior and
communication which he conducted from 1955 through 1963.
He then left dolphin research to investigate his own
mind, on the theory that the study of the self and the
universe are one. His decision to concentrate on himself
was prompted by the dolphins who, he feels, taught him a
lot about being a human. Dr. Lilly is the author of a
number of books, including Man and Dolphin, The Mind
of the Dolphin, Programming and Metaprogramming in the
Human Biocomputer, and The Center of the
Cyclone. |
In this paper I would
like to discuss a very peculiar effect which we have noticed
in the laboratory while working with the bottlenose dolphin
(Tursiops truncalus). This effect is an example
of the peculiarities of a creative process which occurs in
this particular kind of scientific research but which may also
occur more widely than just here. To state it tersely: if one
works with a bottlenose dolphin day in and day out for many
hours, days, and weeks, one is struck with the fact that one's
current basic assumptions and even one's current expectations
determine, within certain limits, the results attained with a
particular animal at that particular time.
This effect was first
noticed in our work in 1955, 1957, and 1958. As I became more
convinced of the neuroanatomical size and complexity of the
dolphin brain, I noticed a subtle change in my own attitude in
regard to possible performances on the parts of these animals.
To one like myself, trained in neurology, neurophysiology, and
psychoanalysis, a large complex brain implies large complex
capabilities and great mental sensitivity. Such capabilities
and sensitivities can exist of course in forms we have not yet
recognized.
The working hypothesis of an
advanced capability raised our index of suspicion and in turn
sensitized us to new sources of information. It was this
subtle preparation of the mental climate which allowed us to
listen to some rather queer noises that the dolphin was
producing in the laboratory and to review them very carefully
on the tapes. Because of the possibility of a very large brain
capacity and because of musings about the possible areas of
achievement already realized in this species but as yet
undiscovered by us, our minds began to open.
This opening of our minds
was a subtle and yet a painful process. We began to have
feelings which I believe are best described by the word
"weirdness." The feeling was that we were up against the edge
of a vast uncharted region in which we were about to embark
with a good deal of mistrust concerning the appropriateness of
our own equipment. The feeling of weirdness came on us as the
sounds of this small whale seemed more and more to be forming
words in our own language. We felt we were in the presence of
Something, or Someone, who was on the other side of a
transparent barrier which up to this point we hadn't even
seen. The dim outlines of a Someone began to appear. We began
to look at this small whale's body with newly opened eyes and
began to think in terms of its possible "mental processes,"
rather than in terms of the classical view of a conditionable,
instinctually functioning "animal." We began to apologize to
one another for slips of the tongue in which we would call
dolphins "persons" and in which we began to use their names as
if they were persons. This seemed to be as much a way of
grasping at straws of security in a rough sea of the unknown
as of committing the sin of Science of anthropomorphizing.
Also, if these "animals" had "higher mental processes," then
they in turn must have been thinking of us as very peculiar
(even stupid) beings indeed.
We are very
superstitious about killer whales up here. We know from
our ancestors from way back that they once tried to kill
a whale like that, a killer whale, and they hardly
wounded it. It is known that the whale capsized the boat
and chewed up both human beings who were in the boat. It
is said that these whales have a good memory and even
after many numbers of years pass, they always know which
human being had been shooting at them. Raymond
T. Aguvlak, American Scientist, January
1973 |
About this time we began to
be exposed to what I would call the dedicated, opposed
skepticism of some scientific workers. These people were for
several years in close contact with dolphins in the oceanaria
and did not and do not share our views of the possibilities
resident in this huge and complex brain. Their view is not
incomprehensible to those of us who are in the new area we
have opened up. This group of scientists has denied publicly
that mimicry of human speech was possible for these animals
("No vocal cords," is typical). When we demonstrated that
mimicry existed, they changed their tack, and now say,
"Mimicry, so what? Parrots do it, mynah birds do it." If
anyone had said to me in 1947 that a whale could mimic human
words, I would not have believed him. But in 1957 I was forced
to believe--through the experience of hearing a whale do it.
The "mimicry, so what" group may have lost their sense of
wonder and surprise; we have not.
However, I do not wish to
discuss opposing points of view, nor to dwell too long on the
effect of such vociferous opposition on one's thinking. As to
the latter, all I can say is that at one time it slowed us
down a bit, but the dolphins continue to renew our confidence
and make us eager to push on.
We first obtained the
mimicry effect in 1957 by the use of electrodes implanted deep
within the rewarding sites in the brain structures in these
animals. These results, therefore, may have been caused by the
peculiar way that the brain was being stimulated. We
considered that possibly the animals did not have this ability
when stimulated naturally through their normal inputs and
outputs.
In 1961, Miss Alice Miller
and I once again examined the 1957 results. We decided to pay
close attention to the tapes of the previous year (1960-61)
and look at them from the viewpoint that there might be
evidence of a complex mental activity going on in our resident
dolphins.
In March 1960 a dolphin
named Lizzie had produced a sequence of humanoid noises
underwater. This was the first and last time that Lizzie or
Baby, the two dolphins whom we were working with during that
period, produced any sounds of this type. In the pool together
in St. Thomas they had produced whistles and clicks almost
exclusively. The language they were using was strictly
"delphinese." However, the night before she died, Lizzie
(freshly isolated from Baby) said something underwater which
sounded suspiciously like, "It's six o'clock," which I had
just shouted to her over the water of the tank. Miss Miller
and I reviewed that tape many times and each time the uncanny
feeling of 1957 was evoked.
After the Lizzie episode we
obtained an animal which we named Elvar. During his first
year, Elvar had begun to develop a new series of voices over
and above his "delphinese" one. These new emissions covered
such a vast range of vocalization capabilities that we were
hard put to analyze them all. His whistles and clicks were
interpolated among a series of barks, wails, moans, buzzings,
trumpetings, banjo-like sounds, quacking, etc. All of these
sounds first occurred underwater, but later more and more of
them were emitted in air from his now-opened blowhole. Some of
his "quacking" noises had become similar but not identical
with those of human speech. In reviewing these records, Miss
Miller and I saw some changes from the native delphinese, to
noises which we felt were beginning to bridge the vast gap
between delphinese and human sounds. We gradually became
convinced that this was evidence of beginning primitive
mimicry, not quite as advanced as we had found in 1957, but
far enough along to be disturbing and exciting.
During this phase of our
scientific development we were moving from one set of
laboratory quarters to another; Elvar moved with us. We
established a laboratory in Miami in January 1961, and finally
had a more stable environment in which to observe Elvar. We
began to obtain higher quality recordings of his emissions. In
September 1961 we were convinced that it was time to attempt
to elicit straightforward and direct production of human
speech sounds by Elvar without the use of brain electrodes or
even of food reward.
Our reasoning was as
follows: It was already known these animals could be trained
to do all sorts of circus tricks in a very well-timed and
precise way by means of food reward. It was also known that
such training could be obtained from other kinds of animals
with food reward. We decided to test the hypothesis that
possibly the dolphins were rewarded by participating in
activities directly with the human, especially vocal
activities. At that time we suspected that a human must also
be willing to establish a close contact with a given animal
and that the animal must also be kept separated from its own
species.
Elvar was isolated in a
shallow small tank. Alice started an intensive effort to
induce him to vocalize in response to her vocalizations and
activities. Within a few hours of the time that she started
this activity, Elvar responded by beginning to mimic her
voice. The unearthly feeling was once again evoked. Why?
Here was an animal who from
the viewpoint of evolutionary theory is in a group of mammals
who have developed for the last thirty million years in the
sea, completely separated from the evolution of the primates
which gave rise to Homo sapiens. His anatomy and
physiology, though strictly mammalian, were of a strange and
different form than ours, including his vocalization
apparatus. Despite our careful mental preparations, it was
literally a shock and a surprise to hear him say so soon after
Alice, "More, Elvar."
The Cetaceans
hold an important lesson for us. The lesson is not about
whales and dolphins, but about ourselves. There is at
least moderately convincing evidence that there is
another class of intelligent beings on earth besides
ourselves. They have behaved benignly and in many cases
affectionately towards us. We have systematically
slaughtered them.
It is at
this point that the ultimate significance of dolphins in
the search for extraterrestrial intelligence emerges. It
is not a question of whether we are emotionally prepared
in the long run to confront a message from the stars. It
is whether we can develop a sense that beings with quite
different evolutionary histories, beings who may look
far different from us, even "monstrous," may,
nevertheless, be worthy of friendship and reverence,
brotherhood and trust. We have far to go; while there is
every sign that the human community is moving in this
direction, the question is, are we moving fast enough?
The most likely contact with extraterrestrial
intelligence is with a society far more advanced than
we. But we will not at any time in the foreseeable
future be in the position of the American Indians or the
Vietnamese--colonial barbarity practiced on us by a
technologically more advanced civilization--because of
the great spaces between the stars and what I believe is
the neutrality or benignness of any civilization that
has survived long enough for us to make contact with it.
Nor will the situation be the other way around,
terrestrial predation on extraterrestrial
civlizations--they are too far away from us and we are
relatively powerless. Contact with another intelligent
species on a planet of some other star--a species
biologically far more different from us than dolphins or
whales--may help us to cast off our baggage of
accumulated jingoisms, from nationalism to human
chauvinism. Though the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence may take a very long time, we could not do
better than to start with a program of rehumanization by
making friends with the whales and the
dolphins. Carl Sagan, The Cosmic
Connection, Doubleday
1973 |
The repeatedly painful and
humbling part of this experience was that we, as human beings,
had felt that man was at the top; we were alone; yet here was
an "animal" which was entering into that which was peculiarly
human, i.e., human speech. At no matter how primitive level,
he was entering into it. He was taking step number one. To
convey to you our sense of wonder, and yet the sense of the
uncomfortable necessity of continuously reorganizing our basic
assumptions, is difficult. We gambled on Elvar's taking the
first step, and he did. (We still haven't done as well with
his delphinese language.) He impressed us with the fact that
he took the first step towards repairing a gap of at least
thirty million years in a few weeks. He may be skipping some
of the belabored efforts of the human race for the last forty
thousand years to achieve our present degree of articulate
speech among ourselves. Maybe he is not skipping. Maybe he is
just beginning what Homo sapiens went through forty
thousand years ago. And he first did it when and only when
we believed he could do it and somehow demonstrated our belief
to him.
We now are taking a very
close look at his processes of acquisition of these words. We
are impressed with his amazing ability to analyze our sounds
and emit the products of his analysis. He does not reproduce a
word in a "tape-recorder" fashion or in the fashion of a
talking bird. In one's presence he literally analyzes the
acoustic components of our words and reproduces various
aspects in sequence and separately.
One of our clearest examples
occurred when he started saying, "More, Elvar." In one session
he started out with, "More, Var," slowing down his natural
pace and lowering his natural frequency well into the human
range. He then took Alice's whole transmission, "More, Elvar,"
speeded it up, took it back into his natural frequency region
around 4-12 kc per second and repeated it. He then slowed it
down, and lowered his frequencies down near those that Alice
was producing, and reproduced, "More, Elvar" on the human
scale and in the human frequency region.
In another session in which
I was working on the word "squirt" with him, he took the word
and reproduced it at a high frequency and in a very short
abrupt fashion. It was so high-pitched and so fast that one
could not recognize it at all unless it was slowed down
several times in playback. Next he went through at least five
different variations of the word, each of which he produced in
response to my repeating the word "squirt." His productions
sounded like "irt," "squir," "ir," to something which sounded
very close to "squirt" in a Donald Duck-like voice. The latest
studied voice that he uses resembles that of a very small
child; it is very high-pitched and thin in quality, and yet of
such an intensity in air that it is sometimes painful to
listen to when one is closer than three or four feet from his
blowhole.
When one is doing such
vocalizations experiments with Elvar, one sometimes has the
feeling that he is very impatient with our slow and laborious
methods. He acts as if he wishes we would hurry up and
understand him. He apparently is pushing points we as yet
cannot imagine. For example, he sometimes inserts long
passages of delphinese alternating with our words as if to
translate for us.
We have never
seen a porpoise "go berserk" and attack a human with
persistence as a dog or a horse may do. One gains the
subjective impression that the porpoise is a firm, fair
disciplinarian, exhibiting just as much aggression as
will serve its purpose and no more. A female
rough-toothed porpoise, mother of a hybrid calf, was
kept in a tank alone with her calf and frequently
solicited stroking from her trainer. The calf
occasionally situated itself between mother and trainer
while the mother was being stroked. When the calf was
approximately a month old, the trainer in this situation
one day stroked the calf. The mother swung her tail from
the water, reached up and out, and struck the trainer a
sharp, but not damaging, blow across the shoulders, and
then with no further apparent fear or anger continued to
solicit stroking for herself. Karen W. Pryor,
Behavior and Learning in Porpoises and Whales,
Naturwissenschaften 1973 |
This peculiar feeling of "as
if a person or a personality or a being" who somehow reaches
out towards us, who comes as far as we believe he can come at
a particular time, and who seems to be waiting to proceed to
the next as yet unknown step are some of the elements in the
feeling that I above called "weirdness."
I do not wish to give the
impression that every new thing we try with Elvar works. We
have done several new things with him which turned out to be
inappropriate. For example, we expected that when he was sick
he would come and volunteer for an antibiotic shot with a
hypodermic needle. (We had seen another dolphin do this in the
hands of Adolph Frohn.) Elvar would have none of it. As a
consequence of several such injections, he singled me out as
the villain of the piece and expressed great dissatisfaction
with my presence for literally weeks.
At first I found this
inconvenient, but it led to another episode in which we
learned something. Dolphins not only discipline their young
somewhat the way humans do, but the young ones learn proper
manners very rapidly. Elvar was expressing his dissatisfaction
with me and his injections in the presence of Chee-Chee, an
older female. I was attempting to induce him to approach me at
the side of his shallow tank. He had been avoiding me
assiduously by swimming to the far side. Suddenly, he whirled
about in the water, opened his mouth and barked (underwater)
as he charged towards my arm in the pool. Chee-Chee
intercepted him at right angles to his course and slammed the
bottom of her beak down on the top of his head so hard that I
could feel the resulting jar at the side of the tank. She did
this just before his jaws reached my arm. Since that episode
Elvar has not attempted to charge me. (In general, our
dolphins now tend to express their dissatisfaction with
someone who is putting an arm or a leg, or an entire body into
the pool by pushing the person gently out again by a series of
rapid bumpings with their closed jaws against the arm or leg.)
Dave and Melba
Caidwell, of Los Angeles County Museum, have summarized
care-giving behavior in killer whales. A mortally
wounded mother stood by her dead calf, circling the body
for an hour until she died, though she never attacked
the collector's boat. Another female lingered three days
near Hat Island, Puget Sound, after her calf was killed.
A crew from Marineland of the Pacific captured a large
female near Bellingham, but the lasso caught in the
ship's propeller. As she struggled in the water, she
emitted a high-pitched, penetrating vocalization. After
twenty minutes the high dorsal fin of a male killer
whale appeared and the animal zeroed in on the female as
if by radar. The two animals together charged toward the
boat at high speed, veering only when they had
approached to within five to eight feet; then together
charged again. This time they struck the boat. The crew
killed both whales to save the boat. Pacific
Search 1967 |
In such maneuverings, and in
such non-vocal signals to us, they are amazingly silent in the
humanoid sphere. Yet they emit whistles, clicks, and their
sonar, ultrasonic creakings as if signalling to one another.
However, I doubt that this silence will continue. There are
times when they make valiant attempts during their
maneuverings with us to use humanoid sounds, apparently in (to
them) an appropriate fashion. They apparently become
discouraged by our inappropriate responses. The semantics of
their language and their thinking is probably so different
from ours that we sometimes become enamored of the differences
and fail to see simple similarities right in front of our
noses.
Since September 1961 we have
been working every day with Elvar's enunciation and his
vocabulary. We are now eliciting words with food rewards. He
has been working in a tank immediately adjacent to that of
Chee-Chee. In general they tend to communicate from one tank
to the other underwater in natural delphinese clicks and
whistles. During weekends they are allowed to be together for
courtship and sexual play. Elvar apparently has been
practicing his humanoid sounds when we are not there. We had
not attempted to elicit these sounds from Chee-Chee until
about two weeks ago. She was not giving them to us except at
peculiarly odd intervals. Every so often, however, we would
detect a humanoid exchange going on in air between Chee-Chee
and Elvar, so we suspected that she was getting some practice
in private.
About two weeks ago it was
decided that Miss Nadell (a psychologist working with Elvar)
would attempt to elicit humanoid sounds and a humanoid
vocabulary from Chee-Chee. Chee-Chee shifted from delphinese
(clicks and whistles) in air to fully formed humanoid
word-like sounds on the first try. Miss Nadell held a fish up
and said "speak" to Chee-Chee. Chee-Chee came back and said
something that sounded like "speak" and was given the fish.
Miss Nadell then said "louder," and Chee-Chee came back with
something that was like "louder" plus a lot of other
completely nonunderstood emissions.
One gets the impression
during such experiences that the dolphin has been waiting for
the day when he or she would be treated in the same way that
another dolphin has been treated. When the day comes, if the
"proper" gesture and language are used with that particular
animal he responds in the way that the previous one did.
A third animal, Sissy, has
been kept in isolation from Elvar and Chee-Chee on another
floor of the same building. Sissy is a much younger animal
than either Elvar or Chee-Chee and is relatively undisciplined
in comparison to the others. Sissy, about a week ago, was
asked to vocalize for a food reward. In the first session she
replied and demanded the food reward with a very peculiar
delphinese emission in air: with the vocalization apparatus on
the right side (inside her blowhole) she whistled in air and
on the left side simultaneously she clicked in air. One could
see the right side opening fairly widely and steadily and the
exit pulsing only with the modulations of the whistles; on the
left side it was vibrating with each of the very loud
"clapping-like" clicks that were emitted into the air. After a
week's experience with these noises she suddenly began a
series of humanoid noises mixed with the clicks and the
whistles. However, the clicks and the whistles are
predominant. It is almost as if she is an uneducated dolphin
who has barely had enough time to get a toe hold on her own
language and has had no opportunity yet to get a good toe hold
on ours. (Various reports are coming in from the staff that
she has been hitting their hands rather abruptly and suddenly
with her beak and opening her mouth at them. It is possible
that she needs the teaching and the discipline of an older
animal to teach her proper manners at this point.)
I think all
animals think. But that again becomes a matter of
definition. Some people who would want to put animals
into a separate category feel they think, but not on the
level of humans. But man is pretty egocentric about
these things. He doesn't think anything corresponds to
or thinks like him, and that's probably true. That
doesn't make them a lower form necessarily. Maybe they
haven't been able to conquer the earth and overcome
environmental difficulties and fly airplanes, and all
that sort of thing, but in another sort of way they seem
to do very well. They are free. Peter
Morgane |
These experiences illustrate
the thesis that one can protect one's self and maintain one's
ignorance by belittling disturbing experiences, or one can
newly recapture sensitivity and be open-minded (even painfully
so) and discover new facts. Discovery, in my experience,
requires disillusionment first as well as later. One must be
shaken in one's basic beliefs before the discovery can
penetrate one's mind sufficiently to be detected. A certain
willingness to face censure, to be a maverick, to question
one's beliefs, to revise them, are obviously necessary. But
what is not obvious is how to prepare one's own mind to
receive the transmissions from the far side of the protective
transparent wall separating each of us from the dark gulf of
the unknown. Maybe we must realize that we are still babies in
the universe, taking steps never before taken. Sometimes we
reach out from our aloneness for someone else who may or may
not exist. But at least we reach out, and it is gratifying to
see our dolphins reach also, however primitively. They reach
toward those of us who are willing to reach toward them. It
may be that some day not too far distant we both can draw to
an end the "long loneliness," as Loren Eiseley called it.
Dr. John C. Lilly, M.D.
From Mind in the Waters, A
Book to Celebrate the Consciousness of Whales and
Dolphins assembled by Joan McIntyre
|