Hello
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Wait, you're listening? Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC.

Hello. Hello. This is Lulu. Hello. This is Latif. Funnily enough, the episode we have to bring you today is called Hello. It's really about the hardest possible hello. Yeah, yeah. It's someone trying to say hello across a huge gap and not just say hello, but really communicate and understand the language of another species and possibly even have them understand you. Yeah.

We originally aired this in 2014. It was co-reported by producer extraordinaire Lynn Levy and a dolphin. But like actually kind of, but mostly Lynn. She really did most of the work. Yeah. Okay. Let's say no more for now, except... Except... Enjoy. Oh, oh, and also...

If you are listening with children. There are some uncomfortable moments in this story that may not be suitable for younger listeners. Parents. Maybe slow fade it down right now. Right. Listen to it by yourself. Vet it. Probably not the best one for kids. Okay. Yeah. We hope you enjoy. I love your dolphin noise. Thank you very much. Hello, this is Lynn. Someone on the other side of this. Hi.

Hey, Lynn. So a couple months ago, our producer Lynn Levy did an interview with this woman. Yeah, her name is Margaret Lovett. Yes. And this was Margaret's first time doing a radio interview. That magic voice. This is so fun. But this was definitely not her first time talking into a microphone. One, two, three, four. This is the yellow mic. One, two, three, four. This is the orange mic.

Almost exactly 50 years ago. The following recording was made on November 19, 1964 at 2300 hours. Margaret was at the center of this amazing, weird experiment. Yeah, yeah. Who were you at that time? Like, what were you like? Well, I've always had a bit of, if everybody's going left, I'll go right. She tried college for a while. Tulane University for a year. But she dropped out. And I was, what, 20 or 19 or something at that point.

and moved to St. Thomas in the Caribbean. I'd never been to an island. Got a job at this hotel. Did menus, checked people in and out. And one day she hears about this strange research facility on the other side of the island. And I thought, I wonder what that is about. And I asked a few people and they said, oh, no, no, they don't like people there or can't go there. And I was told not to go there. So I went there. And that's how it all started.

That's how we're going to start this show. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. Today on Radiolab, producer Lynn Levy brings us a couple of close encounters, although not with aliens. No, it's not in outer space because it's much closer to home in this case. Although they are kind of alien-like. Yes, alien-like. But not alien-like.

not out there. It's a dolphin. Yes, that's... Shows about dolphins. Yay! We're calling this hour. Hello. So when Margaret got to this mysterious place, there were dolphins there. And what happened was she ended up becoming roommates with a dolphin. Do you mean in the, like, Bed-Stuy one-bedroom apartment sense? Sort of, yeah. She did end up living with a dolphin for many months in this apartment. I.E.

The apartment apartment? Mm-hmm. Had a little desk, had a little kitchen area with a stove. I think it was a little two-burner stove or something, and a pot and a tea kettle. But the thing that's a little bit weird about the apartment is that the whole apartment was filled with water. It was completely filled? Well, I wasn't submerged, but I was in water up mid-thigh, sort of. It was just flooded with water. Just about there. So she could share it with this dolphin. A young male Peter. His Royal Highness Peter.

Peter was a 10-foot-long, bobble-nosed dolphin, young, adolescent male. And he lived there with Margaret, and he could swim under the desk, and there was a balcony, he could swim out onto the balcony. And the balcony was flooded too? The balcony was also flooded, yeah, it's really cool. And what was the idea? I mean, to try and study a dolphin? Yeah.

To study the dolphin, first of all, and take a lot of notes. Extensive notes. Did you have waterproof paper? No. I had a typewriter on this board hanging from the ceiling. They also had... Microphones everywhere. And specifically the task she was given was to teach Peter to speak English. Oh, my God.

And she was supposed to teach the dolphin English? Yep. Really? Well, I mean, this was John Lilly's project. Just for some context, you know how people get all like a little bit crazy these days about dolphins? They have like, you know, shirts with dolphins and necklaces with dolphins and everybody has like dolphin hair bands, dolphin blacklight posters, right? So this all kind of sort of comes from this guy, John Lilly, who

was a scientist, a researcher, starting in the 40s. A total right stuff physics major kind of guy out of Caltech. Man's man, according to Graham Burnett. I'm a historian of science. But then, according to Graham, John Lilly has this epiphany. During the Second World War... At the time, people just weren't thinking that much about dolphins in general. There was not this idea that they were sort of extraordinary beings. They were just like big, dumb fish. You know, they were shot for sport.

So John Lilly is doing this research about brain mapping, and he ends up working with dolphins. And the story that he's told goes that he was experimenting on these dolphins, and as he's working with them, kind of like shoving things into their brains, they make noises, as would anyone. And when he listens back to the noises, which he's recorded,

It sounds to him like the dolphins are trying to speak to him, to say something to him in not in a, not in a dolphin-y way, but in a human way, like trying to speak English to him. Really? Yeah. What did he say the dolphin was trying to say to him? I don't think that we know that, but it sounded to him enough like human speech that he thought like something's going on here. This is important.

According to Graham, he said later that it made him realize, like, we're not the only intelligent organisms out there. Like, we have company. That maybe humans are what happens when high intelligence evolves in an animal that also has hands.

And dolphins are what happens when comparably, if not still more extravagant intelligence evolves in an animal without hands. What do hands get you? Well, hands basically get you an appetite for punching people in the head.

You know, it makes us tool users, but the distance between, you know, the hammer that you use to knock open your coconut and the hammer that you use to knock open the head of that other Cro-Magnon you were never that keen on is, in fact, zilch. There's no difference at all. By the time we got to the 60s with, you know, like peace and love. It was exciting to think that the dolphins and the whales were,

have these huge brains, but they don't like, they're not after anything. They're not doing anything with it. They're not trying to hurt anybody. They're not building cities. They're just like being, man.

And keep in mind, this is on the verge of the Vietnam War, where you have all this anxiety about overpopulation, environmental destruction. So very quickly, the dolphins become like this vision of how we might ourselves be so different.

than we'd come to feel we were, tragically. Does that make sense? So John Lilly was one of the first people to get swept up in all this. He quits his government job, moves to the Caribbean, and sets up this lab. John Lilly's Communication Research Institute. To try to talk to dolphins, which is where Margaret ended up. And my feeling was this, that everybody was talking about how bright they were and how smart they were, and it was dolphins, dolphins, dolphins, and then it was the hot topic.

And yet every day, everybody at that building would get in their car and go home. Yeah. And I thought, what is that? So she volunteered to stay. Yeah, yeah. Her bed was on this kind of wooden platform in the middle of the apartment. I was maybe two and a half, three inches above the water. And Peter was right there. And Peter could flip me a little water and wake me up at any point. And that was the whole point of it. I mean, this wasn't just sleep all night and then...

excuse me, work in the day and then sleep again all night and then do some work in the day, I might as well go home. So I eventually, I didn't really shave my head, but I buzzed it, whatever it's called now, really close. Because any, you know, the hair getting wet thing in the middle of the night was very annoying. Yeah, of course. So I just got rid of the hair. And that was helpful. And then when Peter would come and squirt some water or want to play or throw something at me, then I could just roll off this elevator into the water and be with him and do whatever.

She says he was fascinated by the things she brought with her. A piece of cloth, a teabag. Teabag was a fascinating thing. I drank tea, and the teabag would fall into the water, and he would come and get it.

and sonar it, this creaking noise they make when they're sonaring, and he'd look at it and take the string over his beak and sort of swim around very proudly with his teabag. And then he'd throw it up against a wall and it would stick. And then he'd squirt water on it and it would come back down into the water and he would play with his teabag. Eventually, of course, he would bite it. He has very sharp teeth. And it would break.

And that was a very exciting thing when the tea bag finally broke open. It had babies, as it were, zillions of tea leaves floating around, and he was so none of them all, and wanted to count every single one of them. And what did you think you would find out? I didn't know. You know, I was not coming at this from a science point of view. That's not what I was bringing to the table. Yeah. I just, I just, I had no idea. I was programmed by John to work on the speech.

He had sort of declared that they could probably speak. Look, when you're trying to have a conversation with someone, one person speaks and the other one listens. And then you speak and I listen. And people sort of normally do that back and forth.

When you start with a dolphin making airborne sounds, once they get the idea, there's a lot of screaming that goes on. They're very show-offy and they want to override you. So you have to spend a lot of time getting it down to, I'm talking now. And now it's your turn. And yet if he's upset about something, he'll override you.

And it's annoying. Now listen again. What's this? Come on, Peter. One, two, three. Three. Now start again. One, two, three. Yes. But he learned very quickly to listen to me. One, two, three, four. Yes.

And not to pick up my instructions. If I would say, no, no, no, Peter, I don't want you to do that. I want you to do this, this, this. He would give me back this, this, this. A parrot will often say, no, no, no, Polly won a cracker. They will repeat the whole thing of whatever you said. But Peter would pick up what I wanted when he was being a good student. And he was a good student. There seemed to be...

with this one dolphin anyway, can't speak for all of them, an interest in what we were doing. He wanted to practice. He wanted to get it right. There was a mirror, and he would spend long periods of time by himself, didn't want me to be part of it, and he would practice whatever it was we had been doing in the lesson that day, over and over and over and over. He wanted to get it right. And I...

No, that's not right. And he would work at that for no reason. He's not getting fish. I'm not interacting with him or nothing. He just wants it right. Like doing homework. Like homework, exactly. And after a few months of this, Peter did start to sound really different. One, two. One, two, three. Better. He kept getting better. It's extremely difficult for them. Hello. Hello.

They just have a blowhole. They do not have the apparatus to really... S's are almost impossible. I would feed him my name. And M is very hard. He would eventually roll over almost into the water with the blowhole to muffle the... Kind of a thing. Really? You're saying he would use the water as a way to help him make the sound? Yes. With that word.

Do you think he knew that was your name? I don't know. But nevertheless, we were a pretty good match. I knew his mood, his temperament. And he knew mine. He knew when I was sick and I would get sick. You're in the water all the time. You're bound to get a cold or something. He just loved my anatomy. He wanted to know what my knees were doing.

He would go behind my knee and sonar and look at it and feel it and push it and find out which way it would and wouldn't go. And I gave him the time, because I wasn't going home, to look at my knee, to look at my feet. He was enormously interested, oddly enough, in the space between my fingers.

Really? Not the fingers so much, but he would, I mean, you know, his beak could just barely fit there, but he wanted to put in between each finger and see what that was all about. The same with the toes. He didn't have any spaces anywhere. Yeah. You know, he had solid flippers, but no space in between them. Do you think he was so interested in your fingers and toes because he didn't have any? Yes, I do.

Margaret and Peter ended up spending about nine months living together. But towards the end,

Things kind of started to unravel. First of all, there weren't really results from this experiment. They never were able to publish any scientific papers. And there were other problems. Lilly got very involved in drugs, especially. LSD, he did bring it down. He did give LSD. He says he did. I believe him to two of the dolphins. I would not let him give LSD to Peter. I wouldn't allow that. Why would he give them LSD? Well...

It's not 100% clear, but it seems like he was trying to find a way to get the dolphins to open up, to connect with.

maybe to talk. In any case, by 1965, 66, his funding had started to dry up. And when people heard about Margaret's work, they tended to focus on like one particular part of the story. You don't have to answer, but a lot has been made of your sort of sexually engaging with Peter. And I just want to ask, because you don't seem like a shrinking violet, I just want to ask, is there anything you want to say about that? What would I like to say about that? I think...

The sensational side of it is... Here's what Margaret told me. Peter was a young dolphin. He was horny. And he would hump her leg a lot, kind of like a dog might do, which was getting in the way of their work. So eventually I just said, the heck with it. And she'd use her hand to...

And it would quickly satisfy him, and then we could go back to doing what we were doing. And I never really gave it another thought. I never thought, ooh, don't let anybody know. I never thought, ooh, this shouldn't be. But because of details like this and the drugs, this experiment became extremely controversial, almost untouchable. People didn't want to be associated with Lily. Nobody wanted to fund anything that sounded like Lily. It just got this, like, aura of...

Don't go there. Don't go there. Even people who wanted to do really rigorous work with human-dolphin communication had a tough time getting any funding. And that lasted for a long time. And the thing is, even though there are so many reasons to disapprove of this experiment, when you talk to Margaret, you can't help but want to be in that apartment with them. He would come over, and when he was in what I call his sweet mood, and Peter had a lot of very, very sweet mood to him,

He would sink to the bottom and take my foot in his mouth. And he wasn't sonaring and he wasn't looking at anything. It was almost like a little kid comes and just wants to hold your hand. And he would just sink to the bottom and close his eyes and just hang on to my foot. And then he'd have to come up and breathe. And then he'd go back down and he'd just grab my foot. And he would do this for a good while. We'll be back in a moment with another encounter.

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radiolab, and today... Hello. Yes. Or as a dolphin might say... How would a dolphin say it? I don't know. Well, and you know what? That is exactly kind of the question of this next segment. I mean, the dream that a human being can talk to a dolphin, or any animal really, get in their heads and cross that gap. This is a dream that humans have had since, like, forever. Yeah, St. Francis of Assisi goes way back. Now, insofar as dolphins are concerned, after the John Lilly situation...

researchers did get a little tepid. Yeah, but they didn't stay tepid, as you say, for long. No. Because along came this one. Dr. Denise Hersey, director of the Wild Dolphin Project. Who basically decided to take John Lilly's experiment and flip it. Rather than have the dolphins speak English, let's have the humans speak dolphin. Or at the very least, let's create a shared language where humans and dolphins can speak.

Or at least whistle. Well, you know, it's about finding a place you can meet. Back to producer Lynn Levy. Okay. So for Denise, this dream of finding that meeting spot, it goes back to when she was a little girl. Well, when I was 12 years old, I used to page through the Encyclopedia Britannica in the days when we had books. And I would always stop at the whale and dolphin page, look at the dolphins and go, wow, I wonder...

What their brains are like because they've evolved in the water. You were thinking that when you were 12? I was. I was a total nerd. In fact, I entered this contest in Minnesota like, what would you do for the world if you could do something? And I actually wrote, I would build a human-animal translator so we could figure out what was going on in the minds of animals. So, yeah, I don't know. I got the bug early and here I am. Were you having a fantasy about what you might learn? A fantasy? No, I was just curious. Yes.

So I don't know, you look in their eyes, there's definitely something behind there. You just want to know what it is. Fast forward many years...

Denise got a boat. And I went out to the Bahamas. She was like, if I'm going to study these dolphins, I'm going to do it in the wild. That's where they live. So she tracked down a pod of wild dolphins. Yep, yep. And she just tried to blend in. I actually anchored the boat in one spot most of the time. This spot in the Bermuda Triangle. In the middle of, I call it the dolphin highway. Where dolphins come and go. They could come by if they wanted to, and if they didn't, they didn't. When they would come by...

She and her team would just slip into the water. And behave ourselves. Just sort of watch, paying attention to who was who, which dolphin had a crooked fin, which one didn't. And when they'd leave, we'd get out. And that's really how we operated for the first five years. And it worked. Five years? She spent five years just watching? Not doing anything else? Yes. Doesn't this take an enormous amount of patience?

Well, sure. I mean, but after about five years, they started realizing, well, these guys aren't going to grab us and poke us and prod us. So they started just going about their own business. Like feeding, mating. Nursing. And talking. Or at least making a lot of noises, which she and her team would record. Wow, that's all dolphin squeaky? They make all these, yeah, like that. That's like there's like a clicking kind of squeaking sound that they make.

Ooh. It sounds like a zipper. Zipper, yeah. Yeah, they make like whistles that are more kind of distinct and then they make sounds that are like longer and weirder and...

And do you have any sense that each of these sounds means something different? Well, that's exactly what we don't know. I could tell you what kinds of sounds are correlated with fighting and with mating or disciplining a calf. What we don't know is, are there detailed kind of words in there? Is there more kind of encoded information? But what they do know is that each dolphin seems to have its own kind of signature whistle. Which is basically a name. Every individual has its own name.

Peter had a name. Nobody's ever asked me that. Here's Margaret again. And his name was... Really? It was almost saying Peter here. Right. So I can call you Lynn by your whistle and you Robert by your whistle. So I could be a dolphin going, Lynn! Exactly. Do they do that? They do.

Not only that, apparently dolphins will use the names of other dolphins who aren't even around. Like, they can't see them. Like, they'll talk about each other behind their backs? Yes, maybe. Wow, that means that they're...

using representations of things which aren't in front of them, which is sort of like the beginning of language. If that's what they're doing and we don't know, but if that's what they're doing, then yeah, that's kind of like the edge of language. So, you know, it gives us hope that there's probably more information going on there than we know. And now, finally, she has that device. ♪

Which device again? The magical, you know, human-animal translator device that she was dreaming of writing about when she was 12. She has this box that can generate dolphin noises and it can recognize dolphin noises. And if it works the way that, you know, that she's dreaming it'll work, it could be the first, like, real two-way back-and-forth conversation between a human and

and a wild animal. So we're looking forward to the summer and getting out and getting more data and really exercising the boxes and see what happens. Good, we're ready. So I beg my way aboard. Everybody good? Seasick pills and tummies? We left on July 8th from Florida and headed for the Bahamas to see this pod that she has been following kind of forever. Almost 30 years now. Voted

The boat is called the RV Stenella. Stenella is the scientific name for this particular type of dolphin, the spotted dolphin. Have you seen a spotted dolphin? I've never seen one in person. What is this boat like? It's like not a tiny boat, but it's not a big boat. And it was just absolutely full of humans. And who are your humans?

Well, there's Denise, obviously. How's it going? And you got a captain. My name's Keir Smith. First mate. Danielle. Research assistants. Allison Myers. Les Mason. Bethany Oliere. Nathan Skripchak. Volunteers. Drew Mayer. There's an acoustics expert. Matthias Hoffman. For a long time, I couldn't even figure out where everybody was sleeping because the boat seemed so small. I was like, there is not room for all these people on this boat. Behind you, there's a hot soldering iron next to the fridge. And I haven't even gotten to this guy. Don't get into it. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

His name is Thad Starner. So you didn't have, like, any dolphin experience before this, right?

Oh, hell no. He's one of the guys who invented Google Glass. I became a computer programmer, so I never have to leave air conditioning, right? And I'm out here in, what is this, 100 degree weather to do what? So his job on the boat is to, he's in charge of these boxes. Those boxes probably cost us 100K at this point. We're looking for funding. Looking for funding. So he's the tech whiz. When he came down to visit my lab, I was telling him about the two-way work and the difficulty with

underwater stuff. And he said, oh, I build wearable computers. I said, oh, can you build me an underwater wearable computer? Sure, that shouldn't be hard. Four years later. What does this machine look like? It looks like a toaster, like one of those fancy chrome toasters, except you wear it on your chest. Are they silvery? They are silvery. They have a bunch of sort of knobs and buttons and speakers on them. It's got pre-programmed whistles in it. I can punch a key and it projects whistle eight.

Ear whistle B. Ear whistle C. She's programmed in signature whistles of some of the dolphins. Rat. Palette. Bijou. And we made signature whistles for ourselves. Oh. Oh.

She can call their names and they can call her names. That's what she's saying? That is the idea, yeah. And if they do call her name, this name that she's made for herself, then the box should be able to recognize it and can tell her that she's been called by name. It'll actually say into her ear in English, Denise. This is real-time, I call it real-time sound recognition, but it's real-time whistle recognition underwater. How does...

If she's made up this name for herself, how is it that they're going to know that that's her name? Well, the idea is that they're learning. So she gets into the water over and over and she says, you know, the equivalent of, hi, I'm Denise. Hi, I'm Denise. Over and over and over. And they learn it. You know, they develop this. Oh, like maybe they'll just start to use it and call her. Yeah. So you hope they call you. I'd be really sad if they didn't call my name, but...

But I guess at the very least, she could call their names and see how they react. Right. Well, see, that would be a eureka moment, I think, if you hit the Lolita button and Lolita suddenly turned and looked right at you with a shock. Exactly. What the heck? Wow, that human called me by my signature whistle. Whoa. Has that happened yet? It hasn't happened yet. Whoa.

And this is something I just did not appreciate. For a while I was on this boat, I was like, why is this so hard? Like, this seems like it should be, these people are so smart, like this should be easy, but they're just like constantly being defeated by the ocean, basically, which, and the ocean is like a worthy foe, but it's like the first year. First year was a complete disaster, trying to get the hardware to work. What happened the first year?

Everything broke. It was leak city. Basically, the boxes just kept shutting down as soon as they would get in the water. That's not good. It's not good. That's sort of not what you want. No. And last year... We had the boxes working, but then we couldn't find the dolphins. The dolphins just disappeared. Where did they go? You know, they went 100 miles away to another location. They don't know why. I kept up with my side of the deal, Denise. Your dolphins stood you up. They moved.

And one of the reasons I was on the boat is it felt like everybody was thinking, like, this is it. This is the year. We're going to go out there, we're going to find some dolphins, and we're going to make some history. You ready? Ready. Excited. Now. Any minute now. Okay, it turns out it's not that easy to find these dolphins. They're not tagged. You know, they're wild dolphins. So you just, like, you go to where you think they might be. Do you know that song?

You stare at the water and you wait. Yeah, what is that?

For the first three days, pretty much, we were just driving around. Game of Thrones. In circles, like literally in circles. You know, I feel like I had like a five-hour conversation about Game of Thrones. I've never even seen an episode of Game of Thrones. Any dolphins? Any dolphins anywhere? Oh, right. No. There's nothing else to do. Dolphins, come on, dolphins. We need you now. Come on, dolphins. Come on, dolphins. Come on, dolphins. To kick in. Dolphins.

See a piece of seaweed, it would look like a dolphin. A wave that looks like a dolphin. I have to say that everything looks like a dolphin to me right now. There are days like that. Dolphins! Oh yeah, they are right there. Woo! Woo!

All of a sudden out on the water we see one fin, two fins, three fins, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Oh, there's so many of them and they're so cool. As we're all standing there watching them, Denise turns to me and she goes, "You wanna go in?"

I don't know. Do you recommend it? And I was not prepared for her to say that. And also, I was holding recording equipment and everything. And so I just, I ended up just having to go in, like, in my clothes. Like, wearing, like, my shorts and, like, a bra. And I had, like, all modesty thrown aside. They were like, you can go in. And I was like, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Go on. Jesus Christ. Here I go. We'll be right back.

Hey, I'm Jadabumran. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radio Lab, and today... The show's called Hello. Back to Lynn. I mean, it's a total sensory shift. The temperature changes, everything goes quiet. It almost feels like this, like, classic through-the-looking-glass moment, where you, like, you go through the looking glass and, like, everybody's walking on the ceiling. Uh-huh.

And I jumped in and there were two pretty big dolphins coming right at me, like maybe two feet from my head and staring at me. And I was like, I don't know what to do. What did you do? I stayed very still. I...

Pretty much froze. Now, how far were they from you? Two feet. Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah. Dolphins are not small, and they were looking at me in a way that was like, we see you. And also, they make these sort of clicking, sonary sounds, which are like... Do you think they were talking to you or just talking about you? Well, no. I mean, what I think they were doing is...

is sonaring me, sort of looking at me with sound. I mean, my head was vibrating. I mean, they can see not just body shape, they can see your bones. They can see into you, like you really feel looked at. Wow. It was heart-stopping. That was un-f***ing-believable. I thought it was way too cool. It was so cool. At that point, I was like the Trip Cadet, and I go home happy. Wow.

You know, and everybody was like, calm down. Those weren't even the right dolphins. What do you mean? Well, those were bottlenose dolphins. Denise studies spotteds. But the next day. All right, onward for spotteds. Spotteds are bust. We set out again, go for a few hours. Bethany does this dolphin dance. Leaking, energetic. And. Got some. Yeah. The dance worked. The dance worked. You saw them, right? Yeah, right there. Yeah, there we go.

So then, everybody's like, you know, it's like all hands on deck situation. Everybody's like strapping on the boxes and strapping on headphones.

So there's a lot of scrambling. There's so much scrambling. There's one off the bow here. It's like a fire drill. Now, I'm putting on my box. Here's the problem. I'm just testing. Unlike a captive dolphin, wild dolphins, they have other things to do. They have, you know, fish to catch. You kind of have to entice it into having a conversation. Otherwise, it'll just swim away. But how do you do that when you don't know its language?

Well, turns out dolphins are just crazy for scarves. Scarf high. Scarf low. When you throw them a scarf, they sweep it up with their tail fin and then they let it go and it wafts through the water and another dolphin comes up and sweeps it up with their rostrum. So the idea is you use the scarf as kind of like a bridge.

Denise and another diver will get in the water with a scarf. We'll get in the water and we'll just start... Passing it back and forth. It's human to human. Like, hey, look at this fun thing we're doing. Let them watch. If they want to get in the game, we let them in the game. Sometimes we'll take the toy over to them, show it to them, and press the word for scarf. Say, hey, this is a scarf. They just made up a whistle for scarf? Yep. And ideally, and this is the key, the dolphins will pick up the word and use it too to ask for the scarf. If and when they do that...

Then you've got like a tiny bit of common ground that you can build on. Okay. Who you got? We have four spotted dolphins. We are little candidates.

Yes, you've been waiting for them, right? We have. Just before they jump in, Denise walks another diver through the game plan. So you're gonna hold it and you're not gonna give it to them. You're gonna entice it with them. You're gonna be like, "Oh, this is so nice!" And I dive down with it and wave it? Yeah, first start at the surface and just really get them with you. Moments later... All clear? Good, we're ready. Denise jumps in, followed by three other divers.

Were you in the water this time? No, I actually had to watch the whole thing from the deck. And, like, you could see from the surface three or four adolescent dolphins. See, Denise is right up next to one of them. You see the back of her head and her little snorkel. That's good. She's surrounded right now. What are they doing? I'm not sure.

Oh, they're kind of like twisting around each other. I will say this. She is tremendously graceful in the water. She gets in the water and she's like totally at home. So maybe she is a dolphin. She might secretly be a dolphin. Going like around and around. And there she goes under. Man, what is happening under there? This is what it sounds like underwater. This is the actual sound from the scarf dance? They record everything that goes on under there. Oh.

I mean, a lot of that is the dolphins just doing whatever they're doing. But some of it is Denise with the box making this scarf whistle over and over. Like, scarf. You want the scarf? Yeah? Scarf? Because she's like trying to get the dolphin to say the word, right? Yeah.

Eventually, she and the dolphins surface and... He's got the scarf right here. He's got the scarf! One of the dolphins is holding the scarf. Hey! It's like this flash of red. And then they all go back under. And if Denise comes back up with it, that's real good. All right, wait and see. After about a minute, she surfaces. I think Denise has it now. Got it. She dives one more time.

A minute later, dolphin has the scarf. And this went on and on. They were passing it back and forth so fluidly that I thought, maybe the dolphin has begun to ask for the scarf by name. Eventually, Denise gets... Gravity sucks! ...hauled back up onto the boat. And we all just sort of gather around like, well, well... Yeah, the two juveniles picked up the scarf right away and...

We played some signature whistles and we played some scarf whistles and then some sargassum came floating by. Piece of seaweed. Showed him that and played the sargassum whistle. You think he got any mimic? Nothing that triggered the system, but, you know, we'll see what it looks like. It's exhausting. Wait, she didn't get anything? Well, I mean, nothing the box recognized as a match. You know, nothing that indicated the dolphin, like, learned a word. It sounded like they were right there. But there was this one thing that happened. She said that when she...

addressed one of the dolphins by its name. The dolphin turned around and looked at her and kind of cocked its little dolphin head. Really? Yes. ♪

I was hoping that you'd say that. Wow. Also, there was this moment where Thad and Celeste were looking at the data later. Who is that? And they saw that right after Denise made her signature whistle... Is that somebody responding with their signature whistle? Another dolphin made its signature whistle. Sweet. Whoa, that's pretty cool. You mean like she said hi and it said hi back? Yeah. That's amazing. Well, maybe. I mean...

The thing is, dolphins make their signature whistles all the time. So it could be nothing. Or it could be this moment. I mean, she's a very rigorous scientist. Like, she wants that to happen another 30 times before even starting to take it seriously. But still, it does make you think about the possibilities. What do you want to ask? I don't know. I want to ask everything. Like what?

I'd like to know what their lives are like when we're not around. I mean, how do you spend your day, you know? Do they think about things? I mean, do they think about the future? Do they think about the past? I mean, we know they have long-term memories, you know. Do they remember their calves from 10 years ago? Do they think about death? Yeah, they certainly see it. It'd be anything you'd ask your friends, right? Hmm. Although part of me wonders, like,

Are they ever going to even get there? What do you mean? Well, if the goal is to have a conversation, and you're going to do it this way where you're in the wild, and you can't touch them, and you've got to verify every whistle 35 times, well, are they ever actually going to have a conversation? Well, because this is like day one of the language lesson. I could get here. Yeah, I get it. But don't you feel like Margaret was... All the problems of that experiment aside, she was actually getting somewhere with Peter? Like they were actually having a real exchange? In the moment, perhaps. But thinking forward...

I believe that what you can accomplish by talking, by having a two-way conversation, is just infinitely greater. And I totally agree. But if it's taken her 30-something years to get to a maybe hello. Yeah. She doesn't even know if she got to hello yet. And...

If all she has is just a limited amount of time with these dolphins every summer, then 50 more times is going to take her 50 more years. And I'm just like, oh, God, the planet's going to be 17 degrees warmer by that point. Dolphins are going to have all migrated to some other spot. It just feels like, oh, come on. Just get in a pool and let the dolphin hold your foot. She's already got the hello going for her, maybe. So that's like a start. And then, yes, in 50 years, she may have moved past hello to hello.

A three-word sentence. How's your mackerel today? Yeah, I think that too. A three-word sentence, yes. I would put money on a three-word sentence in 50 years. The question is, do we ever get to the point of... Exploring death. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. Lynn, do you have faith? I have faith that if Denise continues with what she's doing, that we'll be able to talk about...

concrete things. We'll be able to talk about seaweed and we'll be able to talk about coral and we'll be able to have a scintillating conversation about scarves. I do believe that and that is not nothing. I mean, that is pretty impressive in its own way. Big thanks this hour to our producer, Lynn Levy. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. Thank you guys for listening. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler.

Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhujana Sambandham, Matt Kilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khary,

Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Carolyn McCusker and Sarah Sonbach. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Adam Chabill.

This is Amanda Darby calling from Rockville, Maryland. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Science Reporting on Radiolab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.

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