I wrote this after keeping Lilly’s Dolphins & Men at my bedside for several years: it’s a very ‘browsable’ book, sort of mind blowing, and if I ever take Ketamine it will be due to Lilly’s influence…
Margaret’s account of the incident reads like a seduction…
Dr. John C. Lilly, whose research into psychedelic drugs and sensory deprivation inspired the movie Altered States, was a gifted scientist, a polymath who made significant contributions in several fields. Lilly’s abiding obsession was communication with dolphins. He studied them for several decades and his beliefs about them evolved considerably; he eventually came to believe that communication between men and dolphins was impeded not by the dolphin’s supposedly inferior intelligence, but rather, by the radically different marine environment which formed that intelligence. Dolphin brains, after all, are as complex as human brains and 20% larger, and in all the animal kingdom, dolphins and humans are the two mammals with the highest brain to body weight ratios. It’s true that humans are virtuoso tool users compared to dolphins, but it’s also true that dolphins pass information amongst themselves at rates up to 20 times faster than do humans. It’s hard to measure pure intelligence apart from psychology; can we be certain that we’re not underestimating dolphins simply because they’re different?
In one attempt to bridge the gap, Lilly constructed a watery apartment in which Margaret, a human, and Peter, a dolphin, lived together for up to ten weeks at a time. Their cohabitation was difficult at first. It seems that dolphins, in nature, are accustomed to near constant erotic play and that Peter’s unrelieved sexual tension made him so boisterous that Margaret was unable to work with him. Interestingly, it was Peter, not Margaret, who resolved the dilemma. Over a period of several weeks he gradually accustomed Margaret to the touch of his extremely sharp teeth—an erogenous zone for dolphins—and eventually persuaded her to relieve him manually. Frankly, Margaret’s account of the incident reads like a seduction, with Peter using tactics familiar to many teenaged boys. But it worked; he and Margaret learned to talk to each other with great precision, attaining to possibly the most profound inter-species communication ever achieved.
I know that that communication was important, but I can’t get past the sex bit. Peter, thrust against his will into an alien environment and forced to interact with an exceedingly strange animal, was nevertheless able to get precisely what he wanted and needed from that strange animal; who, exactly, was training who?
I believe the episode proves Lilly’s point – dolphins may well be our intellectual equals, or even our superiors. But our world views are so intensely different that communication is nearly impossible – at least for us. Some dolphins have learned up to 50 human words, but humans have yet to utter a single syllable of delphinese; from their points of view, we’re the ones who are slow.
Lilly’s experiments in human-dolphin cohabitation took place in the 60s and have not been repeated since. I find this inexpressibly sad. There is, perhaps, another intelligent species on this planet, a race of peaceful beings who could end our long loneliness. If we could speak with them freely, we ourselves might be transformed… but we’re no longer trying very hard.
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