Bat Speak

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 20^th 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.