The
nature of animal communication has been of interest to humans for
ages. We do know that they communicate with each other. We
watch them and observe the sounds and gestures they use and wonder
how they speak to each other. How much information are they able to
exchange, and how complex might it be? We assume that human
communication is far more intricate, since we have a much greater
cognitive ability and we have developed countless words that we
string together in endless ways. But are we really that much more
loquacious?
The
biggest barrier to understanding animal communication is the fact
that we cannot get inside their minds to figure out what's going on.
The so-called “theory of mind” that allows one human to guess
fairly well what's going on inside the head of another human is
helpful, because every human brain works pretty much the same. But
how does the mind of an animal operate? What goes on inside the head
of beavers or elephants, when they send messages to each other?
In
Stephan Budiansky's 1998 book If a Lion Could Talk, he says
that we humans simply can't get inside the mind of an animal because
(1) they communicate with each other in a wordless manner and (2) our
anthropomorphic attitude gets in the way: we can't help but attribute
human characteristics to what they're doing. When we do this, we miss
who they really are. It causes us to view animals as some sort of
defective version of what a human is. We completely miss their
special kind of intelligence. So if a lion could talk, we'd
totally not understand what it said.
Rene
Descartes didn't help cross-species communication, because he
believed that animals were more like machines than conscious beings.
He thought that they have no feelings or emotions. Descartes paved
the way for 20th century cognitive scientists, who thought
that, although animals might be more conscious than a machine, they
still insisted in seeing animal consciousness as a lame version of
ours.
These
limitations we've had regarding animal communication are finally
beginning to be cast off. In 1974 the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote
a seminal paper titled “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” he took
issue with the then-current view of animal consciousness and claimed
that bat communication is quite sophisticated; that in fact bats'
echolocation is similar to human vision and contains lots of
information. But since consciousness is a very subjective phenomenon,
we humans will never be able to experience the world the way a bat
does. Nagel maintained that each critter knows only what it's like to
be themselves. We will never be able to know what it's like to be a
bat—even if we could decipher their language. Even if a bat could talk, we'd not understand what it said.
A
recent fascinating forward step in the process of learning how
animals communicate was taken by researchers at the Bat Lab for
NeuroEcology at Tel Aviv University, who showed that bats not only do
a very good job of communicating, but that they jabber among
themselves quite a bit. The scientists recorded the vocalizations of
Egyptian fruit bats and then analyzed the sounds. What initially
sounded like a meaningless cacophony was really an abundance of “bat
speak.” They were even able to identify individual bat voices and
learn, to a limited extent, what the messages were. They found that
bats bicker a lot—they quibble over food, space, where to sleep,
and with whom to have sex... just like humans! Bat communication is
indeed much more sophisticated that we thought.
So
the evidence mounts. Animals do communicate, and if we can drop our
anthropomorphic bias, we are beginning to learn how well they do it.
Many indigenous peoples have long known that animals are
articulate—that they possess sophisticated nonverbal skills.
Animals employ subtle ways of sending messages that don't require all
the verbiage we humans seem to need. While we fire off long strings
of words at each other—often without listening—animals use different
but effective ways of getting their messages across. Maybe if we shut
up and honed our listening and observational skills, we could learn a
thing or two about communication from them.
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