The Atlantic speaks with Con Slobodchikoff, a professor of animal behavior at Northern Arizona University, who has spent 30 years decoding animal communications and believes we are approaching the point of breaching the human-animal language divide:
A computer science colleague of mine and I are using artificial intelligence techniques to keep a computer record of the call that prairie dogs were making, analyze it with these AI techniques, and then spit back the answer to us, which potentially could be in English. And then we could tell the computer something that we wanted to convey to the prairie dogs. And the computer could then synthesize the sounds and play it back to the prairie dogs.
The [prairie dogs] have word-like phonemes, combining those into sentence-like calls. They have social chatter. They can distinguish between types of predators that are nearby — dogs, coyotes, humans — and seem to have developed warnings that specify the predators’ species and size and color.
“Plants substitute biosynthesis for behavior”, employing biochemical messaging as a means of interacting with their environment on a level we don’t even fully understand, yet we are constantly immersed in this sea of molecular communication.. Its been hypothesized that plant psychedelics are messenger molecules to mammals that naturally raise awareness at critical junctures in order to impart information vital to maintaining the continuity of the all life in biosphere…But how do plants communicate with each other besides the thick matrix of pheromonal activity?
