 Okay, well I have, I have 10 SLT. Should we wait for any late stragglers or should we go ahead and get started? Yeah, so there's a note card giver. Well, I'll, I'll, I'll explain this when we get started. Okay, all right, let's go ahead and get started then. Lights, camera, action. Well, welcome everyone to our latest in the series of Science Circle panel discussions. We're going to have a little bit of an experimental format today. As you can see, we have kind of a de minimis panel. It's myself and Delia, who has graciously accepted to share her thoughts on this topic. So we appreciate that. The, so the topic today is basically animals, which I think are pretty cool. I, but I'm not just going to be showing cute Facebook animal videos. We're going to be looking at scientific reports of the scientific study of animal behavior. And so, so key to this, I think whole experiment here is going to be synchronized video viewing. So I have res tier a special screen, the peril vision screen, which has a cool feature that allows everyone in the parcel to all be watching the video from the same point. So it sync synchronizes the video. But what's going to happen is I'm going to load a link to the screen. Also, by the way, I'll interrupt myself here. The science circle box next to Delia is a note card giver. And one of the note cards is a screen help. So if you have so make sure that you have your video enabled in your preferences, allow it to auto play. Allow it to let scripts play video and disable the video filtering the media filtering. So the way the syncing works is I'm going to load the video and you some text will appear on the screen and you want to click on the text portion of the screen. Let's click on the text. Then if you need to synchronize, if you feel like you're out of sync, if you'll notice on the left side of the screen is a little extended panel with two buttons and the lower button has a recycle symbol. So just click that recycle symbol and then you will be synchronized with everyone else in the room. Okay, so we're going to try this. So I do have a few introductory remarks I'd like to make one of the things that inspired me to do this talk is my fandom, my boy crush on friends to walls. And I'm interested in a couple of points that he makes, which I think is interesting. So one is that morality is evolved the human morality is evolved. So, and what the deal with that is that there are sort of two schools of thought about human morality. One is from the philosopher Kant, who postulated that morality is obtained through intellectual reason that we use our intellect to reason about morality. And then sort of we come up with moral rules that way, and then we impose that reason to morality on society. The other school of thought comes from the philosopher Hume, who sort of felt that morality is sort of just a natural byproduct of living socially. That when you live socially, you just kind of inherently develop a set of norms and understandings about how you're going to behave. It's an evolved morality. And one of the things that France to walls looks at is to see whether we can find evidence of an evolved morality in the animal kingdom. So let me see if I can pull up this link. So one of the first things I want to show is the if I can select this link is one of his discussions about morality in the animal kingdom. I think another frankly another one of his motivations in trying to demonstrate that morality is evolved rather than obtained through reason is in fact to separate morality from religion. Because I think the Kantian view is basically a religious view that morals are imposed on us from some authority. And I think he wants to catch morale that idea. So hopefully let's let's try our little experiment here. I'm going to go ahead and load this video and we can watch it. Oh wait actually hang on I forgot. So my other point that I wanted to sort of highlight in this presentation is Vander Waals other pennant which is he's kind of resisting the notion that it is wrong to anthropomorphize animal behavior. And again there are two schools of thought mainly coming from philosophers again which say that humans are just categorically distinct from animals. And that you cannot ascribe to animals human motivations or. But the other school of thought which really is actually I think more prevalent with biologists. And scientists which is that you simply have to recognize the biological evolutionary history of humanity and that humans you know emerged from the same nature that all these other animals live in. And that therefore it's not unreasonable to believe that that some of the higher animals chimpanzees and other creatures maybe dolphins even and so forth you know have emotions. And are able to exhibit very interesting sort of humanistic behaviors like reciprocity and compassion and cooperation and things like that. Which you know we can completely relate to and I sort of endorse that view I think it is. I think it's I disagree with the view that that animals are categorically different. Okay with that said let's try our first video this is friends to walls. So click on the text. Then the video should start and if you're out of sync you can click that recycle button. I believe one of the things that may vendor walls famous is he's kind of famous for coining the term alpha male. In his book about alpha males in societies. Look how similar the bonobo love making is to humans isn't that interesting I think that's remarkable. So to demonstrate reciprocity. He's going to show us some really interesting like archival footage. One of the things he's going to show us is this eight this chimpanzee experiment from 1937. This is amazing to me. The persistence in the hungry chimpanzee to you know to nudge the companion to cooperate with him is I think quite striking. You know he knows that he needs the cooperation of the other chimpanzee. If you're having trouble with the video there's a note card giver in the box next to Delia that has a note card for screen help. So the two interesting parts about this one is that the chimp on the right has a full understanding. He needs the partner so full understanding of the need for cooperation. The second one is that the partner is willing to work even though he's not interested in the food. Why would that be well that probably has to do with reciprocity is actually a lot of evidence in primal animals. I like that comment that you just can't make an apparatus then a single elephant can't pull. And so that's how this all operates. We do the same task with elephants. Now with elephants it's very dangerous to work with elephants and another problem with elephants is that you cannot make an apparatus that is too heavy. This experimental design is quite ingenious I think. You can probably make it but it's going to be a pretty clumsy apparatus I think. So what we did in their case is we do these studies in Thailand with Josh Plotnik is we have an apparatus around of which there's a rope, a single rope. And if you pull on this side of the rope the rope disappears on the other side. So two elephants need to pick it up. Never underestimate how animals are motivated by food, even elephants. So the first tape you're going to see is two elephants who are released together arrive at the apparatus. The apparatus is on the left with food on it. And so they come together, they arrive together, they pick it up together and they pull together. So it's actually fairly simple for them. And so that's how they bring it in. But now we're going to make it more difficult because the whole purpose of this experiment is to see how... He knows that he can't pull the rope by himself. I love that. So what we do in the next step is we release one elephant before the other. And that elephant needs to be smart. But if he just stands on the rope, see, then when the other elephant pulls on it, his end of the rope won't disappear, it won't slip away. So all he has to do is stand on it. But it shows the understanding that he has because he puts his big foot on the rope. And he just innately figured that out somehow. I'm not sure I would have thought about it. But it shows the intelligence that the elephants had. They developed several of these alternative techniques that we did not approve of necessarily. So the other elephant is now coming. And the other elephant has to work really hard to pull the food in. Look at the other. The other doesn't forget to eat, of course. This was the cooperation reciprocity part. Now something on empathy. Empathy is my main topic at the moment of research. And empathy has sort of two qualities. One is the understanding part of it. This is just a regular definition, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. And the emotional part. And so empathy has basically two channels. One is the body channel. If you talk with a sad person, you're going to adopt this expression. Yeah. I think anonymous entities comment about mirror neurons of emotion. Empathy. I think is apt. That's actually why people keep mammals in the home and not turtles or snakes or something like that, who don't have that kind of empathy. And then there's a cognitive channel, which is more that you can take the perspective of some of the animals. So he's going to show a clip of a chimpanzee looking at an animation of a chimpanzee yawning and then infectively yawning himself. Of course, we can study that with yarn contagion. And the animated head is really crappy. It's not even realistic. But it still works. It's not even that good. People who have problems with empathy such as autistic children, they don't have yarn contagion. So it is connected. And we study that in our chimpanzees by presenting them as an animated head. So that's what you see on the upper left, an animated head that yarns. And there's a chimpanzee watching, an actual real chimpanzee watching a computer screen on which we play these animations. See, on the right there, the real chimpanzee is yawning, prompted by the animated video. So a yarn contagion that you're probably all familiar with, and maybe you're going to start yawning soon now, is something that we share with other animals. And that's related to that whole body channel of synchronization that underlies empathy. But here you can kind of see how even in animal societies, this kind of morality beginning to emerge of comforting people and cooperating together and things like that. You know, these are, I think, really like foundational components of human morality. It's empathy driven. That's actually the way they study empathy in human children is to instruct a family member to act distressed and then they see what young children do. And so it is related to empathy. And that's the kind of expressions we look at. We also recently published an experiment you may have heard about it on altruism and chimpanzees, where the question is, do chimpanzees care about the welfare of somebody else? And for the case it had been... So what we're looking at with vendor walls is testing animals in a laboratory setting. Later we'll look at what it's like to study, for example, dolphins in a wild setting. Like how do you test wild animals in their natural habitat? One has a bucket full of tokens and the tokens have different meanings. One kind of token feeds only. The partner who chooses the other one feeds both of them. So this is a study we did with Vicky Horner. And here you have the two color tokens. So they have a whole bucket full of them. Yes, Vick makes an excellent point that in chimpanzee society, the alpha male's role actually is comforter in sheep. Unlike our present alpha male in the White House, and in stark contrast to our previous alpha male in the White House, it is important that the alpha, you know, getting comforted by the alpha is very powerful in these societies and that's an important function that they have. So it doesn't matter. So she gives us now a pro-social token and both chimps get fed. So the one who makes the choices always gets a reward. So it doesn't matter what survivor and she should actually be choosing blindly. But what we find is that they prefer the pro-social token. So this is the 50% line that's the random expectation and especially if the partner draws attention to itself, they choose more. And if the partner puts pressure on them, I think a game theory like the prisoner's dilemma also supports the sort of social benefits of reciprocity over, you know, hundreds and hundreds of iterations. After a while, societies figure out the benefits of reciprocity. So the final experiment that I want to mention to you is our fairness study. And so this became a very famous study. Oh yeah, this is a classic video that went viral, I think, last year. And we did that originally. That he's going to show here in a minute. I'm going to show you the first experiment that we did. It has now been done with dogs and with birds and chimpanzees. But we started out with... Yeah, me too, CB. So what we did is we put two... What strikes me about this video is how quickly the monkey on the left gets outraged. I mean, it doesn't take three or four or five, you know, snubs of the grape. Like he gets outraged instantly. Like the very first time he doesn't get a grape, he gets outraged. The cucumber is perfectly fine for them. Now if you give the partner grapes, the food preferences of my Capuchin monkeys correspond exactly with the prices in the supermarket. And so if you give them grapes that's a far better food than you create inequity between them. So that's the experiment we did. Recently we videotaped it with new monkeys who had never done the task thinking that maybe they would have a stronger reaction and that turned out to be right. The one on the left is a monkey who gets cucumber. The one on the right is the one who gets grapes. The one who gets cucumber, note that the first piece of cucumber is perfectly fine. The first piece he eats. Then she sees the other one getting grape. Yeah, it's important that the one on the left sees that the other one got the grape. Even though it doesn't look like he's paying attention, he still notices that the other one got the grape. And that's what she does. See, he's like outraged immediately. And so each of the other ones sees that. So he gives a rock to us now, gets again cucumber. This is wrong. We are the 99%. So this is basically the Wall Street protest that you see here. Yeah, apparently this video, this experiment generated a lot of comments from economists. Let me tell you, I still have two minutes left. Let me tell you a funny story about this. This study became very famous and we got a lot of comments, especially anthropologists, economists, philosophers. They didn't like this at all because they had decided in their mind, I believe, that fairness is a very complex issue and that animals cannot have it. And so one philosopher even wrote us that it was impossible that monkeys had a sense of fairness because fairness was invented during the French Revolution. So now... Oh, that's interesting to us. I had not picked up on that detail that there are variations of this experiment but the one who got the grape refuses the grape. I hadn't noticed that before. A couple of combinations of chimpanzees where indeed the one who would get the grape would refuse the grape until the other guy also got a grape. So we're getting very close to the human sense of fairness and I think philosophers need to rethink their philosophy for a while. So let me summarize... I feel like Franz de Waals is very compelling at assembling evidence for his arguments. Empathy and consolation, pro-social tendencies and reciprocity in the sense of fairness. And so we work on these particular issues to see if we can create a morality from the bottom up, so to speak. And in our note card giver, I have a note card with some other video links. I have another Franz de Waals link with just an interview with him basically where he kind of elaborates more on his ideas. So I recommend that also. So... There are two really important points here, though. One is that most of these are done in laboratory settings. Yeah. It makes a difference. I mean, that just subscribes a lot of behaviors. And the second is that different groups evolve in different ways. So that in the wild with chimpanzees and bonobos and other primates, they're in social groups. They have, even within the species, cultural or ethnic variations, describe that sort of thing. Yeah. Well, with that prompting, let's take a look at a dolphin video that shows what it's like to try to study intelligent animals in their natural habitat outside of a laboratory. And how do you try to construct a way to interact with them? Let's check this out. Hopefully this will work. And again, be sure to click on the text when I load the video. And then if you're out of sync, click the recycle symbol on the left side, sort of extended panel on the screen there. Decades ago, not years ago, I set out to find a place in the world where I could observe dolphins underwater and try to crack the code of their communication system. Now, in most parts of the world, the water's pretty murky, so it's very hard to observe animals underwater. But I found a community of dolphins that live in these beautiful, clear, shallow sandbanks of the Bahamas, which are just east of Florida. And they spend their daytime resting and socializing in the safety of the shallows, but at night, they go off the edge and hunt in deep water. Now, it's not a very... Yes, Delia. And one of the challenges of working with animals in the wild is, you know, they become acclimated to you, to the scientists and so forth. And so it's very difficult to create a scientific environment to study natural behavior when, in fact, the social groups that you're studying, you know, your presence among them, you don't know how much it changes their behavior. And they go through pretty distinct developmental phases, so that's fun to track their behavior. And by about the age of 15, they're fully spotted, black and white. Now, the mother you see here is Mugsy. She's 35 years old in this shot, but dolphins can actually live into their early 50s. And like all the dolphins in our community, we photograph the Mugsy and track them. So one of the things she mentions here about the dolphin lifestyle I think highlights an important feature of studying intelligent animals in the wild. What you're looking for are animals that have big brains, that are social, and that are long-lived, which chimpanzees and dolphins and probably birds are all like that. And having long lives, like a long childhood, a long adolescence, you know, suggests that these animals require a lot of cultural learning before they become mature adults. They have good vision, so they use body postures to communicate. They have taste, not smell. And they have touch. And sound can actually be felt in the water because the acoustic impedance of tissue and water is about the same, so dolphins can buzz and tickle each other at a distance. And now we do know some things about how sounds are used with certain behaviors. And dolphins give each other names with their calls. And it's like a name. And this is the best-studied sound because it's easy to measure, really. And you'd find this whistle when mothers and calves are reuniting, for example. Another well-studied sound are echolocation clicks. This is the dolphin sonar. And they use these clicks to hunt and feed. But they can also tightly pack these clicks together into buzzes and use them socially. For example, males will stimulate a female during a portion of the day. The dolphin sonars are so effective that they can buzz each other remotely from a distance because, you know, the pressure waves travel through the water so effectively that they don't even have to be touching. So dolphins are also political animals, and so they have to resolve conflicts. And they use these burst-pull sounds as well as their head-to-head behaviors when they're fighting. And these are very unstudied sounds because they're hard to measure. Now, this is some video of a typical dolphin fight. So you're going to see two groups. And you're going to see the head-to-head paw string, some open mouths, lots of squawking. There's a bubble. And basically, one of these groups will kind of back off and everything will resolve fine. And it doesn't really escalate into violence too much. Now, in the Bahamas, we also have resonant bottle-nose that interacts socially with the spotted dolphins. For example, they babysit each other's calves. The males have dominance displays they use when they're chasing each other's females. And the two species actually form temporary alliances when they're chasing sharks away. And one of the mechanisms they use to communicate their coordination is synchrony. They synchronize their sounds and their body postures to look bigger and sound stronger. Now, these are bottle-nose dolphins. And you'll see them starting to synchronize their behavior. This synchronizing is pretty remarkable, but there's kind of one dolphin there in the middle that seems very wiggly. Doesn't quite seem to get the whole synchronizing idea. I wish I was that coordinated. Another, as I'd like to bring in your... Sure. Now, it's important to remember that you're only hearing the human audible parts of the sound. Dolphins make ultrasonic sounds, and we use special equipment in the water to collect these sounds. Now, researchers have actually measured whistle complexity using information theory. And whistles rate very high relative to ephemeral languages. But first, Paul sounds... The little whales and narwhals. Yes, that's true. Paul mentioned that in this video, that spotted dolphins and bottle-nose dolphins often cooperate by babysitting each other and mutually defending each other and things like that. So that is very true. And also, I think what she's talking about here is analyzing dolphin sounds outside the range of human hearing. And since we can't hear those sounds, we use information theory to analyze what might be going on in those non-audible ranges. I think that's quite fascinating that we have kind of mathematical models that we can apply to this data to help us maybe not decode, but at least sort of analyze what's going on with the dolphin sounds. So we want to develop an interface like this in the Bahamas, but in a more natural setting. And one of the reasons we thought we could do this is because the dolphins were starting to show us a lot of mutual curiosity. So I also think it's super interesting that dolphins will mimic us in the water, mimic our postures and so forth. I didn't know that. He was quite remarkable to me. ...is to drag seaweed or sargassum in this case around. And they're very adept. They like to drag it on, drop it from a appendage to a appendage. This footage of the adult is Carol. She's 25 years old here, and this is her newborn, Cobalt, and he's just learning how to play this game. She's kind of teasing him. I'm also kind of interested in this dolphin play behavior because it seems like most animals sort of play with their mouths like the mouth is the main way they interact with the world. But dolphins use all different parts of their body. They use their fins and their tails and so forth, you know, sort of like appendages. For some reason, that just seems a little bit interesting to me. It shows a little bit more body awareness than you might see with other animals like you probably wouldn't see a dolphin chasing its own tail like you see with dogs and cats, for example. I just think the dolphins have more awareness of their body than a lot of other animals do. They use their fins on the keypad and happily exchange information and request toys from each other. But we quickly found out the dolphins simply were not going to hang around the boat using a keyboard. They got better things to do in the wild. They might do it in captivity, but in the wild. So we built a portable keyboard that would get pushed through the water and we labeled four objects they like to play with, the scarf, the dolphin. And that's the scarf whistle, which is also associated with the visual symbols. And these are artificially created whistles. So at first they try to acclimate the dolphins to interact with a keyboard, which I think is also kind of interesting. And the other thing I think is interesting about this experiment is how hard it is to get these wild animals to just freaking pay attention to you. Just to get their attention and get them to focus on what's happening is very challenging. Just play the rope key and that's the request for the toy from the human. So I've got the rope, I'm diving down and basically trying to... The thing is, there are actually very, very few animals on the planet that we can engage in this way. That sort of even notice us enough to really be able to interact with them so we can test them. Really, there's just a handful of animals that we can do these kind of studies with. I'm going to try to request this toy, the rope toy from the dolphins using the rope sound. See if they might actually understand what that means. That's the rope whistle. Up come the dolphins and drop off the rope. Well, so this is only once we don't know for sure if they really understand the function of the whistles. So here's a second toy in the water. This is a scarf toy and I'm trying to lead the dolphin over to the keyboard to show her the visual and the acoustic signal. Now this dolphin, we call her the scarf thief. Because over the years, she's absconded with about 12 scarves. In fact, we think she has a boutique somewhere in the Bahamas. So I'm reaching over, she's got a scarf on her right side. And we try to not touch the... Yeah, Taglan, I think they do think we're cute. There were some... I saw some headlines last year about MRI studies with elephants and that elephants think humans are cute, you know? Because when they see humans, it lights up the part in the brain I guess associated with cuteness or something like that. So I think that does happen. I wanted to share this video with you, not to show you any big breakthroughs because they haven't happened yet, but to show you the level of intention and focus of these dolphins to have an interesting system. And because of this, we really decided we needed some more sophisticated technology. So we joined forces with George Tech with sad starters and wearable computer to build us an underwater wearable computer that we're going to chat. But there's also one that I've seen recently where a dolphin came up to a diver so basically the diver activates the sounds on the keypad, on the forearm. See, dolphins have figured out that humans have hands and that, you know, hands are very... you know, hands can be used to comfort you and to make, you know, and to touch you. Yeah, the dolphin took the diver's glove and it's mouth and sound recognition so you can respond to the dolphins quickly and accurately. And we're at prototype stage, but this is how we hope it will play out. So diver A and diver B both have... One of the things I kind of like about this video is that, you know, she's very conservative about, you know, the prospects for her research. You know, there haven't been really any huge breakthroughs about communicating with dolphins. And I guess what's really interesting is just this sort of observing the process of figuring out how we can scientifically study these animals. How can you design experiments? How can you attract the interest of these animals to pay attention to you? You know, these very, very, very threshold problems that have to be solved just to freaking study them much less, you know, get any breakthrough results. For example, right now we can put their own signature whistles in the computer and request to interact with a specific dolphin. Likewise, we can create our own whistles, our own whistle names, and let the dolphins request specific divers to interact with. I think dolphins are also very problematic because they're so playful. You know, it's sort of hard to get them to just sit still and pay attention. It's a species that they're probably close to our intelligence in many ways, and we might not be able to admit that right now, but they live in quite a different environment and you still have to bridge the gap with the sensory systems. Now imagine what it would be like to really understand the mind of another intelligent species on the planet. Thank you. This is a little bit of a tension, for any of those, any of you who know the old animated cartoon show from the 90s, Dr. Katz, one of the comedians I'm blanking on his name now, but talked about what it would be like to be Aquaman, where you can talk to the fishes, and he says, what kind of crappy superhero pair was that? I mean, what would a fish possibly have to say? Like, hi, hi Aquaman, hi Aquaman, hi fish, seeing any evil deeds going on, and then the fish says, hi Aquaman. It's like, fish have nothing to say. How many of you have seen the Alfred Hitchcock film, The Birds? Any of you get really freaked out by that? You might want to leave now. So this is a vending machine for crows, and over the past few days, many of you have been asking me, how did you... I may have had my mic off. So this is about crows. I kind of want to show a video about birds. Many ideas you can't get rid of anyway, at a cocktail party. About 10 years ago, I was at a cocktail party with a friend of mine, and we were sitting there, and he was complaining about the crows that he had seen that were all over his yard and making a big mess, and he was telling me that really we ought to try and eradicate these things. We got to kill them because they're making a mess. And I said that was stupid. It was something useful. And he said that was impossible. And I'm sure I'm in good company in finding that tremendously annoying when someone tells you it's impossible. So I spent the next 10 years reading about crows in my spare time. And after 10 years of this, my wife eventually said, look, you've got to do this thing you've been talking about and build the vending machine. So I did. But part of the reason that I found this interesting is that I started noticing as a result of human habitation expansion. And no one seems to be paying attention to all the species that are actually living. They're surviving. I'm talking specifically about synanthropic species, which are species that have adapted specifically for human ecology. Species like rats and cockroaches and crows. And as I started looking at them, I was finding that they had hyper-adapted. They become extremely adapted living with us. And in return, we just tried to kill them all the time. One reason I'm showing this video is because in a few minutes here, he's going to go and experiment with a bird. So for example, rats are incredibly responsive breeders. Solving a puzzle as anyone who's tried to get rid of them knows. To extract food from a tube. And let's build something that's mutually beneficial. It's quite remarkable. And find some way to have a new relationship. What the bird does to extract food from the tube. But the story of the vending machine is a little more interesting if you know more about crows. It turns out that crows aren't just surviving with human beings. They're actually really thriving. They're found everywhere on the planet except for the Arctic and the southern tip of South America. And in all that area, they're only rarely found breeding more than five kilometers. A lot of birds are very adaptive. It's remarkable how well birds have adapted to an urban environment with crows. The ability to adapt the human environment in itself is a display of intelligence. Because the human and urban environments are just full of surprising circumstances that you just don't encounter in nature. They're constantly surprised by novelty. And to be able to adapt to the novelty here it is. The video of the bird solving the problem. The researchers had a problem. They messed up and left just a stick of wire in there. And she hadn't had the opportunity to do this before. You see it wasn't working very well. So she adapted. Now this is completely unprompted. She had never seen this done before. Cook, no one had shown her how it could happen. But she did it all on her own. So keep in mind that she's never seen this done. So not only did this crow find the wire. And by the way I should mention these crows are they naturally use sticks to fish for food. But she finds the wire and then she uses the side of the plastic crate to mold the wire into a hook. Completely unprompted. It's just amazing. In Sweden crows will wait for fishermen to drop lines through holes in the ice. And when the fishermen move off they can reel up the lines and eat the fish or the bait. It's pretty annoying for the fishermen. On an entirely different tack at University of Washington a few years ago we were doing an experiment where they captured some crows on campus. Some students went out and netted some crows and brought them in. And the other thing is that the crow initially tries to fish it out with the straight wire. Like the crow goes through a sequence of experiments and they fetch the food so it tries the easiest one first and then they fish it out with a straight wire. Then that doesn't work so that it modifies its experiment and try another approach. So it's almost as if the crow is like beasening or it's sort of like like has foresight in a sense. So in itself is quite So we know that these crows are really smart but the more I dug into this the more I found that they actually have an even more significant adaptation. Yeah, pretty interesting. So what's significant about this isn't that crows are using cars to crack nuts. In fact, that's old hat for crows. This happened about 10 years ago in a place called Sendai City at a driving school in the suburbs of Tokyo. And since that time all the crows in the neighborhood are picking up this behavior. And now every crow within 5 kilometers is standing by a sidewalk waiting to collect its lunch. So they're learning from each other and research bears this out. Crows seem to have a remarkable ability to transmit and learn information from generations to generations that illustrates that nicely. The point being that they develop cultural adaptation. And as we heard yesterday that's the Pandora's box that's getting human beings in trouble and we're trying to see it with them. They're able to very quickly and very flexibly adapt to new challenges and new resources in their environment which is really useful to live in a city. So we know that there's lots of crows who found out they're really smart and we found out that they can teach each other. And when all this came clear to me I realized the only obvious thing to do is build a vending machine. So that's what we did. This is a vending machine for crows and it uses Scinarian training to shape their behavior over 4 stages. It's pretty simple. Basically what happens is that we put this out in a field where you can see the machine being there and actually they eat up all the peanuts and then they see that they're peanuts here on the feeder tray to help them out. Then they leave and the machine spits up more coins and peanuts and that's really dandy if you're a crow. Then you can come back anytime you need to sell the peanut. So when they get really used to that and we move on, they fly patterns or whatever, various kinds of behaviors that they model to the younger generation we go ahead and stymie them to the third stage for we only give them a point. Like most of us who've gotten used to it are playing, this is really good for them off. They do what they do in nature when they're looking for something and they sweep them all the way with their beak. It's just done by modeling behaviors. When that happens they get a peanut and so this goes on for some time the crows learn that all they have to do is show up, wait for the coin to come out, put the coin in the slot and then they get their peanut and when they're really good and comfortable with that and this is where we see the difference between crows and other animals. Squirrels for example would show up with the peanut, come back with the peanut, go away. They do this maybe half a dozen times before they get bored and then they go off and play in traffic. Crows on the other hand show up and they try and figure it out. They know that this machine's been messing with them through three different stages of this behavior. They figure it's got to have more to it. So they poke at it and peck at it and whatnot and eventually some crow gets a bright idea that hey, there's lots of coins lying around. One of the things that interests me about this vending machine experiment is you can just put something in the crows environment just like put it there and they will like just naturally inspect it. What's significant about this to me isn't that we can start to pick up peanuts. Mind you there's 216 million rounds with it. Just naturally. Crows can do it. Instead, I think we should look at it and just messing around with it. I think that crows can be trained to do other things. For example, why not train them to pick up garbage after stadium events or find expensive components from discarded electronics or maybe do search and rescue. The main point of all this for me is that we can find mutually beneficial systems for these species. We can find ways to interact with the other species that doesn't involve exterminating them but involves finding an equilibrium with them to make a really useful balance. Thanks very much. Those are all of my planned videos. We still have a little bit of time left. We can just kind of chit chat for a bit. If we go a little bit over time are people interested in watching a video about slime molds? Because slime molds are actually you know pretty freaking cool. Well, alright, well, let's see if slime molds are cool. Let's see, I hope I select the right the right video here. This is not too long. It's only about 10 minutes so we'll only go a little bit over time. No, you don't need one big brain to act smart. Take ants, for example. They build intricate colonies. They farm. They wage war. Each ant has a tiny little brain. But together they exhibit swarm intelligence. So this is a little bit like a swarm intelligence? You know, the Borg and so forth, the resistance is futile. But the weird thing about slime molds is they are not a hive intelligence. A slime mold is a single cell with one cell with millions of nuclei. It's very fascinating behavior. We took a trip to the swarm lab at the New Jersey Institute of Technology to check it out. Studying slime mold is one of the that's probably one of the weirdest organisms. Studying slime mold is one of the that's probably one of the weirdest organisms I've worked with. My name is Simon Garnier I'm an assistant professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Simon runs the swarm lab which studies intelligence in places you might not expect to find it. The main research topic of the lab is trying to understand how what we call decentralized systems. A system that don't have a boss or an architect or someone in charge how these systems are capable of self-organizing and through this self-organization find solutions to problems. And Simon has an unlikely test subject for his studies. Slime mold is a unicycle organism so it's a single cell. But it's a very particular cell compared to what people think cells are. Instead of having one nucleus it has actually millions of them sometimes billions of them. It's a cell that can grow over very large sizes. One of the rare cells in the world that you can actually see with your own eyes. But as unique as slime mold is to study it also takes a lot of patience. It doesn't move very fast just a millimeter an hour for someone studying animal behavior and also studying things that you can't see their behavior directly you have to wait. Other than that it's cheap. It doesn't taste very good. I wouldn't recommend people to eat that. You tried it? I tried it. What does it taste like? It's more like, have you ever like licked the floor? Like it tastes like dirt. But slime mold isn't just weird because of its size or its taste. It also appears to be intelligent. It doesn't have a brain but it can solve all kinds of complex problems without any of the hardware. So intelligent behavior without a brain. It can talk of where it's been. It can solve mazes in search of food. It can even be trained to take risks in the name of a big payoff. And then there are the transit experiments. About a decade ago scientists at the Okaito University in Sapporo had a weird idea. What the research did essentially is they gave slime mold a map of the Tokyo rail system. And each of these stations was actually a food source for slime mold. And then they let slime mold explore. I'm not sure what he means by when slime mold finds research. The researchers gave a map to the slime mold. What does that even mean? What the researchers found a few days later was a pretty well designed rail system that closely mimicked the real life map. What they found is that the slime mold is actually a built network pretty close to what we know. They are very cheap to build. But at the same time, if there is destruction in the network, they will be able to get around it. That bit about being responsive to disruption is something that our transit networks could learn a lot from. Yeah, I think he shows that later in the video that they can solve mazes. And this organism that's used essentially a bunch of proteins and lipids and this thing is just capable of solving it naturally without any external help. Simone's team helped us recreate another famous transit experiment that uses a map of the United States. By placing food sources on major U.S. cities, we essentially asked the slime mold to build us an interstate highway system, which begs the same question that so much of this asks. How is slime mold doing this? Simone's not entirely sure, but he has an idea. Here in the lab, one of the hypotheses we are exploring is that the brain of the slime mold is actually the brain. The membrane is at the bottom of the slime mold because of the concept of the environment. So getting the outside information and getting the inside information. Meaning, even without a brain, a single bit of slime mold can react to the surroundings and simulate information throughout the cell. Simone thinks that decision-making power may come from that ability to synchronize information and that the fact is that stimulus response behavior is remarkably good at mimicking intelligence. Just the mere fact that you sort of are attracted or recoiled by a stimulus through thousands and thousands of iterations starts to look like you're smart. So sort of the foundations of intelligence, I think, we also ask the same question. What exactly do we learn from all this? Well, first, studying the slime mold is like studying a very, very distant past. Life was unicellular at the beginning and that's the unicellular organism. And so by looking at how something like this is capable of solving complex problems, we sort of get to the origin of intelligence. Yeah, a good point says to me about the delay gratification. That's a different order from the stimulus response. The future like self-driving cars is going to be a big decentralized system. We're going to have millions of these self-driving cars on the road and essentially they are all computers on wheels and each of these computer on wheels is going to try to make a decision in real time on which road to take, how to avoid this or the car, how to find the best path. Basically, if we can tease out the algorithm that slime mold uses to make decisions, we could use some of that math for ourselves. If the self-driving cars are capable of talking to each other, figuring out where traffic is clogged, they can automatically redistribute themselves in the network and decrease essentially the amount of pressure on a particular road, making it better for everyone. A few days later, Simon sent us the results of the experiment. The map isn't perfect, but it is comparable to a highway network that took millions of dollars and years to create. So, yes, this is just a bunch of goo in a Petri dish, but it's good that can make you question your own complexity as a human. So the question is, if slime mold is not intelligence and it's using only basic physics and chemistry to solve this problem, well then, if we are as good as a sack of proteins, are we intelligent really or do we need to really find what intelligence means? I mean, when we look at something like slime mold. Hey, everyone! You're watching this on the Brent New Verge Science YouTube channel. The whole science team has been working on this, and we're really excited. Okay, thanks, everyone. I think that's all we really have time for. I'm sure we could do this all day because it's a blast. But you've got to draw the line somewhere. I really appreciate you all attending and really enjoyed the conversation today. Oh, yes, and I do want to make sure I thank Delia. She was so kind to join us today to provide color commentary on all the topics we discussed. Thank you, Delia. That was my pleasure. It was fun. I think this is a topic we ought to revisit periodically. Yes, I agree. You know, I'm not going to be able to come up with new topics for these presentations indefinitely, so I'm going to have to revisit some of them from time to time, and I think this will definitely be a fun one to read.