5 ms·

Their body is far more than a factor of 7.4 larger than ours. Accounting for most of the brain being IO wiring, and the fact that they mostly just have to swim

Their body is far more than a factor of 7.4 larger than ours. Accounting for most of the brain being IO wiring, and the fact that they mostly just have to swim with their mouth open to survive, there's no reason to believe whales are particularly smart nor that anything particularly novel / intelligent happens inside that big brain.

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
They process sonar information in a visual way, and communicate it long distance. When have you last yelled at someone to place the 3D image of a swarm of krill in their minds?
- 2wrist 4y ago
  This made me smile, and laugh, and smile some more. :-)
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  >They process sonar information in a visual way Which is certainly no harder than processing stero vision or stero sound, as pretty much every species with either two eyes or two ears does. >When have you last yelled at someone to place the 3D image of a swarm of krill in their minds? You don't really need 3d point cloud precision for this. Here, I can do it right now. KRILL ON MY LEFT BRO! Given the bandwidth of 20 hz whale sounds, its preposterous to imagine them containing a more sophisticated depiction of things than that.
  - noiv 4y ago
    I like to invite you to close your eyes and walk through your flat only using click sounds (link). Works surprising well, right? Now add some 50 million years on evolution on top, realise how good water transports sound and put some overtones on that 20hz base frequency. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uS3lvUt7vY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uS3lvUt7vY
    - LegitShady 4y ago
      bats can do it with much smaller brains, and coordinate flying at the same time. there's no reason to think you need massive complicated brains to do it.
  - glenstein 4y ago
    >You don't really need 3d point cloud precision for this. Here, I can do it right now. KRILL ON MY LEFT BRO! Okay but that completely misses the point of what they were communicating. If you're skeptical about the communication that's one thing, but the thing you're offering is a substitute is not remotely equivalent. My understanding is that whales can interpret echoes of their own signals and read them as a map of physical features around them, and can exchange these signals with each other. Linguistic abstraction is a different type of thing altogether, and I don't know what point would served by going up to whales and telling them that they "don't need" the form of communication they actually use.
    - IIAOPSW 4y ago
      >Okay but that completely misses the point of what they were communicating. The comment I was replying to said >When have you last yelled at someone to place the 3D image of a swarm of krill in their minds? To which I say this is preposterous because the amount of data that could possibly fit inside of whale calls is orders of magnitude smaller than the data it would take to make a 3d image of a swarm of krill. Whatever it is they are saying, it must be a significantly compressed reduction, perhaps similar to the "map" that is communicated when you ask a stranger on the corner how to get somewhere. Why should one whale take the time transmit a literal 3d terrain map for another whale when mere driving instructions would suffice?
  - driggs 4y ago
    You are confusing social communication with echolocation. Humans have the former but lack the latter. Bro. Yes, it's 3D point cloud precision. (Source: I study echolocation in bats, and many of the classic texts cover echolocation in cetaceans as well.)
    - IIAOPSW 4y ago
      I'm not confusing anything. The comment I'm replying to states "When have you last yelled at someone to place the 3D image of a swarm of krill in their minds?". Well, irrespective of what whales actually understand of their 3d environment based on echolocation, they are certainly not "putting that 3d image in another whales mind just by yelling it." The bandwidth of their communication channel is to small for that. At best, they might be encoding driving directions to krill and/or mates. Therefore the comment I was replying to was obviously and absurdly generous in its interpretation of whale brain capabilities. Even believing they do point cloud echolocation is a bit generous considering what whales actually need to accomplish. A low resolution 3d blob cloud (in contrast to point cloud) would be all the comprehension of the world they might ever need. Unlike bats, whales don't have to track down and catch the krill after reaching them.
- jl6 4y ago
  > They process sonar information in a visual way Really? How do we know? What does in a visual way even mean when it’s not eyes?
  - glenstein 4y ago
    I'm assuming they mean spatial representation.
  - TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
    Research team discovers that dolphin sounds generate images with echolocation. https://www.sott.net/article/407359-Dolphin-sounds-generate-images-research-team-discovers https://www.sott.net/article/407359-Dolphin-sounds-generate-... Took me a bit to find this, google, brave search and bing are worthless. Had to use a work-around to find the exact title, and search for that.
    - mintplant 4y ago
      > See Also: > "Nothing to do with man" - Astrophysicist says climate-cultists "are on a gravy train" to make money I dunno about the credibility of this site.
      - TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
        Way to show that you just read titles, bruh. Just below the article are the references: 1] http://cymascope.com/cyma_research/breakingnews.html http://cymascope.com/cyma_research/breakingnews.html [2] http://www.speakdolphin.com/pressRelease/Press_Release_3D_Print_Human.pdf http://www.speakdolphin.com/pressRelease/Press_Release_3D_Pr... [3] https://conceptualrevolutions.com/2014/06/06/qa-with-gerald-pollack-on-the-institute-for-venture-science/ https://conceptualrevolutions.com/2014/06/06/qa-with-gerald-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vWlYteyF7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vWlYteyF7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28Ap4ove3Fg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28Ap4ove3Fg
        mintplant 4y ago
- bhedgeoser 4y ago
  "Look that swarm of krill is shaped like a toroid."
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
austinjp 4y ago
That's a very odd way to consider how whales live. They form social groups, communicate with each other, navigate and migrate, avoid and fight predators, and so on.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  So does a squirrel, a chicken, a cat, dog… ants, bees… Not a lot of grams needed for that.
  - speed_spread 4y ago
    You can add humans to that list, yet we consider ourselves much more sophisticated than these animals you mention. We recognize in whales some of the traits that we believe make us different. Having a longer lifespan might explain the higher nurture/nature ratio. Cats and dogs don't live long enough to develop complex background stories that require abstract language to be transmitted to their children.
    - e9 4y ago
      Life span has nothing to do with that. Life span is all about economies of scale of the organism. The larger the organism the more efficient it is. The heart rate is slower etc. There are exceptions in animal kingdom, of course. For detailed scientific overview on this specific topic, I highly recommend this book: The Scale by Geoffrey West
      - speed_spread 4y ago
        I wasn't suggesting that the longer lifespan was a result of higher cognitive functions but rather the opposite. Living longer enables individuals to travel further and face a greater variety of situations which require more sophisticated methods of analysis and transmission to be transmitted to others in the herd / offspring.
        e9 4y ago
dtgriscom 4y ago
You're presuming that it takes more brain to monitor and control more body mass.
- ithkuil 4y ago
  I think the assumption there was that brain size is proportional to the quantity of sensory inputs. sense of touch scales with the body surface which scales with the square of the animal size while body mass scales with the cube of the size. Other sensory input scales with the complexity of the organ; e.g. for the eye the number of photoreceptors
  - TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
    Walnut-brained Stegosaurus must have been practically numb.
    - ithkuil 4y ago
      Brain structure does also depends on what kind of animal. Mammals have a more complex cortex and so perhaps it's harder to compare
  - dtgriscom 4y ago
    Animals don't have a constant number of nerves per area of skin. Even within a species, fingertips have far more resolution than their backs. It seems reasonable that whale skin evolution wouldn't spend energy differentiating between two touches six inches apart.
nxpnsv 4y ago
That is weird, or your assumption that this was the single evolutionary pressure whales evolved with is perhaps over simplified.
bmitc 4y ago
Many whale species have much more complex folding than humans. Also, the areas relating to emotional intelligence are much larger.
gus_massa 4y ago
Note that as a general rule, the size of the brain does not escale as the volume (or weight of the animal), it's more like volume brain ~= volume body ^ (2/3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93body_mass_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93body_mass_ratio (in the graphic, dolphins are almost in the same line with a slope of 2/3 than us, but whales are lower)

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago

They process sonar information in a visual way, and communicate it long distance. When have you last yelled at someone to place the 3D image of a swarm of krill in their minds?

2wrist 4y ago
This made me smile, and laugh, and smile some more. :-)
IIAOPSW 4y ago
>They process sonar information in a visual way Which is certainly no harder than processing stero vision or stero sound, as pretty much every species with either two eyes or two ears does. >When have you last yelled at someone to place the 3D image of a swarm of krill in their minds? You don't really need 3d point cloud precision for this. Here, I can do it right now. KRILL ON MY LEFT BRO! Given the bandwidth of 20 hz whale sounds, its preposterous to imagine them containing a more sophisticated depiction of things than that.
- noiv 4y ago
  I like to invite you to close your eyes and walk through your flat only using click sounds (link). Works surprising well, right? Now add some 50 million years on evolution on top, realise how good water transports sound and put some overtones on that 20hz base frequency. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uS3lvUt7vY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uS3lvUt7vY
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    bats can do it with much smaller brains, and coordinate flying at the same time. there's no reason to think you need massive complicated brains to do it.
- glenstein 4y ago
  >You don't really need 3d point cloud precision for this. Here, I can do it right now. KRILL ON MY LEFT BRO! Okay but that completely misses the point of what they were communicating. If you're skeptical about the communication that's one thing, but the thing you're offering is a substitute is not remotely equivalent. My understanding is that whales can interpret echoes of their own signals and read them as a map of physical features around them, and can exchange these signals with each other. Linguistic abstraction is a different type of thing altogether, and I don't know what point would served by going up to whales and telling them that they "don't need" the form of communication they actually use.
  - IIAOPSW 4y ago
    >Okay but that completely misses the point of what they were communicating. The comment I was replying to said >When have you last yelled at someone to place the 3D image of a swarm of krill in their minds? To which I say this is preposterous because the amount of data that could possibly fit inside of whale calls is orders of magnitude smaller than the data it would take to make a 3d image of a swarm of krill. Whatever it is they are saying, it must be a significantly compressed reduction, perhaps similar to the "map" that is communicated when you ask a stranger on the corner how to get somewhere. Why should one whale take the time transmit a literal 3d terrain map for another whale when mere driving instructions would suffice?
- driggs 4y ago
  You are confusing social communication with echolocation. Humans have the former but lack the latter. Bro. Yes, it's 3D point cloud precision. (Source: I study echolocation in bats, and many of the classic texts cover echolocation in cetaceans as well.)
  - IIAOPSW 4y ago
    I'm not confusing anything. The comment I'm replying to states "When have you last yelled at someone to place the 3D image of a swarm of krill in their minds?". Well, irrespective of what whales actually understand of their 3d environment based on echolocation, they are certainly not "putting that 3d image in another whales mind just by yelling it." The bandwidth of their communication channel is to small for that. At best, they might be encoding driving directions to krill and/or mates. Therefore the comment I was replying to was obviously and absurdly generous in its interpretation of whale brain capabilities. Even believing they do point cloud echolocation is a bit generous considering what whales actually need to accomplish. A low resolution 3d blob cloud (in contrast to point cloud) would be all the comprehension of the world they might ever need. Unlike bats, whales don't have to track down and catch the krill after reaching them.
jl6 4y ago
> They process sonar information in a visual way Really? How do we know? What does in a visual way even mean when it’s not eyes?
- glenstein 4y ago
  I'm assuming they mean spatial representation.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  Research team discovers that dolphin sounds generate images with echolocation. https://www.sott.net/article/407359-Dolphin-sounds-generate-images-research-team-discovers https://www.sott.net/article/407359-Dolphin-sounds-generate-... Took me a bit to find this, google, brave search and bing are worthless. Had to use a work-around to find the exact title, and search for that.
  - mintplant 4y ago
    > See Also: > "Nothing to do with man" - Astrophysicist says climate-cultists "are on a gravy train" to make money I dunno about the credibility of this site.
    - TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
      Way to show that you just read titles, bruh. Just below the article are the references: 1] http://cymascope.com/cyma_research/breakingnews.html http://cymascope.com/cyma_research/breakingnews.html [2] http://www.speakdolphin.com/pressRelease/Press_Release_3D_Print_Human.pdf http://www.speakdolphin.com/pressRelease/Press_Release_3D_Pr... [3] https://conceptualrevolutions.com/2014/06/06/qa-with-gerald-pollack-on-the-institute-for-venture-science/ https://conceptualrevolutions.com/2014/06/06/qa-with-gerald-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vWlYteyF7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vWlYteyF7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28Ap4ove3Fg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28Ap4ove3Fg
      - mintplant 4y ago
bhedgeoser 4y ago
"Look that swarm of krill is shaped like a toroid."

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

austinjp 4y ago

That's a very odd way to consider how whales live. They form social groups, communicate with each other, navigate and migrate, avoid and fight predators, and so on.

Scoundreller 4y ago
So does a squirrel, a chicken, a cat, dog… ants, bees… Not a lot of grams needed for that.
- speed_spread 4y ago
  You can add humans to that list, yet we consider ourselves much more sophisticated than these animals you mention. We recognize in whales some of the traits that we believe make us different. Having a longer lifespan might explain the higher nurture/nature ratio. Cats and dogs don't live long enough to develop complex background stories that require abstract language to be transmitted to their children.
  - e9 4y ago
    Life span has nothing to do with that. Life span is all about economies of scale of the organism. The larger the organism the more efficient it is. The heart rate is slower etc. There are exceptions in animal kingdom, of course. For detailed scientific overview on this specific topic, I highly recommend this book: The Scale by Geoffrey West
    - speed_spread 4y ago
      I wasn't suggesting that the longer lifespan was a result of higher cognitive functions but rather the opposite. Living longer enables individuals to travel further and face a greater variety of situations which require more sophisticated methods of analysis and transmission to be transmitted to others in the herd / offspring.
      - e9 4y ago

dtgriscom 4y ago

You're presuming that it takes more brain to monitor and control more body mass.

ithkuil 4y ago
I think the assumption there was that brain size is proportional to the quantity of sensory inputs. sense of touch scales with the body surface which scales with the square of the animal size while body mass scales with the cube of the size. Other sensory input scales with the complexity of the organ; e.g. for the eye the number of photoreceptors
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  Walnut-brained Stegosaurus must have been practically numb.
  - ithkuil 4y ago
    Brain structure does also depends on what kind of animal. Mammals have a more complex cortex and so perhaps it's harder to compare
- dtgriscom 4y ago
  Animals don't have a constant number of nerves per area of skin. Even within a species, fingertips have far more resolution than their backs. It seems reasonable that whale skin evolution wouldn't spend energy differentiating between two touches six inches apart.

nxpnsv 4y ago

That is weird, or your assumption that this was the single evolutionary pressure whales evolved with is perhaps over simplified.

bmitc 4y ago

Many whale species have much more complex folding than humans. Also, the areas relating to emotional intelligence are much larger.

gus_massa 4y ago

Note that as a general rule, the size of the brain does not escale as the volume (or weight of the animal), it's more like volume brain ~= volume body ^ (2/3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93body_mass_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93body_mass_ratio (in the graphic, dolphins are almost in the same line with a slope of 2/3 than us, but whales are lower)