Communication between humans and animals may be possible after all.
In 1961, a handful of the world's top scientists gathered at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, home to one of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world and the birthplace of the modern search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The meeting was held to decide whether scanning the cosmos for signs of alien life was a worthwhile idea. The group named itself the Order of the Dolphin in honor of John C Lilly, a neuroscientist who would spend the peak of his career taking LSD and trying to talk to dolphins.
Only a few years earlier, Lilly—trained as a neuroscientist—had expanded his research on consciousness and the brain to dolphins. Lilly noted that dolphins' brains were about the same size as humans'. If they were as smart as humans, Lilly wondered, would we be able to communicate with them?
To better study his subjects, Lilly opened the Communication Research Institute on the island of St. Thomas, where he and a small group of colleagues would pioneer the study of dolphin communications. Lilly's early experiments, published in leading journals like Science, suggested that dolphins were capable of mimicking human speech patterns, and that inter-species communication was indeed possible.
But Lilly's unorthodox methods may have had a significant influence on his results. As he detailed in a 1967 article, he had been administering 100 microgram doses of LSD to the dolphins, as one of the handful of researchers in the US who had been authorized to study the potentially therapeutic effects of the drug.
Lilly noted that dolphins on LSD were far more vocal than usual. This was measured through a "duty cycle," or the percentage of the time that a dolphin will spend vocalizing per minute. Without anxiety or stimulation, this duty cycle for sober dolphins can oscillate wildly from zero to 70 percent. With dolphins on LSD, the duty cycle "very frequently does not drop to zero at all."
