Before Peter Gabriel Jammed with Monkeys, John C. Lilly Tripped with Dolphins

How can we communicate with animals? Music seems to work. Consider the uncanny video below, in which Peter Gabriel jams with a female bonobo monkey. The monkey picks out a haunting melody on a keyboard and appears to play along with her human counterpart.

Gabriel is part of a team of people (which also includes Internet granddaddy Vint Cerf, computer scientist Neil Gershenfeld, and cognitive psychologist Diana Reiss) proposing to develop an "interspecies internet" allowing animals to communicate with one another. And with us. If we develop further understanding of animal cognition, they argue, then we can build interfaces which allow them to take advantage of human tools—like the internet.

After all, it's simple vanity to assume consciousness is unique to humans. Increasingly, we find that animals show signs of self-awareness. Reiss, who teaches dolphins to communicate using underwater keyboards, pointed out in the group's recent TED talk that “we used to think [self-awareness] was a uniquely human quality, but dolphins aren’t the only non-human animals to show self-recognition in a mirror. Great apes, our closest relatives, also show this ability,” as do elephants.

If they're capable of benefiting from it, how could we deny conscious beings the access to evolutionary tools like the Internet? If nothing else, creating such a network would be good practice in tamping down our inherent human chauvinism, and might come in handy if we ever need to communicate with other species in the universe. As Gabriel put it in yesterday's Here & Now episode on the subject, "If aliens do exist…we expect them to treat us as smart creatures that are worth listening to, and I would ask, 'like we have with the other species on this planet?'"

All of this is pretty bleeding-edge (and bleeding-heart), but it owes a huge debt to the often-ignored work of an animal communication pioneer: John C. Lilly.

Lilly, arguably the psychedelic patron saint of an interspecies internet, started his scientific career at the National Institute of Health, working on the puzzle of what would happen to the brain if it were deprived of external stimulation. This was the 1950s: the prevailing thought at the time was that an absence of stimulus would essentially put the brain to sleep.

To prove otherwise, Lilly built the world's first isolation tank, and, floating in this saltwater void, discovered that reality was quite the opposite. In fact, he described the tank as "a black hole in psychophysical space" where reveries, hallucinations, and even out-of-body experiences were possible. In 1964 he mixed LSD and sensory deprivation for the first time, and his path went deeply afield from that point forward. See also: Altered States, a movie partially inspired by Lilly's work.

In a move that should be logical to anyone experienced in psychotropic drugs, Lilly became obsessed with communicating with animals, particularly fellow floaters: whales, dolphins, and porpoises. He quit the NIH and founded the Communications Research Institute, based in the US Virgin Islands and Miami, to study the big-brained sea dwellers.

Certain that cetaceans communicate in a sophisticated sonar language, he spent the rest of his life trying to crack a dolphin code. "I believe it is important," he wrote in The Mind of the Dolphin, in 1967, "that we consider possible ways of dealing with nonhuman intelligent life forms before the duty is forced upon us." His methods of doing this were, to say the least, unconventional.

For 10 weeks in 1965, Lilly had a female research associate, Margaret Howe, move in with a dolphin named Peter. They shared a two-room house flooded just enough for Magaret to wade around in a leotard and Peter to swim at her feet. They cohabitated fairly successfully, until it became apparent that Peter had a sexual interest in Margaret—and when his coy nibbles at her toes were unrequited, he started whacking her shins with his flippers and showing off his genitals.

The true predecessor to the interspecies internet might be Lilly's "two-faced" underwater computer, Joint Analog Numerical Understanding System (JANUS, named after the two-faced Roman god), whicht was designed to allow humans to communicate with dolphins.

A researcher would type onto the "human face" of JANUS, an Apple II keyboard, which would then transmit sounds underwater to a dolphin pen while simultaneously displaying visual information on computer screen. Hydrophones would pick up any sounds the dolphins made in response and feed them into a frequency analyzer to search for patterns. After a few years of ponderous trials, Lilly was convinced the dolphins would learn the sonic code, and a human-dolphin dictionary of stereophonic acoustic picture-words could be written.

The idea of using keyboards instead of complicated acoustic apparatus, as Reiss did decades later, didn't appeal to Lilly. "They don't have these little fingers we have," he wrote. Rather, he hoped to reach dolphins on their level. Lilly decided, after a lifetime spent studying dolphins, consuming barrels of LSD, and imbibing a special super hallucinogen he referred to only as "Vitamin K," that dolphins not only had symbolic language, but the capacity to gauge one another's internal physical and emotional states using sonar.

In an interview with OMNI Magazine in 1983, Lilly said, "every dolphin is aware of where every other dolphin is, just in case he's needed. 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you' is one of their rules, and, unlike, us, they follow it twenty-four hours a day."

"They're also more spiritual," he added, "since they have more time to meditate."

Ultimately, Lilly's dolphin research was part of a larger study of consciousness, one he amply supplemented with psychedelic self-experimentation and isolation. By stepping into the sea and making a valiant effort to bridge the gap between animal and human cognition, however, Lilly laid a foundation—albeit a shaky one at best—for future inquiry into interspecies communication. May we, like the dolphin floating in the sea, take time to meditate upon his ideas.