• Question: would there be any way to talk to animals

    Asked by to Andrei, Ekbal, Gemma, Helen, Ruth on 18 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Ekbal Hussain

      Ekbal Hussain answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      Hi Sparky1212!

      Talking to animals would certainly be a very cool thing to do! A lot of animals can communicate within their species by making sounds and from watching these animals, scientists have realised that certain sounds are related to very simple sentances such as “I’m hungry” or “leave me alone”.

      We often talk to our animals such as dogs and they seem like they understand us by recognising the word “food” for example, which means they will soon be fed and they can also recognise the tone of our voice if we are angry with them or praising them. However, most animals do not have the ablilty like we do to hold full conversations but there are some exceptions..

      Scientists have discovered that unlike most animals, dolphins seem to have conversations with each other and talk while they play, which is pretty cool huh? But in order for us to ever be able to communicate with them we must first understand their language, which in itself is very difficult as dolphins talk by whistling to each other.

      So its hard to say if we will ever be able to talk to animals in the way that Doctor Dolittle does! But there is a possibility that one day computers will be able to translate the language of dolphins for example into English for us to understand and we may be able to copy these sounds! Which would be pretty awesome!

      Ekbal

    • Photo: Helen Gath

      Helen Gath answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      Hi,

      Ekbal has made some great points. When i saw this question, I automatically thought of Kanzi the ape, so felt I wanted to share this with you.
      Kanzi has been trained to communicate with, and they he may not say the actual words we might, it is still possible t have a conversation – just a different kind. So how did he learn to communicate? Any animal, no matter what it is, learns by word association. When you were young, everytime someone talked about ‘dogs’, and you saw a dog, you would have slowly learnt that we refer to this particular animals with the word ‘dog’. We give it a label. Through out our whole lives, we keep on learning by association.

      With Kanzi, they did they did the same. Saying a word enough times whilst referring to an object, e.g. holding a ball and always referring to it as a ball, Kanzi slowly learned what to picture in his mind wen some one said ball. Here is a REALLY cool video showing what Kanzi is capable of;

      Just to point out, she is wearing a box on her head so that we know Kanzi has learnt the SOUND of the word, and not learnt to lip read his teacher.

      But this seems like a one way conversation right? Well, if asked what fruit he would like, Kanzi has learnt to use pictures to answer a question. This is called a Lexigram. So if Kanzi wants an apple, he may press on the picture of an apple when asked what he’d like.
      Check out this cool video too;

      The fact that Kanzi can respond to questions and think independently essentially shows us he can communicate with humans!
      And Kanzi is not the only animal that can do this. Lots of other apes and monkeys have learnt to communicate, as well as birds, mammals….we may not be able to discuss a complex topic yet, bu this is amazing none the less!

    • Photo: Andrei Luchici

      Andrei Luchici answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Both Ekbal and Helen had made some great points!

      I think there might be a more ‘sci-fi’ way of communicating with animals… Recently a company in US has invented a device that reds the electrical waves produced by the human brain and then converts them into actual electrical current that are used to control objects on a computer screen.
      Here’s an website with this product: http://emotiv.com/epoc/features.php

      Imagine if you could do the same with animals… read their brain waves then find some patterns that correspond to actions, objects, etc and then have them translated into words on the screen… For us to talk to them, we would do the opposite… read our brain waves and then translate them into the sounds (discovered before) that an animal would make for the same object, action, etc. Our days of long, frustrating animal training sessions could be over!

      I’m sure the technical details of this task are very challenging, but hey … science is not easy after all 🙂 I’m curious to hear what others are thinking about this…

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