What Do Dolphins Talk About?
How can we tell if other animals have thoughts, desires, self-awareness? And if they do have all of those things, how can we communicate with them? Diana Reiss, a professor of cognitive psychology and director of the Animal Behavior and Conservation Graduate Program at Hunter College, has been working on these questions for decades.
In this episode of the Ignorance podcast—a series that investigates what scientists don’t yet know, what remains to be figured out—neuroscience professor Stuart Firestein and neurobiologist Leslie Voshall interview Reiss about the mirror test, computers for dolphins, and more.
The Ignorance podcast looks into what scientists don’t know, what remains to be figured out.
Listen to the full podcast here.
Partial transcript:
Leslie Vosshall: How did you ever believe you could learn anything about how animals think?
I was always interested in communication with animals because I thought when I was a kid, I was communicating with my dog. And I was, and we do communicate with our pets. With dolphins, it’s quite a different situation. They’re about as different from us as you can possibly get in terms of body form, in terms of evolution—we’ve evolved in totally separate domains.
