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A few people speculate that sperm whales might be transmitting sonar "images" in their communications [1]. At first it seems like a crazy idea, and maybe it is

A few people speculate that sperm whales might be transmitting sonar "images" in their communications [1]. At first it seems like a crazy idea, and maybe it is---but it isn't impossible since the whales perceive their environment via sonar. If we could directly and efficiently communicate synthetic images to each other, then "words" might never arise. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/16/opinion/sunday/conversation-with-whales.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/16/opinion/sunday...

nine_k 11y ago
Now we sort of can. See emoji, memes, etc.
- huac 11y ago
  Well, or 'pictograph' alphabets (e.g. ancient Chinese)
netcan 11y ago
Very interesting thought, whether in turns out to be true or not. Seems plausible, at least. If not whales, maybe some other species. The existence of sonar as a highly evolved sensory experience already tells us about scale of possibility within the creative repertoire of biology. Our brain design is clearly influenced a lot by the sensory and communication tasks that are important to us. For example, human smell is something unimpressive, by mammalian standards. We have smell and it affects us occasionally. It says 'don't eat that!' or somemsuch, sometimes. We also have some pheromones that are a basic scent communication method. Many mammals make 90% of mating decisions based on smell. Some species can react to a 6 day old pee stain the way humans react to strippers. Some find food from long distances away. They use highly developed scent based communication to transmit information about themselves (mostly) to one another. Something can smell scary, in a "Shit, that gave me a fright!" kind of way. It's not a stretch to imagine they dream or think in smells the way we do in words, sort of. We communicate with sound in amazing ways. Right now we are communicating using sight (most of us) in a way that piggybacks on our brain's special design to understand words, which are sound based. This is fairly common in our biological branch, words... or so it seems. Anyway, the design is flexible to be used in various ways. You can learn language without having hearing. There is obviously a lot of potential for nature to be novel.
- kaybe 11y ago
  To be fair, most people massively underuse their sense of smell. Feynman described being able to distinguish who touched long untouched books by smell - sounds a bit farfetched until you try, it's not that hard for most. Then again, it's also not very useful in today's society.
  - praveenperera 11y ago
    Sense of smell is very important when it comes to becoming a good cook.
lawpoop 11y ago
If they are projecting sonar images at each other, this would be much easier for us to determine than if they are using serial, syntactical language, right? They may not be projecting shapes of actual objects, but if they are projecting shapes at all, it would probably be easy to record and reconstruct them visually for us to see, no?
lawpoop 11y ago
If they are projecting sonar images at each other, this would be much easier for us to determine than if they are using serial, syntactical language, right? They may not be projecting shapes of actual objects, but if they are projecting shapes at all, it would probably be easy to record and reconstruct them visually for us to see, no? I'm thinking if they so use 3-D sonar communication, they probably have a vocabulary of geometric symbols. For instance, with our vocal apparatus, we can imitate sounds like "bark bark" or "buzz", but instead we say "dog" and "bee". This allows us to talk about things that don't make sound, including abstract ideas. Perhaps they have 3-D geometric symbols, analogous to our words. Instead of imitating the sonar reflection of a school of fish, they might just have a shape that means "school of fish".
- pitchka 11y ago
  It is a question of how they encode the image. Just like our eyes filter out most of the things and the brain reconstructs the picture, they might send compressed images that are easily reconstructed by their brains, but it takes effort to do it with computers. Eyes are easier because they take the image and compress it (or maybe they work on compressed sensing :D). Sending images via sonar can be accomplished by a time sequence that might not be equivalent to the representation of image, but to the brains of a whale it can be reconstructed into a coherent one.

nine_k 11y ago

Now we sort of can. See emoji, memes, etc.

huac 11y ago
Well, or 'pictograph' alphabets (e.g. ancient Chinese)

netcan 11y ago

Very interesting thought, whether in turns out to be true or not. Seems plausible, at least. If not whales, maybe some other species. The existence of sonar as a highly evolved sensory experience already tells us about scale of possibility within the creative repertoire of biology. Our brain design is clearly influenced a lot by the sensory and communication tasks that are important to us. For example, human smell is something unimpressive, by mammalian standards. We have smell and it affects us occasionally. It says 'don't eat that!' or somemsuch, sometimes. We also have some pheromones that are a basic scent communication method. Many mammals make 90% of mating decisions based on smell. Some species can react to a 6 day old pee stain the way humans react to strippers. Some find food from long distances away. They use highly developed scent based communication to transmit information about themselves (mostly) to one another. Something can smell scary, in a "Shit, that gave me a fright!" kind of way. It's not a stretch to imagine they dream or think in smells the way we do in words, sort of. We communicate with sound in amazing ways. Right now we are communicating using sight (most of us) in a way that piggybacks on our brain's special design to understand words, which are sound based. This is fairly common in our biological branch, words... or so it seems. Anyway, the design is flexible to be used in various ways. You can learn language without having hearing. There is obviously a lot of potential for nature to be novel.

kaybe 11y ago
To be fair, most people massively underuse their sense of smell. Feynman described being able to distinguish who touched long untouched books by smell - sounds a bit farfetched until you try, it's not that hard for most. Then again, it's also not very useful in today's society.
- praveenperera 11y ago
  Sense of smell is very important when it comes to becoming a good cook.

lawpoop 11y ago

If they are projecting sonar images at each other, this would be much easier for us to determine than if they are using serial, syntactical language, right? They may not be projecting shapes of actual objects, but if they are projecting shapes at all, it would probably be easy to record and reconstruct them visually for us to see, no? I'm thinking if they so use 3-D sonar communication, they probably have a vocabulary of geometric symbols. For instance, with our vocal apparatus, we can imitate sounds like "bark bark" or "buzz", but instead we say "dog" and "bee". This allows us to talk about things that don't make sound, including abstract ideas. Perhaps they have 3-D geometric symbols, analogous to our words. Instead of imitating the sonar reflection of a school of fish, they might just have a shape that means "school of fish".

pitchka 11y ago
It is a question of how they encode the image. Just like our eyes filter out most of the things and the brain reconstructs the picture, they might send compressed images that are easily reconstructed by their brains, but it takes effort to do it with computers. Eyes are easier because they take the image and compress it (or maybe they work on compressed sensing :D). Sending images via sonar can be accomplished by a time sequence that might not be equivalent to the representation of image, but to the brains of a whale it can be reconstructed into a coherent one.