
Image Shows a Dolphin's Echolocated Impression of a Submerged Human - eric_h
http://news.discovery.com/animals/whales-dolphins/image-shows-how-dolphins-see-people-151207.htm
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lobster_johnson
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](https://www.cymascope.com/aboutus.html)

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

~~~
100ideas
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".

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymatics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymatics)

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porsupah
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](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."

~~~
100ideas
This page describes the methodology in a bit more detail:
[http://www.cymascope.com/cyma_research/oceanography.html](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...](http://www.cymascope.com/cyma_research/images/Dolphin-sees-with-
soundREV.jpg)) 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

~~~
100ideas
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...](http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-
bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA337008)

 _" 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](http://imgur.com/a/RLqF8)

------
baxter001
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.

~~~
colanderman
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.

~~~
amalag
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.

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tzs
> 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?

~~~
cc_wk
Occam's Razor suggests old-fashioned sexism

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

~~~
conceit
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.

------
Kinnard
"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.”"

~~~
jessaustin
_If that proves to be true an exciting future lies ahead for inter species
communications._

So, porn?

------
Mz
Related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698937)

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

------
dang
Url changed from [http://gizmodo.com/unprecedented-image-shows-a-dolphins-
echo...](http://gizmodo.com/unprecedented-image-shows-a-dolphins-echolocated-
impres-1746714755), which points to this.

