[music] I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest to the broadcast today, Eduardo Mercado.

He's the author of the book Why Whales Sing and is a professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo.

Welcome, Eduardo.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Professor let me start with what inspired you to write this book?

Right.

So I've been studying humpback whales for about 30 years now, and, it wasn't a field that I initially had planned to go into, and the book itself came from this finding that I had as a graduate student, a long time ago.

That doesn't really map on to what most people in the field think humpback whales are doing.

And so I was inspired to take the time to try and put this out so that they could see some alternative ideas about why it is that humpback whales sing.

You have an original thesis that you've sought to validate.

But, now it's not really a theory.

It's the new science of the communication system of these whales.

Tell us about when you started 30 some years ago, what the knowledge was about whales and how they communicated and how that evolved in the decades since.

Sure, so the species of whales that I focus on was humpback whales, which is the most well known singing whale.

And they were first described as singing in the 1970s, so about time I was born.

And when I started in graduate school, there have been, about 30 years of research on humpback whale singing.

And the consensus was that songs were basically like the peacock's tail in terms of how whales were using them, that they would produce the song, and then, it would be males producing it, and females would hear it, and then they would want to have sex with the singer.

And when I first started, my goal was mainly just to describe the sounds they were making when they sang.

I wasn't attempting to look at the function at all.

I was just looking at what are the kinds of sounds they make while they're singing.

When I was looking at the sounds, the goal was to try to make a library or vocabulary of sounds kind of like human phonemes that the whales were using, so that people could use those to describe the songs.

And I was working with some engineers at IBM to apply, essentially speech based analyzes to humpback whale song.

But what we found was that if you recorded whales in different years, they weren't using the same sounds from year to year.

They were gradually changing the sounds they used, which seemed odd because they're using these sounds at really long distances, like 4 or 5 miles.

And you would think that they would use very stable sounds so that the signal would get through despite all the possible interference.

And so I got kind of confused about how they can even use the sounds if they're changing them from year to year.

They changed their sounds even more than humans changed their sounds in terms of their vocabulary from year to year.

And so in thinking about that, I was trying to figure out how do they even use these things and how would the females know what's a good sound if the sounds this year aren't the same sounds that were produced two, three years ago, it was in trying to understand that puzzle that I started to think about whether they might use the sounds for something other than just sending messages.

And I was also studying dolphins at the time and dolphin echolocation.

And so I sort of had this thought that maybe the sounds weren't just, feathers in an a peacock tail, but something more sophisticated, some kind of signal that would allow the whales to actually use the sound to perceive things in their world.

So tell me what you found, in terms of how sophisticated the the language was and why in your mind, it was evolving.

Meaning there was a different lexicon or an updated or upgraded lexicon each year you studied.

Okay, so I guess I wouldn't say it's a language per se, but they're making a wide range of sounds.

Much more like a jazz musician might make with a saxophone than, like what humans make with their voice.

But the closest analog to a language, right?

Because they can use their bodies for body language, right?

But what the analogy is when you talk about human communication, what you and I are doing now would be the music that they make.

Well, that's the standard model.

So I would say that's the one most biologists would say is happening when humpback whales sing.

But the way I interpreted it, all right, I interpret it now in the book, is that they're doing something much more like what the US Navy does with their sonar when they're trying to find the submarines, which is modulate the sounds in ways that will tune it into the target for really long distances so they can tell what's happening and so on that.

So just to come back to original question, humpback whales are way more, flexible in terms of making sound than us.

They can make sounds lower than the lowest bass singer and sounds higher than the highest soprano, which is kind of amazing in how large they are.

Usually large animals can't make sounds really high, but they can go like an octave above the highest soprano's voice can go.

And they use all these, different frequencies and they switch between them pretty flexibly.

When they're making sounds.

So based on the, Navy like system that you describe in sonar, whatever you attribute to this system, how does it enable them to perform their day to day functions, you know, informed by this system that they have, for protection, for what exactly are they deploying this, to what ends.

Sure, humpback whales are kind of different from other, cetaceans like whales and dolphins, they're usually solitary.

So they're kind of swimming around by themselves most of the time.

And they're going really long distances, like migrating from Hawaii to Alaska and back every year.

So they're expanding like huge, amount of ocean by themselves.

But at some point, if they want to get together with other whales, they have to find the other whales because they're not in specific places.

And so my belief about what they're doing is they're using this as a way to kind of scan, really like many square miles of ocean to figure out where other whales might be.

And then if they can find them, they can potentially join with them.

And this is one way they can actually come together.

When you think about the place of, the humpback whales in the wider ecosystem, of ocean faring creatures.

Why should they matter to us here not in the water?

What defining characteristics do they have that you think can help inform us here humans?

So in terms of the ecosystem they're at like sort of a major player in the food chain since they're taking in lots of food, putting out lots of waste that fertilizes lots of other, organisms in the ocean.

So, if they were to be gone, it would disrupt the entire, balance of the ocean in terms of the biological dependance between essentially the food cycle.

So in that sense, we have some vested interest in them being healthy just so that the ocean is healthy.

So I'm a psychologist and I don't focus as much on ecosystem topics as what's happening inside a brain.

My background is in neuroscience, and I think they're interesting because they're one of the few mammals, maybe the only mammal other than humans, that seems to have the capacity to keep on changing what they do as adults and the way that you sound.

So, I mean, they've had a very different evolutionary history.

So these are two different brains.

You can think of it as two different computers that have somehow come to the same point in terms of being able to very flexibly control the way they use sounds over time.

And that's kind of the key thing, I think, from a neuroscience perspective, makes them interesting, is that they've solved the same problem as us, but from a very different path.

Where are you left in this book in terms of your findings, what was still unanswered in your continued quest to learn everything you can about these creatures and apply it, if and when possible, to our existence?

Okay, yeah.

So, I think in terms of thinking about what we don't know about singing whales, it's a lot.

It's very difficult to study humpback whales or any other whale that sings in the ocean because they're submerged most of the time.

They move, they're awake day and night.

You can't really follow them for very long before they can outrun you and disappear.

And so just some basic things about how their lives work are still unknown.

The thing that I've been working on recently is, though, is specifically when there's multiple whales singing in the same area, how do they modify the sounds they make to accommodate each other?

So if there's 2 or 3 whales and they're all singing at the same time, are they ignoring each other like singing in the shower, or are they doing something much more, collaborative in the sense of modifying what they do based on what other words they hear are doing.

And our initial findings suggest that they're actually quite dynamically modifying their songs based on what other whales in the area are doing.

So I think that's interesting from the perspective of sort of collaborative vocal, you can say social interactions.

It hasn't really been studied other mammals before.

So it gets, again, another kind of angle at what sorts of flexibility might a mammal have in terms of the way they use sound.

You were director recently of a cognitive laboratory at your university.

Give our viewers a sense of what you're studying, more broadly, and what your department studies more broadly as it relates to, neurological and psychological well-being.

Yeah.

So my laboratory was called a neurology and cognitive plasticity laboratory.

So it's focusing on the way the brain changes over time.

And the way that thinking processes change over time, specifically focusing on use of sound.

But almost anything perceptual would be the focus of what we look at.

And mainly in adults, although we've looked at children as well.

So, the main questions I've been trying to answer are what determines how fast a brain can change, when it changes, and how it changes in terms of responding to things that are happening in adulthood.

So if you hear a novel sounds, you hear a new language.

What does your brain do to try to accommodate that?

What constrains like how fast you can learn a new language or a new form of music?

And specifically focusing on cortical processing, which is sort of the biggest part of the human brain and mammal brains in general.

What is it about that part of the brain that makes it be able to change rapidly or not?

And what are the individual, so what we found is that different individuals have different capacity to change.

So some individuals can change really rapidly and others may not.

And there's ways to detect that before you try to teach them something.

But we don't know exactly what it is about the way the brain's organized that makes one person be able to change really fast and another person not be able to, because they all have the same kinds of synapses that all change.

But there's something about this structure that makes it easier for certain individuals and certain species to change really rapidly.

And makes it harder for others.

Change what precisely?

And at what ages?

So the context of, right.

So if you're looking at undergraduates in college, it would be changing how well they could resolve different kinds of, say, inflections of speech or kinds of sound.

So how rapidly can they learn to pick up on very subtle cues in the way someone's producing speech that they haven't heard before or make subtle distinctions between sounds they haven't heard before.

So basically, it's kind of like wine tasting, but in an auditory domain.

like how quickly can they pick up the cues that would distinguish, like wines of different quality, and what determines who can do that and who can't.

And what would you say in some was the applicability to important behavioral or policy questions that we have, at a time when science is being defunded?

I think it's important for anyone engaging in that endeavor to demonstrate relevance and applicability to, you know, relevant, daily happenings, you know, and ultimately, like I said in my earlier question, the well-being of society, you know, broadly.

So, you know, if you were to correlate any of the, the studies emanating from your lab that you formerly directed to, relatable, questions of well-being, either individual or public policy, what comes to mind, if anything?

Yeah.

For sure.

So the way I think about it is sort of in the context of mostly educational contexts.

So in terms of like what things does it makes sense to do with children to try to make them be better able to think, and the way I conceptualize it is somewhat like agriculture, where, you know, there was a time where people just did their own thing and grew plants the way they thought would work, and they didn't really understand all the constraints about soil and different kinds of delivery of water systems that would affect how the crops would grow.

They just kind of did it.

And it worked, it worked.

And they learn through trial and error, which is basically how the education system is right now.

The whole point, from my perspective of what all these years of training are supposed to be, is to create brains that can do things that they wouldn't have been able to do without the training.

So, you do homework, you study, you practice all these different, reading and writing and mathematical skills.

Presumably, so you can do something as an adult that you would not have been able to do.

But there's no awareness of what's happening in an individual's brains while this is all occurring.

So in that sense, we're totally blind to what we're actually changing.

So some of the things we're doing might change brains in a way we want it to change, and other things might be doing the exact opposite of what we want to happen.

And so I think understanding like when brains can change, how they can change, and what are the factors that determine how fast they can change, in what ways are fundamentally important to being able to create systems to make people who can think better.

We've done several episodes, with scholars in your field studying how our brain chemistry can help us, resolve more peacefully our political disputes.

Do you have any particular interest in that area and studies that, whether it's from the humpbacks or your study of humans, that could be applicable, when we think about, problem solving, resolution to political problems that have ensnared American society over the last quarter of a century.

And have been exacerbated over time.

What would you advise based on what you've studied in terms of thinking about, brain health and functioning and how we can do humanity better?

But specifically in the political arena, which often is the parameters of how that humanity lives or dies.

Yeah, I mean, so that's not something I've studied specifically.

Maybe the closest analog would be that I've studied individuals with autism who tend to have, very narrow interests in a lot of domains and then become very focused on that.

And I feel like that's in some ways a model of a lot of the ways that political thinking has advanced over time, in that once people become experts in a certain area, they tend to be very good at the thing that they've practiced thinking about and not so good at kind of expanding the way they can think about things into novel directions.

And so I think, I've seen some of that in the research with humpback whales as well, and that people who are kind of locked into a certain way of thinking about the way whales lives work.

And there's a politics of science as well.

And the ability to kind of like, branch out and think about novel ways of understanding the world is very difficult for many people who have expertise and I think in general, understanding why it is that brains tend to, like, go into this momentum in a certain direction and not be able to break out of it or entertain alternative possibilities.

Is something that is just accepted right now as being the way the world works.

But if there were ways to kind of like increase the flexibility of brains, even if it's for a temporary time period, maybe you could have someone, it's kind of walk in the mental shoes of someone who's not in their normal way of thinking.

And maybe that would expand the flexibility of thought processes to consider new alternatives without immediately kind of rejecting them based on preconceived notions about what makes sense.

How acute would you say is the crisis in science right now?

As a result of defunding?

I would say like, this is just the beginning stage.

So right now there's still sort of some momentum from previous work.

That's kind of like still carrying on from before and hasn't really hit the wall yet.

So I think it's going to be like the next 5 or 10 years where you'll really see that there'll be a major, downgrade in terms of what people are discovering because of novel ideas.

And it'll become much more like locked in to whatever we already knew.

We're just going to keep on recycling that in different forms.

And so I do think it's a crisis in terms of innovation, even though that tends to be the focus of a lot of the funding for science is innovation.

I think we're actually going in the opposite direction in terms of innovation.

And probably AI will make that even worse, because AI is basing it, everything it does is based on historical records of things and inferring from those.

So it's [inaudible] to innovate to even more limited, I think, in that respect.

The only good argument I've ever heard for AI is, that it was helpful in, collating, and narrowing down the pool in, you know, deciphering the right, spike protein for the, mRNA vaccines.

And that actually, that process, was computerized.

Now, whether you want to say that was AI, an assist from AI or just technology, kind of a pre AI technology.

What say you about, you know, the efficacy of AI in the pursuit of scientific discovery?

I think in that context, probably it is very useful, but that I guess I wouldn't call that a case of applying, a known system to a kind of a known problem.

And it's just a matter of cranking through the calculations to get to an output.

That humans could have done as well, it just would have taken them longer.

So although it is finding a new sort of treatment for a new, medical problem, it's one that falls into a category that's very familiar to many people in that field.

So they knew what kinds of things to tell the programs or AIs to do to get to the point where I could actually find the specific, you know, kinds of information that they wanted.

Right.

And to be clear, for our audience, it was in the process of, ascertaining what, would be the most effective in formulating the vaccine, right?

So studying the, the different possibilities of, what the spike protein could be in, trying to generate immunity for humans.

And apparently it was combing through a lot of records and a lot of data.

But, in general, would you say that humans have as great a capacity for scientific discovery as any AI machine?

I definitely they have more, in terms of coming up with things that haven't been thought of before.

And that was especially true, you know, for people like Einstein and Newton who are going against what everybody believed about what was happening and coming up with sort of, what would be considered like crazy ways of interpreting the world.

That turned out to be crazy enough to be correct.

And I think that's where the humans may have the advantage.

There are definitely things that AI can do that are, you know, much more efficient and much more precise than what most humans can do.

But I think that there's not really a Newton or Einstein AI so far that I've seen.

Fingers crossed.

I think that's the plot of The Terminator.

And I don't understand why people.

You said you're a child of the 70s.

I mean, it came a little bit after that.

When I was coming of age, I think the first movie was, was in the 80s or maybe 90s.

I think it was the 80s.

But it's it's like the Goldilocks, I mean, and Big Bad Wolf, you just, it's stunning to me, the way that, people have amnesia about historical depictions.

My theory, professor, is that for so long, it didn't happen.

Like the flying cars, which the closest parallel now is, Waymo's, or autonomous vehicles.

But it didn't happen for so long that now we don't remember that humans had a certain, sensitivity to or appreciation of the deleterious effect AI would have, or at least an AI that got out of control.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that's true.

It's hard to, I mean, the people tend to be much more optimistic about what they can predict about the future than any past record suggests they should be.

They should be a lot more, humble, I think, in that respect.

Well, when it comes to your actual labor, for the book and the study of the humpbacks, I'm just curious how frequently were you in the water yourself?

And I don't mean literally.

I mean, in a vessel studying it from the vessel in the water.

That's something when you think of, like, all the, research that went into the Titanic film and other entertainment projects, and recreational projects that, it takes a lot of, funding capacity, I'd imagine, to have the technology to be able to listen to the whales.

And so I'm wondering how often did you kind of roll up your sleeves and get in the field, which is the water, and then how did the technology change?

So when you first were studying this, presumably in the 90s -or something like that, 80s?

-Yeah, early 90s.

Is this how sophisticated could you, how could you hear just how audible the level, the quality of the audio, versus today?

So as we close those two questions, how often did you get in the water?

Is it as expensive as, you know, James Cameron's films?

And then has it changed?

So, the quality of what you heard in the 90s, is vastly improved today.

Sure.

So I did a lot more.

So I went to grad school in Hawaii, and when I was in Hawaii, I was in the water more often.

You know, when I was a professor in Buffalo, as you might imagine.

In the early years of my career, I spent more time on boats.

And the way that worked was essentially we had underwater microphones that we would throw over the side of the boat, and we would try to hear whales and then find them, and get closer to them and get the best recordings we could of them.

So sometimes we would get good recordings, and sometimes we get nothing.

And I think what's different now is, a lot of the analysis I've done recently are based on recordings being made by the National Oceanographic Association, because they have a lot of these underwater microphones that are on the bottom recording all over the world 24 hours a day, and they make all their data available.

So they, you know, because they have so much coverage, they get a lot of whales by accident, essentially.

And so it's a much more efficient way of recording.

And there's also drones that they use with underwater drones and above water drones.

So I think it's a lot more, a lot less Jacques Cousteau kind of go out and find the whales sort of analysis of recordings in a much more taking advantage of these existing infrastructure to get the most out of it.

I mean, NOAA is spending a lot of money on that set up, but not to study whales, but it's sort of a side benefit, and there's basically very little money being spent on whale research that involves going out in boats.

There's a few labs that can still do it, but it's pretty rare.

And that last question, professor, was about the quality, through the scientific exploration and advancement, of what you're listening to.

Right.

It is it, as I presume, in order to make the contentions that you have and, through the scientific process.

I'd imagine the quality of the recordings is better.

I'd be interested in maybe lining it up for our viewers if we can get it to hear what it sounded like in the 90s versus in 2026.

Right.

Well, actually, so in terms of quality, the quality was pretty high in the 90s.

In the 70s it wasn't as great.

But by the 90s they had kind of refined it to the point where they had pretty high fidelity recording at the same level as inherit microphones.

And so if you got close to an animal, you can get a really clean recording, over a broad range of frequencies.

And I think the equipment today is not that much better in that respect in terms of the individual, microphone technology.

So actually, I've been pretty lucky that it advanced quickly and has kind of reached high fidelity over the last 20 years, has been kind of maintained.

I say it's more about the amount of areas being covered now that's increased versus the quality of the actual recordings.

What do you think was the most fascinating thing from the book that you want to share with our viewers who are considering picking it up?

Sure.

So the interesting thing about this idea when I first had it was that it seemed like not plausible.

And the more I looked into it, the more things I found it made it seem more plausible.

And one of the things is the reason why I'm in neuroscience is specifically because when I looked at sort of studies of the neuroanatomy of the humpback whales ear, I discovered that it was way more, I guess, filled with neurons than what a human has.

And so it has this extremely advanced ear, the only other animals with ears as advanced as it are dolphins and bats and mainly just dolphins.

And so this idea that there's just like this whole, like you wouldn't think of a whale as being like way more advanced in terms of the hearing than a human.

But even if you look at the very input level, they're just like way past where we are.

And so it's a little bit humbling, interesting to just know, like, oh, they're doing something very different and they've got a lot more inputs coming into their ear than what we have, maybe more like what our eyes are compared to other mammals.

We have really good eyes.

Last question, the applicability of that to, improving human, hearing.

Have you thought at all about that?

The way in which your study of the whales could help, people who were either hard of hearing or deaf?

I haven't thought of in that context, but I have thought in the context of things that can determine what people can learn.

And so I think that, I mean, there are ways to augment human sensory systems.

You can add inputs that wouldn't naturally be there and the brain can accommodate those.

And the question is how high resolution would you want?

Like cochlear implants are very low resolution compared to natural hearing, but your brain can deal with it.

But no one so far has kind of like upped the ante and kind of, you know, doubled or tripled what a human ear can take into it.

And that's for humans to do, not machines.

Eduardo Mercado III, author of the really exciting book.

And I'm wearing this in your honor, because you should go out and get it.

Why Whales Sing, professor, thank you for your scholarship and for joining me today.

Thank you for having me.

[music] Please visit The Open Mind website at thirteen.org/openmind.

Download the podcast on Apple and Spotify.

And check us out on X, Instagram, and Facebook.

Continuing production of The Open Mind has been made possible by grants from Vital Projects Fund, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Ploughshares Fund, Angelson Family Foundation, Robert and Kate Niehaus Foundation, Grateful American Foundation, and Draper Foundation.