Why do dolphins have such a large brain? Human and dolphin brain - description, characteristics, comparison and interesting facts Mental abilities of dolphins.

Any person who has met dolphins at least once will forever remember his communication with these unique and amazing animals. Affectionate, playful and quick-witted, they are nothing like dangerous predators, and 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 strongest residents. sea depths.

Man has been studying the habits and intelligence of dolphins for a very long time, but, most likely, the dolphin managed to study the man much better. After all, it is much older than modern Homo Sapiens - its 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 fanned with legends no less than the appearance of man on earth.

Channeling with Dolphins We give energy for health and development

Heirs of Atlantis

The fact that once dolphins were inhabitants of the land has been known to scientists for a long time. They left the water, but, over time, for some unknown reason, returned to it again. To explain exactly when and how this happened, science is not yet able to do. 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 history.

Recently conducted by Australian scientists, studies that compared the DNA of humans and dolphins make it possible to assert that they are our closest relatives. Perhaps they are just a parallel branch of evolution that split off from the main species about a quarter of a million years ago.

And on the basis of these studies, the old legend was continued - that dolphins are the descendants of the people who inhabited Atlantis. When this highly developed civilization went 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 for one's 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 completely abandon it - after all, we have something in common, so there must be a logical explanation for this fact.

BBC. Secrets of the sea depths. Magic world of dolphins

Dolphins: relatives or progenitors of mankind?

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

And conducting tests for the level of mental development showed amazing results - dolphins scored only 19 points less than representatives of 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.

Largely due to this, John Lilly, a well-known neurophysiologist in scientific circles, who worked with dolphins for a long period, argued that they would be the first representatives of the terrestrial animal world who would 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 mind is so similar to the human one.

All this data unwittingly 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 leaving the water on land to give rise to a new life, and then again going to the seabed to enable a person to go his own way of development.

This assumption is also supported by the most interesting facts about how dolphins in conditions wildlife save a person. Many sailors who were shipwrecked or simply had the misfortune to collide with sharks tell how dolphins drove away hungry sharks from them for hours, preventing them from approaching a person, and helped them swim to the saving shore. Such an attitude is typical for dolphins in relation to their own offspring - perhaps they perceive a person as their cub in trouble?

Another scientifically established fact that speaks in favor of the unconditional superiority of dolphins over the rest 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, taking care of relatives who are weak and defenseless due to their age or state of health.

The absence of polygamy, typical of the animal world, suggests that dolphins are at a higher stage 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 about. Body of Light. Interesting

Are dolphin abilities a miracle 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 a person learns more and more about what these mysterious marine inhabitants know and can do.
First of all, their subtle hearing is unique to all wildlife. Having left for the second time to live in the water column, the dolphins were faced with the fact that visibility in it is much lower than in the air. But having adapted quickly enough, they became the owners of not just fine hearing. After all, in order to perfectly navigate in the water over long distances, it is not enough just to be able to transmit sound, you need to be able to make those objects that are unusual for “sound” “sound”.
To do this, dolphins use a sound wave - a short click they make, which, having reached an obstacle, returns under water in the form of a kind of echo. This location pulse propagates in water at a speed of up to 1,500 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, to determine the distance to the alleged obstacle.
At the same time, one dolphin, having received such information about an approaching obstacle or about a large school of fish within reach, betrays this data to its fellows using special sound signals, and at sufficiently large distances. At the same time, each dolphin in the flock is able to distinguish all its members by their characteristic voice intonations, and each of them has its own name. In the course of the experiments, it was found that the level of language development allows one dolphin to explain to his fellows with the help of sounds what action needs to be performed to obtain 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, then nothing will happen.
At the same time, their onomatopoeia abilities are also very developed - 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 on a sound recording where the real sound is and where the "speech" of the dolphin is almost impossible. 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 analyzer abilities, here dolphins have left the whole world far behind. animal world planets. So, they easily distinguish three-dimensional forms from flat ones, distinguish between a huge range of colors (only blue causes difficulty), they can easily determine where to look for a particular object.
An experiment conducted with dolphins by Soviet scientists is very interesting. The ball was shown to the animal, and then it was hidden behind the shirima. When the screen was opened, two objects appeared behind it - a voluminous box and a round flat shield. When sipping on a rope tied to them, the ball fell into the pool. Almost all animals would pay attention to the round shape of the shield and would start looking for the ball in it, not paying attention to the volume. But not a single dolphin was mistaken - they always chose the box correctly 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, able to repeat even the most difficult tasks after the coach. They are also good teachers who know how to teach a sequence of actions or a difficult trick to their relatives. Moreover, the rest of the dolphins in the flock adopt new knowledge not under the influence of hierarchical requirements or under duress - they do it out of curiosity and love for everything new. A lot of cases have been recorded when a member of the pack who lived for a certain time in the dolphinarium could then teach his fellow tribesmen everything he learned there.

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 that are fraught with the inhabitants of the deep sea. So, while exploring new territories, they put a sea sponge on their nose, which protects them from electric discharges of stingrays or the burning bites of poisonous jellyfish.
Dolphins are also capable of experiencing quite human feelings of jealousy, resentment, love. Moreover, they will express them quite accessible to a person. For example, a young female who is jealous of a new coach or just a curious person (and most often a female) will do her best to push the “homeowner” away from her partner, while accurately calculating the strength of her actions. She will not hurt or injure a person, but she will definitely make it clear that the presence of this lady near her beloved is highly undesirable.
Both aggression and pain are not applicable in matters of dolphin training - 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 confirms that they have a long-term memory capable of storing information for a sufficiently long time.
Well, perhaps the most amazing fact, which indicates that the mind of dolphins is very close to the human, is their use in conditions natural environment habitation of tools. In order to extract fish from cracks in the rocks, they clamp some kind of stick or dead fish in their teeth and use them to push the hidden specimen into open water. This unique ability to use "handy" 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 for us. And a person will learn navigation, the ability to know the weather and escape from marine predators not from boring textbooks, but from living experts on the secrets of the underwater kingdom.

Hypnosis laboratory. Regressive Hypnosis. Dolphins. How to have a gifted child. Hypnosis laboratory.

Already in Ancient Greece to these marine predators treated with great respect. But are they as smart as we think? Justin Gregg conducts an investigation.

As soon as the American neurophysiologist John Lilly (John Lilly) opened the skull of a dolphin, a convex pink mass was exposed. He immediately realized that he had made an important discovery. The brain of an animal was huge: even more than a human. It was 1955. After studying the brains of five euthanized bottlenose dolphins, Lilly came to the conclusion that these fish-like aquatic mammals surely have intelligence. Possibly superior to human intelligence.

When Lilly made his discovery, the relationship between intelligence and brain size seemed simple: the larger the brain, the smarter the animal. We, with our huge brains stuffed into our swollen skulls, by this logic, naturally, turned out to be the most smart look. Therefore, the dolphins must have been smart as well. But research since then has shown that the dolphin's "claim" to be the most intelligent (apart from humans) is not so well founded. Crows, octopuses, and even insects show intelligence comparable to that of a dolphin, even though they don't even have nearly as much gray matter.

So are dolphins as smart as we think?

CE test

Encephalization Coefficient (EC) is a measure of relative brain size, calculated as the ratio of actual brain size to the average predicted brain size for a mammal of a given size. According to some measurements, the largest EC (7) is in humans, since our brain is 7 times larger than expected. Dolphins are in second place, for example, in large-toothed dolphins, the EC is approximately 5.
However, when it comes to comparing EC with the intelligent behavior of animals, the results are mixed. Large ECs correlate with the ability to adapt to a new environment or change their behavior, but not with the ability to use tools or imitate. The matter is further complicated by the growing last years criticism of the very principle of calculating the FE. Depending on the data fed into the model, humans may end up with normal brain-to-body ratios, while gorillas and orangutans have incredibly large bodies compared to standard brains.

Gray matter

The presence itself big brain- or a large EC - does not guarantee that the animal will be smart. But not only the size of the brain intrigued Lilly. Inside the skull of a dolphin, he found an outer layer of brain tissue that, just like human brain, was twisted like crumpled paper stuffed into a thimble.
The outer layer of the mammalian brain, called the cerebral cortex, in humans is involved in complex cognitive processes, including our ability to speak, as well as self-awareness. It turns out that a dolphin's cerebral cortex is larger than a human's. What could this mean?

In many species that have passed tests of self-awareness (such as the mirror test), relatively most of the cerebral cortex is located in front. It is this frontal cortex that appears to be responsible for the ability of chimpanzees, gorillas, and elephants to recognize themselves in a mirror. Dolphins also successfully passed this test. But here's the catch: they don't have a frontal cortex. Their enlarged cerebral cortex is squeezed into the area on the sides of the skull. The front of the brain remains strangely sunken. And since magpies, which also recognize themselves in the mirror, have no cortex at all, we have to scratch our heads in an attempt to figure out which parts of the brain in dolphins and magpies are responsible for self-awareness. Perhaps dolphins, like magpies, don't use their cerebral cortex to recognize themselves in a mirror. What exactly the dolphin's cerebral cortex does and why it is so large remains a mystery.

Name that whistle

This is not the only mystery surrounding the dolphin's intelligence. For many years, the debate about the mismatch of dolphin brains with their behavior has been so fierce that Canadian marine mammal specialist Lance Barrett-Lennard (Lance Barrett-Lennard) was forced to declare: “If the brain of a dolphin was the size of a walnut, this would have no effect on that their lives are complex and highly social.”

Lilly could oppose the remark about walnut. But with the idea that dolphins are socially complex creatures, he would agree. While conducting rather unpleasant invasive experiments on the brains of living dolphins, he noticed that they often call each other (using whistles) and seek comfort from each other. He considered this evidence for the theory that dolphins are social animals and that their communication system can be as complex as human language.

After 15 years, there is evidence that Lilly was not very far from the truth. During experiments, when it comes to understanding the meaning of signs and their combinations in sentences, dolphins cope with tasks almost the same as great apes. Establish two-way communication with dolphins as well as with higher primates, has not been successful so far. But the ability of dolphins to understand signs in laboratory studies is amazing.

However, Lilly's suggestion that the dolphin's communication system is as complex as ours is probably not true. In fairness, it must be said that scientists generally understand practically nothing about how dolphins communicate. But they managed to find out that dolphins have a feature that is not inherent in the rest of the animal world (with the exception of humans). Among some species of dolphins, each member of the species has its own special whistle, which he uses throughout his life and which serves as his "name".

We know that dolphins can remember the whistles of their relatives and playmates, they even remember whistles that have not been heard for 20 years. Dolphins respond when they hear their own personal whistles from others, according to new research, suggesting that dolphins call each other by name from time to time.

Lilly, of course, couldn't know that. But he could very well have witnessed just such behavior during his experiments half a century ago.

How a dolphin learns

If dolphins try to attract the attention of their relatives by calling them by name, then they are to some extent aware that they are conscious. Unlike most great apes, dolphins seem to immediately understand human pointing gestures. This suggests that they are able to correlate mental states, such as looking or pointing, with the people producing those pointing gestures. How an animal that does not have hands is able to understand the pointing gestures of a person is simply a mystery. And although there is no evidence that dolphins are fully capable of understanding the thoughts and beliefs of others (some call this a “model of consciousness”), they, wanting to draw people's attention to an object, point to it with their head.

Some awareness of their own thought processes (and the thought processes of other creatures) apparently allows dolphins to solve complex problems, as they did in the laboratory. In the wild, a female Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin has been caught removing the skeleton of a cuttlefish to make it easier to eat. This is a long process that requires planning.

When hunting, no less ingenuity can manifest itself. Wild bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia use sea sponges to drive fish out of their hiding place, a skill that has been passed down from generation to generation. Many dolphin populations learn hunting techniques from their peers. Bottlenose dolphins in South Carolina (USA) gather at the shore exposed at low tide to trap fish, while killer whales in Antarctica form groups to create waves and wash seals off the ice.

Such "social learning" is an integral part of the theory of animal culture, defined as knowledge that is passed from animal to animal. This is probably the best explanation for how young killer whales learn the dialect of their family.
One hypothesis for why dolphins have such large brains may exonerate Lilly's original ideas: it suggests that dolphins have some kind of social intelligence that makes them possible solution problems, culture and identity. Many species of dolphins live in complex societies with intricate and ever-changing alliances, the relationship between groups of males in Shark Bay is reminiscent of the plot soap opera. Living in a society riddled with political intrigue requires considerable mental ability, because you have to remember who owes you and who you can rely on. The leading theory is that dolphins developed such large brains because they needed extra "cognitive muscles" to remember all those complex social connections. This is the so-called “social brain” hypothesis.

brainy creatures

This may explain why other animals leading a complex social life, also a large brain (for example, in chimpanzees, ravens and humans). But do not completely write off the owners of a small brain with a small EC yet. Many examples complex behavior, which we see in dolphins, are also observed in species that are not included in complex social groups. A border collie named Chaser knows more than 1,000 signs for objects, a "vocabulary" the size of which would make dolphins and great apes blush when tested under similar conditions. Octopuses use coconut shells to protect themselves from predators. Goats are able to follow human pointing gestures. Fish are able to acquire a range of skills through communication with each other, including defense against predators and foraging. And ants exhibit a behavior called "tandem running," which is probably the best example of non-human learning.

Lars Chittka, an insect behavior scientist, is a strong believer in the idea that small-brained insects are smarter than we think. He asks: "If these insects with such a small brain can do this, then who needs a big brain?"

The more we learn about neuroscience, the more we understand that the relationship between brain size and intelligence in best case insignificant. Dolphins no doubt exhibit a rich range of intellectual characteristics. But what exactly this overgrown nut in the dolphin skull does is now even more of a mystery than before.

Justin Gregg - dolphin communication researcher and author Are Dolphins Really Smart? (Are Dolphins Really Smart)

Scientists have long noticed that advanced intelligence and evolutionary developed brain present in humans and other animals, often showing social behavior. This led anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar to propose the social brain hypothesis. According to the theory, man developed a large brain in order to be able to live large social groups. Although in the last 20,000 years, due to the “domestication” of man, his brain has decreased in size, but before that, evolution had to quickly increase the brain of hominids in a relatively short time so that people could unite in large tribes.

In social communication, it is very important to recognize the so-called "outside knowledge", that is, to understand the hierarchy, social relationships and relationships such as "she knows what he knows" and the like. For example, the alpha male in chimpanzees chooses any females for himself, but at the same time he is tolerant of attempts to mate with them from those who helped him to reign on the throne. Without a sufficiently advanced brain, such intricacies of social hierarchy cannot be assimilated.

Now a group of scientists from the US and the UK has published a new scientific paper "The Social and Cultural Roots of the Whale and Dolphin Brain", which confirms the social brain hypothesis.

The cetaceans (dolphins and whales) have the most advanced nervous systems of any taxonomic group and rank highly on any measure of neuroanatomical complexity. However, many cetaceans are also organized into hierarchical social structures and display a surprising breadth of cultural and social behavior, features of which - which is rare in animals - are very similar to the social behavior of humans and primates. But so far, little evidence has been collected of correlations between large brains, social structures, and cultural behavior in cetaceans.

Whales and dolphins have a vast array of complex social behaviors, including:

relationships in complex alliances;
social transfer of hunting techniques (training);
joint hunting;
complex singing, including singing in regional group dialects;
speech mimicry (imitation of other people's voices);
the use of "voice signatures-identifiers" unique to a particular individual;
interspecies cooperation with humans and other animals;
alloparental care for someone else's cub (for example, by a female helper or "nanny");
social games.

All these patterns of social behavior have been extensively studied and described in the scientific press, but so far there has been no comparative study of cetacean species in terms of the level of complex social behavior, the degree of application of innovations and the ability to learn new behavior - to compare the degree of advancement of social skills and brain size. Such studies have previously been conducted in birds and primates, but not in cetaceans. Now this gap in scientific knowledge is eliminated.

The researchers collected a large amount of data on each species of cetacean: body weight, brain size, degree of manifestation social communication on the above grounds - and calculated the correlation between these indicators. The first diagram below shows family ties between species and brain size (red corresponds to larger size, green - smaller). On the second diagram - indicators of social behavior (social repertoire). Finally, below is a graph of the relationship between these two parameters.

Scientists have found that evolutionary development the brain is associated with social structure type and group size. Moreover, the relationship with group size is quadratic, that is, the most developed brain and advanced social behavior are shown by medium-sized groups, and not small or large groups.

Authors scientific work point to clear parallels between marine mammals and primates/humans. Dolphins and whales also have a combination of both large brains, hypersocial behavior and a variety of behavioral patterns. It was these qualities that allowed man to multiply in incredible numbers and populate the entire Earth. Scientists believe that in dolphins and humans, intellectual abilities manifested themselves in the course of evolution as a kind of evolutionary reaction to the need to live in a society of their own kind.

Dolphins are the most intelligent creatures created by nature. For many centuries, their behavior has attracted and excited the imagination of people. Meeting with them can cause a storm of enthusiastic emotions. Myths and legends were written about their life. And the extraordinary abilities of these animals remain a mystery at the present time.

Into the depths of centuries

Dolphins appeared on Earth more than 70 million years ago. Their origin, which explains the ability, is shrouded in legends and secrets no less than the appearance of man. People have been studying how the dolphin brain works, their intelligence and habits for many centuries. However, these animals were able to study us much better. For a short period they lived on land, on which they left the reservoir, and then returned back to the water. To date, scientists have not been able to explain this phenomenon. However, there is an assumption that when people find with dolphins they will be able to tell us a lot about their lives. However, this is unlikely.

Weird facts about the dolphin brain

Scientists in many countries of the world are haunted by the brain of a dolphin. They try to understand how it works. With social skills, trainability and understanding of human behavior, these amazing animals are certainly different from other representatives of the fauna. Their brains have undergone unprecedented development over the past few tens of millions of years. One of the differences between dolphin and human brains is that animals have learned to turn off one half of the brain so that it can rest. These are the only representatives of the animal world, of course, except for people who are able to communicate in their own language, through the most complex combination of various sounds and clicks. Scientists have found that dolphins have the foundations of logical thinking, that is, the highest form of mind development. And this amazing fact has been found in mammals. These animals are capable of the most difficult riddles, find answers to difficult questions and adjust your behavior to the circumstances set by the person.

The brain of a dolphin is larger than the human brain, so the brain of an adult animal weighs 1 kg 700 g, and the human brain weighs 300 g less. The convolutions in a person are two times less than in a dolphin. Researchers have collected materials on the presence of these representatives not only of self-consciousness, but also of social consciousness. The number of nerve cells also exceeds their number in humans. Animals are capable of echolocation. An acoustic lens, which is located on the head, focuses sound waves (ultrasound), with the help of which the dolphin, as it were, feels the existing underwater objects and determines their shape. The next amazing ability is the ability to feel the magnetic poles. In the brain of dolphins, there are special magnetic crystals that help them navigate the water surface of the ocean.

The brain of a dolphin and a human: a comparison

Dolphin is, of course, the most intelligent and intelligent animal on the planet. Scientists have found that when air passes through the nasal passages, sound signals are formed in them. These amazing animals for communication use:

about sixty basic sound signals;
up to five levels of their various combinations;
the so-called vocabulary of about 14 thousand signals.

The average human vocabulary is the same amount. In everyday life, he manages 800-1000 different words. In the case of translating a dolphin's signal into a human one, it will most likely resemble a hieroglyph denoting a word and an action. The ability of animals to communicate is considered a sensation. The difference between the brain of a human and a dolphin lies in the number of convolutions, the latter has twice as many.

Dolphin DNA study

Australian scientists after comparing the DNA of humans and dolphins concluded that these mammals are our closest relatives. As a result, the legend was developed that they are descendants of people who lived in Atlantis. And after these highly civilized inhabitants went into the ocean, no one knows exactly what happened to them. According to legend, they turned into inhabitants of the deep sea and retained love for a person in memory of a past life. Adherents of this beautiful legend argue that since there is a similarity between the intellect, DNA structures and the human brain with a dolphin, then people have a common beginning with them.

Dolphin abilities

Ichthyologists, who study the phenomenal abilities of dolphins, claim that they take the second place in terms of the level of intelligence development after humans. But the great apes are only the fourth.

If we compare the brain of a human and a dolphin, then the weight of the brain in an adult animal is from 1.5 to 1.7 kg, which is certainly more than that of humans. And, for example, the ratio of body to brain size in chimpanzees is significantly lower than in dolphins. A complex chain of relationships and collective organization indicates the existence of a special civilization of these living beings.

Test results conducted by scientists

When comparing the brain weight of a human and a dolphin and their body mass, the ratio will be the same. During tests on the level of mental development, these creatures showed amazing results. It turned out that by only nineteen points, dolphins scored less points than humans. Scientists concluded that animals are able to understand human thinking and have good analytical abilities.

One well-known neurophysiologist in scientific circles, who worked with dolphins for quite a long time, made the following conclusion - that these representatives of the animal world will be the first to establish contact, and consciously, with human civilization. And the fact that dolphins have an individual highly developed language, excellent memory and mental abilities that allow them to pass on accumulated knowledge and experience from generation to generation will help dolphins in communication. Another assumption of scientists is that if these animals had developed limbs differently, they would be able to write, due to the similarity of their minds with the human.

Some Features

During a disaster that caught in the sea or ocean, dolphins save a person. Eyewitnesses tell how the animals drove away predatory sharks for several hours, not giving any chance to approach the person, and then helped them swim to the shore. It is this attitude that is typical for adults to their offspring. Perhaps they perceive a person in trouble as their cub. The superiority of these representatives of the animal world over other inhabitants lies in their monogamy. Unlike other animals that look for a mate only for mating and easily change partners, dolphins choose them for life. They live big families, together with the elderly and children, taking care of them throughout their life span. Thus, the absence of polygamy, which is present in almost all inhabitants of the fauna, indicates their higher stage of development.

The subtle hearing of dolphins

The uniqueness lies in the fact that the ability to reproduce a special sound with the help of a sound wave helps to navigate in the expanses of water over long distances. Dolphins emit a so-called click, which, having stumbled upon an obstacle, returns to them in the form of a special impulse that propagates through the water at great speed.

The closer the subject is, the faster the echo will return. Developed intelligence allows them to estimate the distance to an obstacle with maximum accuracy. In addition, the dolphin transmits the information received over great distances to its fellows using special signals. Each animal has its own name, and by the characteristic intonations of the voice, they are able to distinguish all members of the pack.

Language development and onomatopoeia

With the help of a special language, animals can explain to their fellows what needs to be done to get food. For example, during training sessions in a dolphinarium, they share information about which pedal to press in order for a fish to fall out. The human and dolphin brains are capable of producing sounds. The ability to imitate them in the latter is manifested in the ability of animals to accurately copy and transmit various sounds: the sound of wheels, the singing of birds. The uniqueness lies in the fact that in the recording it is impossible to distinguish where the real sound is and where the imitation is. In addition, dolphins are able to copy and human speech, however, not with such accuracy.

Dolphins - teachers and researchers

They teach their relatives with interest the knowledge and skills they possess. Dolphins take in information out of curiosity about learning new things, not under duress. There are cases when an animal that lived in a dolphinarium for a long time helped trainers teach their fellows various tricks. Unlike other seabed dwellers, they strike a balance between curiosity and danger. During surveys of new territories, they put on the nose capable of protecting them from all sorts of troubles that will meet on the way.

Feelings and mind of an animal

It has been proven that the brain of a dolphin, like a human, is capable of expressing feelings. These animals can feel resentment, jealousy, love, and they will express these feelings quite easily. For example, if aggression or pain was applied to an animal during training, the dolphin will show indignation and will never work with such a person.

This just confirms that they have a long-term memory. Animals have a mind close to human. For example, in order to extract a fish from a rocky gap, they clamp a stick between their teeth and try to push the prey out with its help. The ability to use improvised means is reminiscent of the development of man when he first began to use tools.

These animals have a well-developed intelligence.
When comparing the brain of a dolphin and a human, it was found that the brain of the first, unlike the human, has more convolutions and is larger in size.
Animals use both hemispheres in turn.
The organs of vision are underdeveloped.
Their unique hearing allows them to navigate superbly.
The maximum speed that animals can develop is 50 km / h. However, it is available only to ordinary dolphins.
In representatives of this genus, the regeneration of the dermis is much faster than in humans. They are not afraid of infections.
The lungs take part in breathing. The organ by which dolphins grab air is called the blowhole.
The body of the animal is able to produce a special substance, which is similar in mechanism of action to morphine. Therefore, they practically do not feel pain.
With the help of taste buds, they are able to distinguish tastes, for example, bitter, sweet and others.
Dolphins communicate with the help of sound signals, of which there are approximately 14,000 varieties.
Scientists have experimentally proven that each newborn dolphin gets its own name and that they can recognize themselves in a mirror image.
Animals are superbly trainable.
To search for food, the most common bottlenose dolphins use a sea sponge, putting it on the sharpest part of the snout and thus examining the bottom in search of prey. The sponge serves as protection against sharp rocks or reefs.
India has banned the keeping of dolphins in captivity.
The inhabitants of Japan and Denmark hunt them and use the meat for food.
In most countries, including Russia, these animals are kept in dolphinariums.

It is very difficult to list all the amazing abilities of dolphins, since every year people discover more and more new possibilities for these amazing inhabitants nature.

website- For quite a long time, experts have studied the language of dolphins and have received truly amazing results. As you know, 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 "dictionary" is impressive - about 14 thousand signals. For comparison: the same number of words is the average human vocabulary. And in Everyday life people get by with 800-1000 words.

Dolphin communication is expressed in sound impulses and ultrasound. Dolphins make a wide variety of sounds: whistling, chirping, buzzing, squeaking, squealing, smacking, clicking, grinding, clapping, roaring, screaming, creaking, etc. The most expressive is the whistle, the variety of species of which includes several dozen. Each of them means a certain phrase (alarm, pain, call, greeting, warning, etc.) American scientists came to the conclusion that each dolphin in the flock has its own name, and the individual responds to it when relatives turn to the dolphin. No other animal has been found to have this 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 in terms of intelligence, dolphins rank second after humans. Elephants were third, and monkeys took only fourth place. Not inferior in weight to the brain of an adult, the brain of a dolphin, at the same time, 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 for communication at the level of survival instinct, but also for the accumulation and assimilation of significant amounts of information. The question is why they need it - if they do not have "intelligent life" in the human understanding. A lot of research is being done in this direction.

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

Their dolphin ear sensitivity level is located in the range of 10 Hz - 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, every second there is information processing comparable to the power of the most complex computers developed by man (Boris. F. Sergeev “Live ocean locators”).

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

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

The "language" of dolphins

The speech of dolphins - all kinds of "unreasonable" sounds in the human eye are already now on the basis of again scientific experiments, is considered by the level of complexity as any human language.

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

Modern languages have the following structure: sound, syllable and word. of which speech is made. 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 linguistic hieroglyphs. When behind one sound designation (sound, syllable) - in such languages, the equivalent of a semantic phrase in our understanding is laid down. In the case of dolphins, this is a definite whistle.

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

Learnability

What are the intellectual abilities of dolphins? First of all, it is worth noting fast learning marine life. Dolphins sometimes learn to follow commands even faster than dogs. It is enough for a dolphin to show the trick 2-3 times, and he will easily repeat it. In addition, dolphins also show creative abilities. So, the animal is not only able to complete the task of the trainer, but also to do some more tricks in the process. Surprisingly, this property of the dolphin brain: it never sleeps. Right and left hemisphere brains rest alternately. After all, a dolphin must always be on the alert: avoid predators and periodically rise to the surface for breathing.

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. Studying the tape recordings that recorded all the conversations and sounds in the dolphinarium, the researcher drew attention to the 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 uttered by them during the working day slipped in a very compressed form! However, the process of teaching dolphins the human language did not go further. Thinking about the reasons for this, Lilly came up with a stunning insight: they got bored with people!

Dolphin therapy

Actively used in modern medicine, official studies confirm 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. This state is typical for meditation, autogenic immersion, hypnotic trance, holotropic breathing. In addition, psychoimmunological studies have shown that during sessions of dolphin therapy, the production of endorphins increases significantly. Endorphins help to harmonize nervous system and set it up for an active and positive worldview.

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