Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Humpback whale songs are surprisingly like human language. They are talking about how humpback whales build up their songs out of smaller independant phrases, much like how human language is constructed.

I've been saying this for some time now, I think one of the best places to look for animal communication that we can understand is with Humpback whales, the males will sit upright in the water for over half and hour and will sing songs. These songs change slowly over the years. What if they are telling their stories of the past year? We have to remember that they can hear and speak on a wider range of frequencies than we can, what if, on each wavelength, they are telling a different thread of the story which is vastly different than human language? We need to have emergent algorithms to look for these subtle interrelationships that our human brains, constrained by human language, just can't understand.

Ok, young ones, Indigo children, it's up to you to figure this out. I'll help.