website- For quite a long time, experts have studied the language of dolphins and obtained truly amazing results. As is known, sound signals occur in the nasal canal of dolphins at the moment air passes through it.

It was possible to establish that animals use sixty basic signals and five levels of their combination. Dolphins are able to create a “dictionary” of 1012 words! It is unlikely that dolphins use so many “words,” but the volume of their active “vocabulary” is impressive - about 14 thousand signals. For comparison: the same number of words makes up the average human vocabulary. And in Everyday life people get by with 800-1000 words.

Dolphin communication is expressed in sound pulses and ultrasound. Dolphins make a wide range of different sounds: whistling, chirping, buzzing, squeaking, squealing, smacking, clicking, grinding, popping, roaring, screaming, creaking, etc. The most expressive is whistling, the variety of which numbers several dozen. Each of them means a certain phrase (alarm, pain, call, greeting, warning, etc.) American scientists have come to the conclusion that each dolphin in the school has its own name, and the individual responds to it when relatives address the dolphin. No other animal has such an ability.

Dolphin intelligence

The dolphin brain is similar in weight to the human brain. Size doesn't matter in this case. Swiss scientists who conducted research on the abilities of animals found that dolphins rank second after humans in terms of intelligence. The elephants were third, and the monkeys took only fourth place. Not inferior in weight to the brain of an adult, the brain of a dolphin has a more complex structure of cerebral convolutions.

Many scientists these days conduct various experiments with dolphins and come to unexpected conclusions.

In particular, the theory that dolphins, unlike other representatives of the animal world, use “their own language” - not only to communicate at the level of the survival instinct, but also to accumulate and assimilate significant amounts of information. The question is why do they need this - if they lack “intelligent life” in human understanding. A lot of research is being carried out in this direction.

An important aspect is that dolphins “see” with their ears. By emitting ultrasound, they scan the object, thus obtaining some kind of visual image. The hearing of these mammals is hundreds of times sharper than that of humans. He is able to hear the sounds of his fellow creatures hundreds and sometimes thousands of kilometers away.

Their dolphin ear sensitivity level ranges from 10 Hz to 196 kHz. Perhaps the low frequency limit is even lower. None Living being on Earth does not have such a wide frequency range.

With the so-called acoustic sounding of space, dolphins generate about 20-40 signals per second (in extreme situations up to 500). That is, information is processed every second, comparable to the power of the most complex computers developed by man (Boris. F. Sergeev “Living Ocean Locators”).

It is assumed that from this kaleidoscope of information the surrounding space and all the objects in it are reproduced, its information content not comparable to our usual visual perception.

It is worth considering that a person receives 90 percent of information through visual signal processing. So dolphins get it through auditory and echolocation. Moreover, at such a level at which a person cannot yet even create technical devices.

"Language" of dolphins

The speech of dolphins - all sorts of “unreasonable” sounds from the human point of view are already based on, again, scientific experiments, is considered in terms of complexity as any human language.

Russian scientists Markov and Ostrovskaya, studying the speech of dolphins, came to the conclusion that it exceeds human speech in terms of complexity.

Modern languages ​​have the following structure: sound, syllable and word. What speech consists of. When analyzing the sounds made by dolphins, 6 levels of complexity were identified, which has a structure similar to ancient, forgotten languages. Such languages ​​are based on something like language hieroglyphs. When behind one sound designation (sound, syllable) - in such languages, there is an equivalent of a semantic phrase in our understanding. In the case of dolphins, this is a certain whistle.

In the speech of dolphins, mathematical patterns were also discovered that are characteristic of written texts according to the hierarchy of information arrangement: phrase, paragraph, section, chapter.

Learning ability

What are the intellectual abilities of dolphins? First of all, it is worth noting that he is a quick learner sea ​​creatures. Dolphins sometimes learn to follow commands even faster than dogs. It is enough for the dolphin to show the trick 2-3 times, and he will easily repeat it. In addition, dolphins also show creative abilities. Thus, the animal is not only capable of fulfilling the trainer’s instructions, but also performing some other tricks in the process. Another surprising property of the dolphin brain is that it never sleeps. Right and left hemisphere brains rest alternately. After all, a dolphin must always be on alert: avoid predators and periodically float to the surface to breathe.

Dolphins have truly amazing abilities. The famous American neurophysiologist John Lilly, one of the pioneers who studied brain physiology at the University of Pennsylvania, called dolphins a “parallel civilization.”

John Lill came close to establishing vocal contact with these animals. While studying tape recordings that recorded all conversations and sounds in the dolphinarium, the researcher noticed an explosive and pulsating series of signals. It was like laughing! Moreover, in the tape recordings made in the absence of people, some words that belonged to the operators and were spoken by them during the working day slipped in a very compressed form! However, the process of teaching dolphins human language did not go further. Thinking about the reasons for this, Lilly came up with a stunning guess: they were bored with people!

Dolphin therapy

Actively used in modern medicine, official research confirms the following facts.

The fact that the patient is in an altered state of consciousness during the session is confirmed by electroencephalographic data (measurements are usually taken before the session and immediately after it). The rhythms of the human brain slow down significantly, the dominant EEG frequency decreases, and the electrical activity of both hemispheres of the brain is synchronized. A similar state is typical for meditation, autogenic immersion, hypnotic trance, and holotropic breathing. In addition, psychoimmunological studies have proven that during dolphin therapy sessions the production of endorphins significantly increases. Endorphins help harmonize nervous system and set her up for an active and positive worldview.

Anyone who has ever met dolphins will forever remember their interaction with these unique and amazing animals. Affectionate, playful and quick-witted, they do not resemble anything dangerous predators, but that’s what they really are. But their love for people is so great that they never show us their skills as one of the most powerful inhabitants depths of the sea.

Man has been studying the habits and intelligence of dolphins for a very long time, but most likely the dolphin has managed to study humans much better. After all, he is much older than modern Homo Sapiens - his age is more than 70 million years. And by the way, the origin of dolphins, which explains the highly developed mental abilities of this species, is no less covered in legends than the appearance of humans on earth.

Channeling with Dolphins We give energy for health and development

Heirs of Atlantis

The fact that dolphins were once land dwellers has been known to scientists for quite a long time. They left the water, but over time, for an unknown reason, they returned to it again. Science is not yet able to explain exactly when and how this happened. Although, perhaps, when a person finds a common language with these amazing creatures of nature, they themselves will tell us their story, because their collective intelligence and the ability to transfer knowledge from one individual to another suggests that dolphins may have their own story.

Recent studies by Australian scientists, which compared the DNA of humans and dolphins, make it possible to claim that they are our closest relatives. Perhaps they are simply a parallel branch of evolution that separated from the main species about a quarter of a million years ago.

And on the basis of these studies, the ancient legend was continued - that dolphins are the descendants of the people who inhabited Atlantis. When this highly developed civilization sank to the bottom of the ocean, who knows what happened to its inhabitants? Maybe they turned into inhabitants of the deep sea, forever preserving the memory of past life and love for a person as his own heir?

And even if this is nothing more than a beautiful legend, the similarity of the brain, intelligence and basic DNA structures does not allow us to abandon it completely - after all, we have something in common, which means there must be a logical explanation for this fact.

BBC. Secrets of the sea depths. The magical world of dolphins

Dolphins: relatives or ancestors of humanity?

Ichthyologists who have devoted their lives to studying the phenomenon of dolphins claim that they occupy the second place in terms of intelligence development after humans. Our "Darwinian" ancestors, apes, by the way, occupy only the fourth step in this hierarchy. The average weight of an adult dolphin's brain is 1.5-1.7 kilograms, which is an order of magnitude greater than the size of the human brain. At the same time, their body-to-brain size ratio is much higher than that of the same chimpanzees, and the high level of organization within the team and the complex chain of relationships allows us to speak of the presence of a special “dolphin civilization.”

And testing for the level of mental development showed amazing results - the dolphins scored only 19 points less than the representatives human race. And this despite the fact that the tests were developed by people and for people. That is, dolphins are characterized by excellent analytical abilities coupled with an excellent understanding of human thinking.

Thanks largely to this, neurophysiologist John Lilly, well-known in scientific circles, who worked with dolphins for a long period, argued that they would be the first representatives of the terrestrial animal world to establish conscious contact with human civilization. Communication will be facilitated by the fact that dolphins have their own highly developed language, excellent memory and cognitive abilities, which allow them to accumulate and transmit knowledge in “oral” form from generation to generation. Scientists suggest that if they had limbs adapted for writing, dolphins would easily master writing, their minds are so similar to those of humans.

All this data involuntarily gives rise to assumptions that dolphins are not just a side branch of human development. It is quite possible that it was they, and not monkeys at all, who became the progenitors modern people, first emerging from the water onto land to give birth to a new life, and then going back to the seabed to enable man to follow his own path of development.

This assumption is supported by interesting facts, telling about how dolphins in conditions wildlife save a person. Many seafarers who were shipwrecked or simply had the misfortune of encountering sharks tell how dolphins spent hours driving hungry sharks away from them, preventing them from approaching a person, and helping them swim to the saving shore. This attitude is typical for dolphins in relation to their own offspring - perhaps they perceive humans as their cubs in trouble?

Another scientifically established fact that speaks in favor of the unconditional superiority of dolphins over other representatives of the animal world is their monogamy. If all other inhabitants of the wild create pairs only for the mating period and easily change partners, then dolphins choose their “husband” for life. They live in real families - with children and the elderly, caring for relatives who are weak and defenseless due to age or health.

The absence of polygamy, typical of the animal world, suggests that dolphins are at a higher level of development than other representatives of the terrestrial fauna. And by the way, they are the only ones who do not confirm the popular psychological myth about the polygamous essence of human nature - after all, they, our closest relatives, live in strong families.

Laura Sheremetyeva - What do dolphins sing to us about. Body of Light. Interesting

Are the abilities of dolphins miracles of nature or a parallel to human development?

• It is very difficult to list all the talents inherent in this type of living beings - their diversity can shake the imagination of even experienced researchers of the animal world. Every year people learn more and more about what these mysterious sea inhabitants know and can do.
• First of all, their fine hearing is unique to all living nature. Having gone to live in the water column for the second time, the dolphins were faced with the fact that visibility in it was much lower than in the air. But having adapted quickly enough, they became the owners of more than just fine hearing. After all, in order to perfectly navigate in water over long distances, it is not enough just to be able to transmit sound, you need to be able to make those objects “sound” for which this is unusual.
• To do this, dolphins use a sound wave - a short click they make, which, having reached any obstacle, returns under water in the form of a kind of echo. This location pulse propagates in water at a speed of up to one and a half thousand meters per second. Accordingly, the closer the object, the sooner the “sound reflection” will return from it. The intelligence of dolphins makes it possible to estimate this period of time with phenomenal accuracy, and, consequently, determine the distance to the expected obstacle.
• At the same time, one dolphin, having received similar information about an approaching obstacle or about a large school of fish within reach, transmits this data to its fellows using special sound signals, and over quite long distances. Moreover, each dolphin in a pod is able to distinguish all its members by characteristic vocal intonations, and each of them has its own name. During the experiments, it was found that the level of language development allows one dolphin to use sounds to explain to its fellows what actions need to be performed to get food. For example, during training, they successfully shared information that if you press the left pedal, a fish will fall out, and if you press the right pedal, nothing will happen.
• At the same time, they also have very developed abilities for onomatopoeia - they can copy anything - from the sound of wheels to the singing of birds, and with such a degree of similarity that it is almost impossible to distinguish in a sound recording where the real sound is and where the “speech” of a dolphin is. Training with copying human speech also revealed the ability of dolphins to imitate it.
• If we talk about the ability of these marine mammals to distinguish colors and shapes of objects, as well as analytical abilities, then here dolphins have left far behind all animal world planets. Thus, they easily distinguish three-dimensional forms from flat ones, distinguish a huge range of colors (only blue causes difficulty), and can easily determine where to look for a particular object.
• A very interesting experiment was conducted with dolphins by Soviet scientists. The animal was shown the ball and then hidden behind a screen. When the screen opened, two objects appeared behind it - a voluminous box and a round flat shield. When the rope tied to them was pulled, the ball fell into the pool. Almost all animals would pay attention to the round shape of the shield and would begin to look for the ball in it, not paying attention to the volume. But not a single dolphin made a mistake - they always correctly chose the box the first time, realizing that it was impossible to hide a voluminous ball in a flat object.
• At the same time, dolphins are not only capable students, capable of repeating even the most complex tasks after their trainer. They are also good teachers who can teach a sequence of actions or a difficult trick to their relatives. Moreover, the rest of the dolphins in the school do not adopt new knowledge under the influence of hierarchical requirements or under coercion - they do this out of curiosity and love for everything new. A lot of cases have been recorded where a member of a pod who had lived for a certain time in a dolphinarium could then teach everything he had learned there to his fellow tribesmen.

Dolphins are brave explorers

• Unlike many other marine animals, they always know how to find the optimal balance between caution and curiosity. They are able to protect themselves from the dangers posed by the inhabitants of the deep sea. So, while exploring new territories, they put a sea sponge on their nose, which protects them from the electrical discharges of stingrays or the burning stings of poisonous jellyfish.
• Dolphins are also capable of experiencing completely human feelings of jealousy, resentment, and love. Moreover, they will express them quite accessible to humans. For example, a young female, feeling jealous of a new trainer or just a curious person (most often female), will try with all her might to push the “homewrecker” away from her partner, while accurately calculating the strength of her actions. She will not cause pain or injure a person, but she will definitely make it clear that the presence of this lady near her beloved is extremely undesirable.
• Neither aggression nor pain are applicable in matters of training dolphins - the animal stops communicating with the offender, turns away from him and demonstrates his indignation at such treatment. It is almost impossible to return an animal to a pair with such a trainer, which once again It also confirms that they have long-term memory, capable of storing information for quite a long time.
• Well, perhaps the most amazing fact, which shows that the intelligence of dolphins is very close to that of humans, is their use in conditions natural environment habitat of labor tools. In order to remove fish from cracks in the rocks, they clamp some stick or dead fish in their teeth and use them to push the hidden specimen into open water. This unique ability to use “improvised” objects to perform complex actions clearly resembles the stage of human development in which he first turned to the help of primitive tools.

And who knows, perhaps soon people will learn to talk with dolphins and this dialogue will open up new knowledge about the world. And the person will learn navigation, the ability to find out the weather and escape from sea ​​predators not from boring textbooks, but from living experts in the secrets of the underwater kingdom.

Laboratory of hypnosis. Regressive Hypnosis. Dolphins. How to give birth to a gifted child. Laboratory of Hypnosis.

For decades now, scientists have been trying to understand exactly how the dolphin's brain works. Capable of learning, with their own social skills and a clear understanding of human behavior, these mammals seem to have come from another planet - they are so different from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Over the past fifty million years, dolphin brains have developed to unprecedented sizes. One of the latest published studies, authored by marine biologist Laurie Marino, argues that dolphins and whales underwent reverse evolution, returning from land to ocean depths. Here are a few facts that fully support these bold conclusions.

Dream
Sleep deprivation kills any living thing - as surely as a gunshot wound. Just twelve days without rest is enough for a highly organized brain to turn off its main functions. But dolphins have learned to deceive the system: these amazing mammals They know how to turn off, at will, half of the brain so that it can rest.

Language
Dolphins remain the only creatures in the world (except for humans, of course) that have their own language. They communicate using a complex combination of clicks and sounds. Moreover, the language of dolphins is complex enough to accurately coordinate the behavior of the entire pod. Researchers estimate the linguistic reserve of an ordinary dolphin at 8 thousand “words” - for an average person it is only 14 thousand, despite the fact that in ordinary life Only about 1-2 thousand words are used.

Logical thinking
Scientists have found that dolphins have the rudiments of logical thinking. This is the highest form of intelligence development that no one expected to find in mammals. Dolphins turned out to be able to solve various difficult riddles, find answers to complex questions and even adjust your behavior depending on new circumstances set by the person.

Dimensions
The brain of an adult dolphin weighs more than the human brain - 1700 grams and 1400 grams, respectively. In addition, dolphins have twice as many convolutions in their cerebral cortex as ours.

Self-awareness
The latest data obtained by scientists may indeed indicate that dolphins have a serious social structure. They have not only self-awareness (something other animals can boast of), but also social awareness, practiced in conjunction with emotional empathy.

Echolocation
The total number of nerve cells in a dolphin is higher than in humans. This is partly explained by the ability of mammals to echolocation: they literally see with their ears. An acoustic lens located on its head focuses ultrasound, which the dolphin uses to “feel” underwater objects, determining their shape.

Magnetic feeling
Another amazing property of the dolphin’s brain was the ability to sense magnetic poles. Dolphins and whales have been found to have special magnetic crystals in their brains that help these mammals navigate the vastness of the world's oceans. The same feature may also explain the reasons why whales wash ashore: guided by the readings of their GPS, they simply do not notice it.

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What kind of brain does a dolphin have?

The brain of a 300-pound (about 135 kilogram) dolphin weighs 1,700 grams, while that of a human weighs 65 to 70 kg. - 1400 gr. In addition, the dolphin has twice as many convolutions in the cerebral cortex, although in a cubic millimeter of its substance there are relatively few neurons, in any case fewer than in the brain of primates. Therefore, one must beware of jumping to conclusions, especially in comparison with humans. However, who knows, maybe dolphins will be able to catch up and surpass primates in intelligence.

Magazine: Fisherman

Neuroscientists believe that the dolphin's brain is on the same level as the human brain and is potentially capable of the same things as human brain. Such an organ, according to the American physiologist John Lilly, provides dolphins with verbal communication with each other and in the future will allow them to speak meaningfully with humans. Lilly assumes that there is a critical brain size (1 kg), below which language is impossible. The bottlenose dolphin has an average brain weight of 1700 g. This is more than the average human (1400 g). The difficulty of verbal communication between a person and a dolphin is explained by the fact that a person hears only a small part of the signals of the second: after all, the range of perception of frequencies in dolphins is 10 times higher than in people.

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Over the past 47 million years, dolphins' brains have developed to sizes unprecedented in other animals. A new, most extensive study of the fossil remains of these marine inhabitants aims to describe the dynamics of the corresponding evolutionary development. Indirectly, this may help to find an answer to the question of how people themselves became so “brainy.”

As you know, dolphins are capable of “intellectual feats” that are inaccessible to other animals. So, they can recognize themselves in the mirror, like humans and some higher primates. Of course, everything this is associated with truly gigantic size dolphin brain. Thus, in some species the ratio of brain mass to total body mass can only be compared with that of humans. But at what rate the brain of dolphins developed remained a mystery until now.

Three researchers, led by American biologist Lori Marino from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, tracked the evolutionary changes in the dolphin brain using fossil remains.

After four years of working among museum collections, this team of scientists identified 66 fossil skulls of dolphin ancestors, adding to the five previously studied. The brain sizes of these specimens were calculated using methods computed tomography(computed tomography - CT), and estimates of the animals' body weights were obtained by analyzing the size of the bones at the base of the skulls.

Fossil skulls dating back up to 47 million years have been studied. They were compared with 144 modern specimens, resulting in the calculation of the so-called EQ(encephalisation quotient - “braininess coefficient”) of each such creature. This coefficient connects the brain mass of a particular specimen with the average value of a particular species of animal of similar size, and if EQ is less than one, then this means that we are dealing with an “underdeveloped” creature, but if EQ > 1, then the brain considered relatively large. In this sense, humans are “more brainy” than all other animals; they have an EQ coefficient of approximately 7.

Residual elements in the skeletons of dolphins confirm that they descended from some kind of land-based four-legged mammals.

Blood tests suggested that cetaceans, which include dolphins, and ungulates are related. Once upon a time they returned from land to the water element (perhaps this was due to some kind of global catastrophe), eventually losing their hind limbs and acquiring fins.

Approximately 35 million years ago, these pinnipeds were the size of a small whale- approximately 9 meters in length, had sharp teeth and an EQ of about 0.5.

And from this moment on, a mysterious change occurs: the old species inexplicably die out, replaced by a new group called Odontoceti (a suborder of toothed whales).

A new study shows that all these creatures were much smaller than before, had smaller teeth, but their brain size increased dramatically. Their EQ jumped to 2,5 - a phenomenon that Marino associates with the development of echolocation skills, that is, the use of sound waves to determine the location of objects under water.

The study also shows that approximately 8 of the 67 species of Odontoceti (including dolphins) went through a second stage of EQ elevation approximately 15 million years ago, reaching rates 4 And 5 , although the reasons for this second evolutionary leap remain completely unclear.

There is only one such case of "explosive" development of "mental abilities" among large animals known to scientists today: over five million years of human history, EQ increased from approximately 2.5 to 7. At the same time, the "mental abilities" of the remaining part of the "dolphin tribe" “For some reason, on the contrary, they decreased.

"There is a myth according to which the development of life forms is always accompanied by an increase in brain size,- says Marino. - However, from the point of view of animal metabolism (metabolism), mental abilities are very expensive, and therefore, according to the logic of evolutionary development, you need to have some extremely compelling reasons in order to “get” yourself a big brain.”. She adds that, according to another scientific myth, only one kind of creature can evolve at the same time and in the same place. big brain. However new job shows that for 15 million years, many different species of dolphins and whales coexisted safely in the ocean together.

Contact between humans and dolphins is one of the favorite plots of science fiction. Moreover, the intelligence of dolphins in literature has become such a commonplace that, according to a number of American authors (Larry Niven, David Brin, etc.), in the future dolphins, together with people, will even be able to explore and populate the Galaxy.