Image Shows a Dolphin's Echolocated Impression of a Submerged Human | Hacker News Reader

Image Shows a Dolphin's Echolocated Impression of a Submerged Human

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60 pointseric_h23 comments

This is spiritual new-age pseudoscience, and it's not worthy of HN.

The web site is by a group called Sonic Age America [1], which turns out to be a guy named John Stuart Reid and his wife [2], whose occupation is "energetic healer". They believe that life started with sound, and have invented "cymatics, the study of visible sound" ("based on the principle that when sound encounters a membrane such as your skin or the surface of water, it imprints an invisible pattern of energy") and "sound healing" ("sound is fast regaining its place as the pre-eminent healing modality") [2].

[1] https://www.cymascope.com/aboutus.html

[2] https://www.cymascope.com/cyma_research/Caduceus%20article-1...

I agree that much of their content has a "new-agey" feel, but that's not sufficient to discredit the particulars of the claims they are making about dolphin communication. It's conceivable their new-agey motivations for the work could nonetheless have led to a legitimate discovery, even if it is shrouded in quacky words like "cymatics".

"Cymatics" isn't quacky, though it may have been co-opted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymatics

I may just be being very slow today, but the methodology is rather unclear to me. eg "imprinted the signal onto a water membrane and then computer enhanced the resulting image"

I'll admit, I'm.. not entirely persuaded by CymaScope's "biology" page:

https://www.cymascope.com/cyma_research/biology.html

"Cymatics--the trigger for life?

Spiritual traditions from many cultures speak of sound as having been responsible for the creation of life. The words of St John's gospel are a good example:

In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. ['Word' meaning 'sound']

The science of cymatics, the study of visible sound, is beginning to yield clues to one of the most challenging questions in science: what triggered the creation of life on earth?

The hypothetical model we have developed was inspired by ancient traditions and demonstrates that sound and cymatic forces could have worked together to become the dynamic force that created the first stirrings of life."

This page describes the methodology in a bit more detail: http://www.cymascope.com/cyma_research/oceanography.html

According to that page, here is what they claim to have done: they placed an object (flower pot, plus-symbol, human body, etc) in front of a dolphin and recorded the echolocation sounds that reflected back from the object in the water as it was scanned by the dolphin.

Then they reproduced the recording of the reflected echolocation pulse and focused it onto a small dish of water such that a two-dimensional surface wave was generated on its surface, which was then imaged (how fast? how many times? not clear) using the "cymascope". These images were then further "computer enhanced". Disturbingly, each of these images revealed the face of Richard David James[1].

The rationale behind this methodology is that it approximates (according to them; I have no idea if this is true) the way echolocation pulses are received by the dolphin's cochlea. They claim that the incoming sound pulses are translated into surface acoustic waves that propagate across the basilar and tectorial membranes in the dolphins cochlea. (see this image: http://www.cymascope.com/cyma_research/images/Dolphin-sees-w...) This is the surface wave pattern they attempted to reproduce on the surface of the water in their "cymascope."

Gonna go see if I can find any peer reviewed articles on this stuff.

[1]: lol no jk

Additionally, the US Navy has funded research into how dolphin sonar sensing and released a report in 1998 that demonstrated the generation of 2D images using "back projection acoustic tomography" of "synthetic dolphin signals". It's worth a read if you want to build your own DIY sonar system :)

I include it here because the work suggests dolphin echolocation pulses may contain sufficient information for dolphins to form something like a mental image of an object, although whether or not they actually do so is unknown. (They cite a 1995 paper by the lead author of the other paper I referenced, but not the potentially more-conclusive 1998 work).

"Tomographic Image Reconstruction of MCM Targets Using Synthetic Dolphin Signals", R. Altes, P. Moore, and D. Helweg. 1998. Accession Number: ADA337008, PDF Url: http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDo...

"Extra information from elevation can be used to adaptively improve focusing and to construct a 3-D surface that represents the physical shape of an object as it would be perceived with vision. Such a surface is different from a representation of reflectivity as a function of position, and it allows direct comparison with visual representations (e.g., photographs) of objects. A visual analogue would be very useful to an animal that tries to perform sensor fusion by combining spatially registered feature maps from vision and echolocation. There is some speculation that dolphins may be capable of such a vision-like target representation (Pack & Herman, 1995), although the issue of the cognitive representation of targets formed by echolocating dolphins remains open to debate (Heiweg et al., 1996; Harley et al., 1995; Roitblat et al., 1995), and the lay concept of "seeing with echolocation" remains unsubstantiated. However, a vision-like target representation is well-suited to human observers and could have application to improvement of MCM performance."

The synthetic images are pretty neat. If you want to check them out but avoid the pdf, here is an imgur of the paper's figures: http://imgur.com/a/RLqF8

I couldn't find any peer-reviewed publications by the researchers cited in the press releases by speakdolphin.com and cymascape.com - Jack Kassewitz and Jim McDonough et al.

However, I did find several scholarly articles that support the the hypothesis that dolphins seem able to recognize objects based on mental images they have formed via their echolocation sense, as opposed to recognition based on the object's particular texture, material, size, etc "signature". Here is one of them:

"Seeing through sound: dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) perceive the spatial structure of objects through echolocation." Herman LM1, Pack AA, Hoffmann-Kuhnt M.J. Comp Psychol. 1998 Sep; 112(3):292-305. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9770316 PDF:[1].

From the paper's General Discussion section:

"The results also argue strongly that learning to associate particular characteristics of echoes returning from objects with the visual appearance of those objects was not the mechanism through which the dolphin in this study or the Pack and Herman study accomplished the cross-modal matching task (cf. Harley et al., 1996). Rather, the most compelling general explanation for the demonstrated cross-modal ability is that echolocation yields a direct percept of the object, in effect a representation of the object's shape that is analogous to or easily integrated with the percept developed through vision."

"In summary, the results reported here as well as those of Pack and Herman (1995) begin to construct a compelling case for a concept of echo imaging by the dolphin. The dolphin can apparently use returning echoes to construct a representation of an object that preserves the spatial structure of that object, to the extent that representation can be used to directly recognize that same object through the visual sense alone. The very short decision times used by the dolphin suggest that the object percept develops almost immediately and is of an integral whole, rather than limited to the examination and extraction of selected features."

[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matthias_Hoffmann-Kuhnt...

Simply because it's possible to deconvolve a dolphins sonar clicks into a 2 dimensional representation approximating our visual senses doesn't mean they have any such similar experience of it, on top of that, the whole linguistic angle seems to be wild speculation.

No, but it would be the same information content -- the dolphin's subjective experience of the signal could be different, but this representation shows us (humans) the information in the signal.

Anyway, this SpeakDolphin.com and "CymaScope" thing is clearly bullshit: https://www.cymascope.com/

Looks like they're maybe gearing up to sell 3D prints of bullshit? http://www.speakdolphin.com/pressRelease/Press_Release_3D_Pr...

I cannot find it now, but there was some recent study that showed that dolphins can emit clicks which match echolocation returns, in essence communicating "images" to each other. Presumably this is what they're referring to.

I think that is an urban legend at this point. I also heard this claim from a colleague. When I did research I found nothing of the sort.

jup, all they did was recording an impulse response of some click, which happened to be a dolphins.

Nothing about dolphin communication (I can't even find a reference in the press realease on the strange dolpin website linked in the article)

edit: I really hoped to lear, that dolphins speak in sonograms :)

> In a scientific first, researchers have just reproduced what a dolphin saw as it encountered a male diver.

I wonder why they specified that it was a male diver? Would a dolphin's echolocation be able to tell a male human from a female human? The resolution doesn't look high enough to distinguish external genitalia, but maybe differences in internal composition (such as body fat) might change the character of the echoes sufficiently to distinguish?

I'm, ahem, a bit out of my depth here, but this reads to me like a lossless translation from an original language which inherently expressed the gender. They've done the same thing with "the female dolphin".

There is good evidence that dolphins can see inside other mammals with their sonar and determine if there is a pregnancy. They can get information about your innards.

Occam's Razor suggests old-fashioned sexism

I don't follow. How does sexism explain this?

translation of uselessly gendered pronouns where no neuter exists (as mentioned in another comment) is explained by unawareness to the source language's imprinted sexism.

"Research team leader Jack Kassewitz of SpeakDolphin.com said in a press release that “our recent success has left us all speechless. We now think it is safe to speculate that dolphins may employ a ‘sono-pictorial’ form of language, a language of pictures that they share with each other. If that proves to be true an exciting future lies ahead for inter species communications.”"

If that proves to be true an exciting future lies ahead for inter species communications.

So, porn?

So even The Smithsonian's editors can't recognize bullshit? Bummer.

Url changed from http://gizmodo.com/unprecedented-image-shows-a-dolphins-echo..., which points to this.

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