The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins

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Movie
Original title The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins
Country of production United Kingdom
original language English
Publishing year 2014
length 60 minutes
Rod
Director Christopher Riley
production Christopher Riley
music Rob Lord
camera Philip Barthropp
Matt Pinder
cut Fergal McGrath
occupation

The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins is a 2014 British documentary directed by Christopher Riley for the BBC . The content is a research experiment from the 1960s in which dolphins were to be taught the English language to communicate with humans . The film shows original film recordings, sound recordings and photos from the time, as well as some re-enacted scenes that are underlaid with the sound recordings.

content

The human species has the urge to exchange ideas with others, not only with one another, but also with other forms of life. Back in the early 1920s experimented with apes to communicate. Until the 1950s, however, there was no progress and experiments in the field stalled. However, one researcher did not want to give up: John Lilly . Lilly was a neurophysiologist from the California Institute of Technology who conducted research on pilots in aviation physiology for the U.S. military during World War II and later turned to animals. In the late 1950s, Lilly was a respected neuroscientist for the National Institute of Mental Health . An important area of ​​his research was how to learn something about the human brain from the animal brain. What fascinated him most was the dolphin brain, which is even larger than the human brain. He finally found access to the animals at Marine Studios in Florida , the first institution to keep these animals in captivity. There he begins experiments on dolphins and recorded their reactions.

In 1957, his wife Mary accidentally discovered that a dolphin was imitating the voices of John and his assistant. Lilly believed that his dolphins, imitating human voices, would revolutionize communication with animals and be the first animals to actively contact humans. In 1961 he published the book Man and dolphin about his findings. His thesis expressed in it that humans would be able to communicate with another species within a decade or two, he presented, among other things, on the talk show by Jack Paar , with which he became known nationwide.

In the early 1960s, the United States was in the midst of a race for mastery of space, and Lilly's work caught on in the emerging quest for alien life . Frank Drake , the founder of the SETI Institute , which used radio telescopes to search for signals from intelligent extraterrestrial life, had read Lilly's book and was impressed with his work. The challenge of communicating with extraterrestrial beings was also similar to Lilly's goal of talking to another species. Since the NASA space program was very financially endowed, Lilly saw an opportunity here to get further research financed. He gave the space organization a compelling presentation that required research on a “model organism” like a dolphin to be prepared for possible encounters with extraterrestrial beings. Lilly then received financial support from NASA, as well as from other government organizations such as the US Navy .

With this support, Lilly had a laboratory built according to his wishes in 1961. On the American Virgin Islands around 1,000 miles from the American mainland, he had a white concrete house built for the animals on a secluded beach on the island of Saint Thomas , with a pool bathed by the sea water. This was often later, the dolphin house ( dolphin house called). Lilly hired veterinarian Andy Williamson in 1962 and anthropologist Gregory Bateson , a respected behavioral researcher , who became director of the facility in 1963 . In contrast to Lilly, his main interest was not communication between animal and human, but from animal to animal. Bateson moved to the island with his wife Lois and stepson Eric.

In 1964, a 22-year-old curious college dropout, Margaret Howe, visited the remote dolphin house, who was not held back by the prohibition signs around the house. Impressed by her demeanor and powers of observation, she was allowed to visit the house regularly after a short test phase. They had three bottlenose dolphins in the house that came from Marine Studios and had previously starred in the TV series Flipper : the older female animals Sissy and Pamela and the male young animal Peter. In February 1964, the laboratory was finally fully operational. Because Lilly was often out and about, he entrusted Margaret with the task of communication training. Since the female animals had previously been trained with human sounds, she concentrated on working with Peter.

Margaret realized that it would not help her work if she went to her apartments every day and left the animals here alone. She suggested that she live with the animals in the dolphin house 24 hours a day. For this purpose, all rooms should be plastered watertight and flooded so that the water would be at least knee-deep in the rooms, including on the balcony and on the upper floor. Peter was supposed to get there via an elevator and live six days a week with Margaret, who slept on the elevator platform and did her work on a table hanging from the ceiling over the water. The animal was to spend one day a week with the two female bottlenose dolphins, who only stayed in the lower area.

Margaret tried to teach Peter to speak like a small child. The animal copied their sounds with great ambition and was very good at imitating their tone of voice . The articulation , however, was a problem, mainly due to the anatomical limitations of producing sounds (apart from whistling and clicking sounds) without vocal cords only via the blowhole. Margaret was very creative to help the animal with articulation: so that the animal could better see how she forms her lips and the animal could imitate this with the blowhole, she painted the lower half of her face white and her lips black.

The work was progressing, but NASA wanted to know if the research would produce results for its goals with alien life forms. Drake sent the young astronomer Carl Sagan in the summer of 1965 . He realized that one would still be very far from teaching animals language and suggested, like Bateson and Drake, that we should concentrate on researching animal-to-animal communication. However, Lilly ordered Margaret to continue with her work between humans and animals.

In the mid-1960s, the mind-altering drug LSD , which was legal and freely available at the time , was just becoming popular. Lilly first came into contact with it in Los Angeles through Constance Dowling , the wife of pinball producer Ivan Tors , who also supported Lilly's work financially. The brain researcher Lilly was fascinated and enthusiastic about how the human brain reacted to the drug and that it could often support psychotherapy . He also experimented with LSD on himself in order to better research the effects on the brain. He hoped for a breakthrough in communication research by giving the bottlenose dolphins LSD. Margaret, however, was strictly against it.

Like every living being, the porpoise Peter had a natural sex drive . Sometimes he tried to dissipate it by rubbing himself against Margaret. When he became too pushy and impetuous, he was sent to the lower area with the two female porpoises for a day. Since this interrupted the research work and his instinct did not decrease over time, but became more frequent, Margaret solved the problem in a pragmatic way and satisfied the bottlenose dolphin with her hand, so that he could continue working afterwards.

Bateson believed that the bottlenose dolphin was being interpreted too much from a human perspective. The animal would only imitate the sounds of the trainers and not understand what it is reproducing. Bottlenose dolphins' ability to listen to humans and imitate their sounds would not be enough to teach the animals the English language. The donors also became more critical and when there were no new reports of success, the financing and the entire project threatened to collapse in 1965. Desperate for new results, he now pushed for tests with LSD. Margaret only managed to spare Peter, but Sissy and Pamela were injected with 200 micrograms of LSD. However, Lilly's expectations were not met, the animals did not react to the drug at all. To get some reaction, he even took a jackhammer , which he used to shake the ground around the house. But even that did not lead to anything.

After this episode, Gregory Bateson left the project, which also ended the financial support. Lilly continued to run the dolphin house on her own. By the summer of 1966 he had amassed large debts as a result and so it finally had to be shut down for good.

In October 1966, Lilly had the bottlenose dolphins fly to his private laboratory in the Miami area . The bottlenose dolphins arrived healthy, but in the laboratories there they had little sunlight and narrow pools of water. A few weeks later, Margaret received a call from Lilly telling her that Peter had committed suicide. Ric O'Barry considers this term, which has been adopted by humans, to be appropriate, as Peter died of "self-induced respiratory arrest". Bottlenose dolphins do not breathe spontaneously like humans, so they have to consciously control each breath. Accordingly, Peter had sunk to the bottom of the pool and stopped breathing. Veterinarian Williamson assumes that the animal could not cope with the separation from Margaret in particular.

When the work in the Dolphin House became known to the public years later, it was not the communication research that interested the people and the drug experiments with LSD were not the main headline either. Instead, people were outraged about the supposed "dolphin" Sex ”by Margaret. In July 1978, a sensational article titled Interspecies Sex: Humans and Dolphins appeared in the men's magazine Hustler, and she heard from others that her work with Peter would be called "The Worst Experiment In The World."

In later years Lilly changed his mind about his own experiments and saw them very self-critically, as he now also saw the animals differently due to their high intelligence. He publicly stated, “I had no right to restrict, detain, or work on them. My only right would have been to work with them, in their natural habitat, in their natural state. ”In the mid-1980s, Lilly began tirelessly to fight against the captivity of dolphins. Due to the public attention, some points in the Marine Mammal Protection Act were subsequently added in the 1980s .

John Lilly died in 2001 at the age of 86 after a brief illness in Los Angeles Hospital. Margaret Howe stayed at Saint Thomas and lived in the dolphin house for another 10 years. She married the project's photographer, John Lovatt, and had three daughters with him. The dolphin house is now an empty ruin.

background

  • It premiered on June 11, 2014 at the Sheffield Documentary Festival and premiered on TV on June 19, 2014 on BBC Four .
  • Over 3,000 tapes from the communication experiments have been preserved and are in the possession of Stanford University . Before Christopher Riley evaluated the tapes for the film, nobody had been interested in the tapes in the previous 50 years. The tapes would also show how quickly the bottlenose dolphins learned to imitate Margaret's voice.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ BBC Four explores The Girl Who Talked To Dolphins on bbc.co.uk from May 8, 2014
  2. ↑ Why was a project teaching dolphins to speak called the worst experiment in the world? in Radio Times on June 17, 2014