The title doesn't match the paper though. People had already decoded the bird calls. What the paper was giving evidence to was that the birds themselves are cognitively decoding the calls.
I’m glad we’re doing this research. It makes me wonder how much time and potential we’ve wasted over the years actively assuming non-human animals were just rote automatons.
It seems like a meaningful amount of science has been spent on systematically dismantling pre-existing prejudice over the last hundreds of years (and thousands in some cases and cultures).
All humans are human.
Babies can feel pain.
Plants feel.
Animals think.
Just …
So much wasted time on what should have always been seen as true.
I get that some cultures already thought some of these things, but many of these were sadly not prevailing.
Yeah I think there's a lot of science news about how plants are capable of more than the average person thinks, but people tend to conflate that with some kind of conscious experience.
Some variety of learnings over the last several years. Many of them are sensationalized; but my simple statement was "plants feel"; and many of these values imply some level of "feeling":
A quick search reveals several other incidences of other "huh"-worthy thoughts; but my goal was "plants feel" and I would argue these are close enough to shorthand to "feel"
I think this is a huge error which collapses the most urgently important distinction at the heart of the entire issue. Plants do complex, interesting things, and we borrow from an already existing vocabulary to make analogies. So people will say plants "feel" or "communicate" or "see".
But those are automatic biological reflexes, and using words with connotations to conscious awareness to describe them makes people think they're the same thing. But a plant "feeling pain" is repurposing words about consciousness to mean new and different things. And I think people are seduced by it because it feels like being open-minded to new possibilities.
I think that there was a relatively recent panic to stop anthropomorphizing the rest of creation and that that rebellion against anthropomorphism clings so hard to "that's not how humans do it and stop thinking it is" that we commit the sin in the opposite direction - and declare everything as "definitely not a lived experience of another being" and "just rote programming" too early.
Of course plants have feelings and conscious experience, it's obvious to anyone who has spent time living with them. Plants literally think and solve problems, too. But you won't succeed in convincing anyone who doesn't understand such basic truths. Reducing a living being to a mere machine is so 19th century, but just as religions still influence how people see the world, it's going to take generations for science to "prove" it to satisfaction, and for the general public to accept it. We're still missing fundamental concepts, much less ability to measure and quantify it.
You'll probably like the biologist Michael Levin and his research, exploring what a mind actually is and seeing beyond what he calls our "mind blindness". https://www.drmichaellevin.org/
I don't think it's as obvious as you make it out to be. For one, what we consider evidence of "thinking" is autonomous action by a being as a whole. For as far as I know, there is no evidence that a plant's movements are governed by a central coordinating authority. Can your evidence distinguish between a plant having a single mind or each branch having decision authority of its own?
Why does a plant’s movements need to be governed by a “central, coordinating authority”? Isn’t that employing another anthropomorphism onto a plant?
Octopi have, what, 9 minds? Would we consider them a single or multiple creatures?
And to think of plants, some single organisms span *acres* of connected root structures.
So, why would one need to distinguish between a single mind and multiple minds in one creature? To what end does it serve, except managing a narrow, specific definition of thought and/or memory that doesn’t even model the whole of creatures we generally agree are living and thinking?
I’m not saying I know if they’re a “self-replicating, autonomous food source” or not; but I am saying it’s quite presumptuous to declare they’re not and then to gradually narrow the definitions when a plant surpasses some line in the sand we didn’t think it would pass.
It reminds me of all the human exceptionalism stances we had over the centuries, “humans are special because they use tools” and the like.
Interesting to me that you employ religion as the pejorative comparison here, when it's the inherent human religions that have perceived in plants gods and spirits since before the beginning of recorded time.
Perceiving plant gods and spirits is closer to experimental science, attempts to describe and make sense of your actual lived experience. Dismissing them without any evidence or experience, just because they don't fit in the worldview you grew up in, is closer to religion.
You wouldn't call every animist belief the same religion's name. That's a loooot of religions that believe those things - the vast, vast majority of them, in fact.
>Of course there's a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain.
But seriously, the articles you posted are inappropriately repurposing words normally associated with conscious experience, in order to get attention.
There is lots of evidence plants react to stimuli. There is no evidence they feel.
There's no reason to think that birds and trees don't routinely exuberate with joy, since cooperating with our needs in needful proportion brings us humans exuberance.
fortunately, there is a lot of evidence behind plant's feeling and thinking; enough so that if you were to expose yourself to it, and if you were willing to update your beliefs based on strong scientific evidence, I believe you'd change your view.
There's evidence for stunningly intricate, marvelously impressive biological function, but there's no evidence whatsoever for internal mental states.
What's happening is we borrow from a pre-existing vocabulary with connotations to conscious activity and we use it to describe automatic biological reflexes, and then some people lose track of whether it was an analogy or whether it was literal and start claiming plants can "feel."
11 distinct calls is something a rote automaton could easily cope with. So I don't think this study proves much of anything about birds' cognitive abilities.
I work in the field. The main takeaway is zebra finches (maybe other songbirds) can discriminate vocalizations based on function, even if they sound similar.
Generally, birds can tell apart categories of sounds e.g. vocalizations from different individual birds, male vs female, call vs song, conspecific vs heterospecific etc. The question is if birds can do it for specific function e.g. agonistic calls vs non-agonistic calls. Simple question but way harder to test because of associated contextual info. with vocalizations.
The paper is culmination of last decade of work (includes many of the past works) but this is the new result.
> the birds mistook long-distance contact calls and short-distance contact calls, which are acoustically very different. But, they never mistook a short contact call with a short alarm call, which have very similar acoustic patterns but entirely distinct meanings. As such, the study reveals that call perception elicits a mental imagery of the meaning of call-types, rather than triggering a reflexive response.
Generally, you test birds in a series of discrimination experiments. So for this example, the discrimination task would be distance calls vs contact calls. Let's say, birds learn to discriminate between 20 distance calls vs 20 contact calls. They can learn this quickly (reward and punishment). After birds learned this rule (say 75% accuracy), we ask to generalize this by adding more calls. Now, birds have to discriminate 30 distance calls vs 30 contact calls (10 new for each). We can check now, for which new calls they are more likely to correct and incorrect response.
In this research field, we often perform this types of experiments (not this exact one). So, this is not that surprising to some of us. Birds also prioritize duration a lot when telling apart calls.
Interesting! Could you break this down further? Maybe specific examples of what you're mentioning might help - for instance, what "similar-sounding calls with different functions" are zebra finches discriminating between? What exactly are different situations of these functions? How exactly (and through what experiments) did she determine this?
And I read the article (but not her research paper), and have a vague idea, but it's tough to get a full grasp - and if this is just too difficult to fully explain, no worries!
Yeah, the paper is indeed difficult to read (even for me). I read it a while back. I'll try to explain.
So, there are few things to know before and see what we're trying to prove. main thing: Categorical perception: (in short) brain perceive similar sounding sounds (say A and B) in a continuous manner, and in the continuum of two sound, there would be a point where one sound (A) will switch and sound like the other sound (B).
In zebra finches, let's take an example: distance call and tet call. Both these calls are contact calls, birds use them to keep in contact with other birds.
Now, we need to extract the acoustic similarity between these two calls, and test birds in a experiment where we ask them to discriminate between these two call types (and get a learning curve; say trials vs probability of correct choice). Then, we can fit a theoretical model of categorical perception to see how well they fit both in acoustic and perceptual dimensions.
This is for one function (contact call), we can do this within other call types and between other call types. At the end, we can see how much of birds' performance is explained by acoustic dissimilarity, function of acoustic calls etc.
This is what the authors have done. They first performed LDA based classification on call type to obtain distance between call types, misclassification etc. (acoustic dimension). Birds went through a series of discrimination experiments based on call types (similar to what wrote above). Then, they compared/matched acoustic and perceptual dimension.
Thanks for the explanation on this. Think I partially understand. Birds can distinguish calls on at least two characteristics, by the sound of it and by its function. And the authors have developed experiments to show that birds can do both. Is this correct or did I get on the wrong track?
Yes. Kind of. They showed that birds can do function/meaning of calls (e.g., contact call group) using the meaning not other cues (e.g. duration, acoustic similarity of calls etc.).
A lot of interesting information here, but this one paragraph blew my mind:
> Although the birds occasionally made mistakes, they more often confused calls with similar meanings rather than similar sounds. “Their responses indicated they have a mental imagery of the meaning of their vocalisations,” Elie said. “In other words, that they understand the meaning of their call types.”
I remember hearing about an interesting paper; it argued that Zebra finch songs were as complex as recursively enumerable languages on the Chomsky hierarchy. I wanted to see if I could find it but came across another paper arguing that their embedded context sensitivity can be explained by simpler rules.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0908113106
Just the same, these little fellows are some of the cutest on our planet.
Left this comment as another computer science connection.
I started feeding a local murder of crows earlier this year.
They seem to have distinctive two-caw sounds for “human sighted, food is about to be thrown”, a “food is here, no sign of the human” and finally, a “human, we’re here, you coming out to throw us some scraps?”
They make plenty of other calls too, but I haven’t been able to associate those with anything I’ve observed them doing.
I may just be over anthropomorphizing, but I’ve recorded them and those three dual-caw calls sound subtly different (to my untrained ears). I’m certain actual ornithologists have looked into this. Chances are, though, I may be suffering from “I want to believe” syndrome.
Very interesting topic, but a strange choice of source. I'd recommend these instead:
Coller foundation press release: https://www.jeremycollerfoundation.org/news-and-insights/pre...
The actual publication in Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads8482
Here's a non-paywalled version of the research.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.14.623689v1....
And here's the non-PDF link: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.14.623689v1
It does have the title going for it.
The title doesn't match the paper though. People had already decoded the bird calls. What the paper was giving evidence to was that the birds themselves are cognitively decoding the calls.
I’m glad we’re doing this research. It makes me wonder how much time and potential we’ve wasted over the years actively assuming non-human animals were just rote automatons.
It seems like a meaningful amount of science has been spent on systematically dismantling pre-existing prejudice over the last hundreds of years (and thousands in some cases and cultures).
Just … So much wasted time on what should have always been seen as true.I get that some cultures already thought some of these things, but many of these were sadly not prevailing.
> It makes me wonder how much time and potential we’ve wasted over the years actively assuming non-human animals were just rote automatons.
It's pretty easy to see that most things above plankton aren't rote automatons. Anyone claiming otherwise just has an agenda to sell.
I don’t believe there’s any evidence behind plant’s feeling or thinking.
Other than that you’re right.
Yeah I think there's a lot of science news about how plants are capable of more than the average person thinks, but people tend to conflate that with some kind of conscious experience.
What the average person thinks is a very low barrier but I do not think plants have crossed that yet.
Some variety of learnings over the last several years. Many of them are sensationalized; but my simple statement was "plants feel"; and many of these values imply some level of "feeling":
Plants scream when harmed:
[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-really-do-scream-out-lou...
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stressed-plants-c...
Plants release VOCs when harmed:
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1lzg4x9/...
(OP's main comment has several sources)
Plants respond to audio stimuli (hearing, sorta):
[3] https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=24-P13-00035&s...
[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4102826/
A quick search reveals several other incidences of other "huh"-worthy thoughts; but my goal was "plants feel" and I would argue these are close enough to shorthand to "feel"
I think this is a huge error which collapses the most urgently important distinction at the heart of the entire issue. Plants do complex, interesting things, and we borrow from an already existing vocabulary to make analogies. So people will say plants "feel" or "communicate" or "see".
But those are automatic biological reflexes, and using words with connotations to conscious awareness to describe them makes people think they're the same thing. But a plant "feeling pain" is repurposing words about consciousness to mean new and different things. And I think people are seduced by it because it feels like being open-minded to new possibilities.
I think that there was a relatively recent panic to stop anthropomorphizing the rest of creation and that that rebellion against anthropomorphism clings so hard to "that's not how humans do it and stop thinking it is" that we commit the sin in the opposite direction - and declare everything as "definitely not a lived experience of another being" and "just rote programming" too early.
Of course plants have feelings and conscious experience, it's obvious to anyone who has spent time living with them. Plants literally think and solve problems, too. But you won't succeed in convincing anyone who doesn't understand such basic truths. Reducing a living being to a mere machine is so 19th century, but just as religions still influence how people see the world, it's going to take generations for science to "prove" it to satisfaction, and for the general public to accept it. We're still missing fundamental concepts, much less ability to measure and quantify it.
You'll probably like the biologist Michael Levin and his research, exploring what a mind actually is and seeing beyond what he calls our "mind blindness". https://www.drmichaellevin.org/
I don't think it's as obvious as you make it out to be. For one, what we consider evidence of "thinking" is autonomous action by a being as a whole. For as far as I know, there is no evidence that a plant's movements are governed by a central coordinating authority. Can your evidence distinguish between a plant having a single mind or each branch having decision authority of its own?
Why does a plant’s movements need to be governed by a “central, coordinating authority”? Isn’t that employing another anthropomorphism onto a plant?
Octopi have, what, 9 minds? Would we consider them a single or multiple creatures?
And to think of plants, some single organisms span *acres* of connected root structures.
So, why would one need to distinguish between a single mind and multiple minds in one creature? To what end does it serve, except managing a narrow, specific definition of thought and/or memory that doesn’t even model the whole of creatures we generally agree are living and thinking?
I’m not saying I know if they’re a “self-replicating, autonomous food source” or not; but I am saying it’s quite presumptuous to declare they’re not and then to gradually narrow the definitions when a plant surpasses some line in the sand we didn’t think it would pass.
It reminds me of all the human exceptionalism stances we had over the centuries, “humans are special because they use tools” and the like.
Interesting to me that you employ religion as the pejorative comparison here, when it's the inherent human religions that have perceived in plants gods and spirits since before the beginning of recorded time.
Perceiving plant gods and spirits is closer to experimental science, attempts to describe and make sense of your actual lived experience. Dismissing them without any evidence or experience, just because they don't fit in the worldview you grew up in, is closer to religion.
Perceiving plant gods and spirits is religion.
It's spirituality. Religions tend to have creeds.
You wouldn't call every animist belief the same religion's name. That's a loooot of religions that believe those things - the vast, vast majority of them, in fact.
Science if finally catching up to Werner Herzog
>Of course there's a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain.
But seriously, the articles you posted are inappropriately repurposing words normally associated with conscious experience, in order to get attention.
There is lots of evidence plants react to stimuli. There is no evidence they feel.
There's no reason to think that birds and trees don't routinely exuberate with joy, since cooperating with our needs in needful proportion brings us humans exuberance.
fortunately, there is a lot of evidence behind plant's feeling and thinking; enough so that if you were to expose yourself to it, and if you were willing to update your beliefs based on strong scientific evidence, I believe you'd change your view.
There's evidence for stunningly intricate, marvelously impressive biological function, but there's no evidence whatsoever for internal mental states.
What's happening is we borrow from a pre-existing vocabulary with connotations to conscious activity and we use it to describe automatic biological reflexes, and then some people lose track of whether it was an analogy or whether it was literal and start claiming plants can "feel."
It's funny you bring up "have no mental state", because there is a plant that scientists find seems to have some sort of memory:
https://www.sci.news/biology/science-mimosa-plants-memory-01...
> The scientists show how Mimosa plants stopped closing their leaves when they learnt that the repeated disturbance had no real damaging consequence.
...
> Astonishingly, Mimosa can display the learned response even when left undisturbed in a more favorable environment for a month.
11 distinct calls is something a rote automaton could easily cope with. So I don't think this study proves much of anything about birds' cognitive abilities.
Thank you, I was also looking for a better source and a link to the paper. I thought the paper was this older one https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06394-9 from 2018.
I work in the field. The main takeaway is zebra finches (maybe other songbirds) can discriminate vocalizations based on function, even if they sound similar.
Generally, birds can tell apart categories of sounds e.g. vocalizations from different individual birds, male vs female, call vs song, conspecific vs heterospecific etc. The question is if birds can do it for specific function e.g. agonistic calls vs non-agonistic calls. Simple question but way harder to test because of associated contextual info. with vocalizations.
The paper is culmination of last decade of work (includes many of the past works) but this is the new result.
From https://www.jeremycollerfoundation.org/news-and-insights/pre... it sounds like the main takeaway is that they seem to conceptualise the sounds:
> the birds mistook long-distance contact calls and short-distance contact calls, which are acoustically very different. But, they never mistook a short contact call with a short alarm call, which have very similar acoustic patterns but entirely distinct meanings. As such, the study reveals that call perception elicits a mental imagery of the meaning of call-types, rather than triggering a reflexive response.
How do you see that?
Generally, you test birds in a series of discrimination experiments. So for this example, the discrimination task would be distance calls vs contact calls. Let's say, birds learn to discriminate between 20 distance calls vs 20 contact calls. They can learn this quickly (reward and punishment). After birds learned this rule (say 75% accuracy), we ask to generalize this by adding more calls. Now, birds have to discriminate 30 distance calls vs 30 contact calls (10 new for each). We can check now, for which new calls they are more likely to correct and incorrect response.
In this research field, we often perform this types of experiments (not this exact one). So, this is not that surprising to some of us. Birds also prioritize duration a lot when telling apart calls.
Interesting! Could you break this down further? Maybe specific examples of what you're mentioning might help - for instance, what "similar-sounding calls with different functions" are zebra finches discriminating between? What exactly are different situations of these functions? How exactly (and through what experiments) did she determine this?
And I read the article (but not her research paper), and have a vague idea, but it's tough to get a full grasp - and if this is just too difficult to fully explain, no worries!
Yeah, the paper is indeed difficult to read (even for me). I read it a while back. I'll try to explain.
So, there are few things to know before and see what we're trying to prove. main thing: Categorical perception: (in short) brain perceive similar sounding sounds (say A and B) in a continuous manner, and in the continuum of two sound, there would be a point where one sound (A) will switch and sound like the other sound (B).
In zebra finches, let's take an example: distance call and tet call. Both these calls are contact calls, birds use them to keep in contact with other birds. Now, we need to extract the acoustic similarity between these two calls, and test birds in a experiment where we ask them to discriminate between these two call types (and get a learning curve; say trials vs probability of correct choice). Then, we can fit a theoretical model of categorical perception to see how well they fit both in acoustic and perceptual dimensions.
This is for one function (contact call), we can do this within other call types and between other call types. At the end, we can see how much of birds' performance is explained by acoustic dissimilarity, function of acoustic calls etc.
This is what the authors have done. They first performed LDA based classification on call type to obtain distance between call types, misclassification etc. (acoustic dimension). Birds went through a series of discrimination experiments based on call types (similar to what wrote above). Then, they compared/matched acoustic and perceptual dimension.
Thanks for the explanation on this. Think I partially understand. Birds can distinguish calls on at least two characteristics, by the sound of it and by its function. And the authors have developed experiments to show that birds can do both. Is this correct or did I get on the wrong track?
Yes. Kind of. They showed that birds can do function/meaning of calls (e.g., contact call group) using the meaning not other cues (e.g. duration, acoustic similarity of calls etc.).
Ah okay, thanks!
A lot of interesting information here, but this one paragraph blew my mind:
> Although the birds occasionally made mistakes, they more often confused calls with similar meanings rather than similar sounds. “Their responses indicated they have a mental imagery of the meaning of their vocalisations,” Elie said. “In other words, that they understand the meaning of their call types.”
Yes, it rather begs the omniscience of the researchers, doesn't it?
I remember hearing about an interesting paper; it argued that Zebra finch songs were as complex as recursively enumerable languages on the Chomsky hierarchy. I wanted to see if I could find it but came across another paper arguing that their embedded context sensitivity can be explained by simpler rules.
Just the same, these little fellows are some of the cutest on our planet.Left this comment as another computer science connection.
No doubts the crows are all having a good laugh at our expense.
I started feeding a local murder of crows earlier this year.
They seem to have distinctive two-caw sounds for “human sighted, food is about to be thrown”, a “food is here, no sign of the human” and finally, a “human, we’re here, you coming out to throw us some scraps?”
They make plenty of other calls too, but I haven’t been able to associate those with anything I’ve observed them doing.
I may just be over anthropomorphizing, but I’ve recorded them and those three dual-caw calls sound subtly different (to my untrained ears). I’m certain actual ornithologists have looked into this. Chances are, though, I may be suffering from “I want to believe” syndrome.
Does anyone have a link to a decoded message?
Another win for machine learning:
>She then applied machine learning to analyse how information was encoded in the calls before testing her findings through behavioural experiments.
Once again, Dr. Dolittle’s seminal work is ignored.