Linked discoveries

NewScientist summarizes a neatly constructed experiment on the parallels between birds and humans.

Cuckoos and a few related species are brood parasites. They lay their eggs in other nests and let other birds raise their kids. The researchers noticed birds making a unique ‘whining’ sound when brood parasites were around. Other members of the species, hearing the sound, would fly in and gang up on the cuckoo, driving it out. After recording some of these calls from various types of birds in various parts of the world, the researchers played the sounds near different species. Sure enough, the birds behaved the same way when hearing the call, even though they weren’t the same type as the birds who made the call, and their brood parasite was also a different species.

Cuckoos are an indirect form of crime or danger, unlike the direct danger posed by a cat or hawk. An alarm call for direct danger seems like a basic function of life, while an alarm for wasted future energy seems to require considerable intelligence. Basic alarm calls take many forms: sounds, gestures, emitted chemicals, signals sent by fungal wire or telephone wire. An anti-cuckoo call is more sophisticated and language-like than an alarm call.

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Calls often have specific meanings, and in some cases, they refer to external objects or events, rather than merely communicating about internal states like fear, or attributes like sex or species. This referentiality means that such calls are akin to human words, which often refer to external objects or events. So, animal communication and human language appear to be on a continuum, rather than ‘language’ being a uniquely human feature.

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I’d narrow it down in two ways.

First, mammals are not on the same continuum. Humans share language with birds, not with other mammals.

Second, a purposeful call is more like a verb form than a word. Words are arbitrary units, purely learned and highly modifiable. A word can change its meaning and form quickly, while grammatical types and syntax are permanent hard-wired features of the brain. Syntax determines grammatical type, and intonation determines syntax. A birdcall is an intonation, so it’s a verb form.

An example from my latest Neurology courseware. This video shows parts of the brain responding to the syntactic connection between an ‘agent’ and an ‘instrument’. The agent here is the cook, the instrument is saucepans.

In the next video, without sound, I showed the assumed ‘wires’ making a connection between the agent and the instrument.

‘Tell the cook to use bigger saucepans’ is an indirect imperative, urging the listener to notify the cook about a problem with the saucepans. It’s thus the same syntactic type as a bird urging the listener to notify other birds about a problem with the cuckoos.

I wrote this paragraph after the second video of the assumed wires:

The wires representing network connections start resonating from the agent cook, then continue resonating until the syntax allows the target instrument or tool saucepans to be spoken.

I was assuming two-way wires, not synapses. Now, thanks to another recent discovery, we know those wires exist!

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Sidenote: I’d like to hear the actual birdcall, but NewScientist didn’t include it on their website. The audio, if any, is behind a paywall.