Dolphins, LSD, and A Love Affair?
The dolphin’s name was Peter; the woman’s, Margaret Howe, a then-23-year-old native of the Virgin Islands, where the experiment took place. During the course of the experiment, however, something no one predicted happened: Peter fell in love with Howe — romantically and sexually.
Yes, you read that right.
Howe is the subject of a documentary featured on BBC. Entitled The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins,it marks the first time in nearly 50 years Howe has spoken of the experiment; after decades of silence, she accepted an interview earlier this year by BBC producer Mark Hedgecoe, who called it “the most remarkable story of animal science I had ever heard.”
I'll admit, it even has these guys beat. Impressive right?
For six weeks, Howe lived in almost total isolation with Peter in a villa that had been flooded with 22 inches of seawater. The water was deep enough for Peter to swim in, but shallow enough for Howe to wade in; a desk suspended from the ceiling allowed her to work and write in her journal out of the water, and a hanging mattress protected by a shower curtain gave her a dry place to sleep. She ate canned food, negating the need for deliveries; she and Peter followed a regular daily routine, untouched by the outside world. English lessons began at 8 am; 10 am was play time; and more lessons occurred at 12 pm and 3 pm, with feeding sessions and more play time in between. Peter apparently liked to watch TV as much as he enjoyed playing fetch with balls and towels.
Over time, Peter developed genuine affection for Howe; this is unsurprising, given what we know about both dolphins’ intelligence and their social behavior. During the fifth week, though, Howe reported in her diary, “Peter begins having erections and has them frequently when I play with him.” She became scared as his “sexual needs” and advances grew more aggressive, noting that dolphin could easily “bite [her] in two” — but she ended up taking matters into her own hands. Literally.
As the narrator apparently says inThe Girl Who Talked to Dolphins,“Margaret felt that the best way of focusing [Peter’s] mind back on his lessons was to relieve his desires herself manually.” Am I assuming that means something like a dolphin handy? Now, that one can raise a lot of questions. Is it ethical for a scientist to sexually pleasure an animal if it genuinely does affect the results of a study? Did she herself question the morality of what she was doing or was it solely on the scientific study? Did she buy him a pack of smokes for after?
We know that dolphins are one of the only other animals besides humans who have sex for pleasure (the other being bonobos); we also know, Dolphins are mostly bisexual sometimes heterosexual, sometimes homosexual, and quite frequent— have sex eight to 10 times a day I’ve been told — so it’s a very different culture that we’re looking at.”
As such, Peter’s advances toward Howe weren’t that surprising. But the depth of the relationship between Peter and Howe took all sorts of unexpected turns, with Peter becoming gentle and essentially wooing his human companion. Howe referred to it in her journal as “courting” behavior, and today noted, “It was very precious. It was very gentle… It was sexual on his part. It was not sexual on mine. Sensual, perhaps.” Seemingly based on the compassion of connection through time spent together.
What could they have possibly been studying?
Well, that requires us to look back in time a bit.
A 2017 Vice article entitled Communication between humans and animals may be possible after all tells us the tale.
"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."
Dr. John Cunningham Lilly (January 6, 1915 – September 30, 2001) was an American physician, neuro-scientist, psychoanalyst, psychonaut, philosopher, writer and inventor.
On the surface, that one may sound a little crazy. Especially after the whole dolphin blowhole.. I mean handjob thing. Dolphins can communicate with us with the use of psychotropic substances? Well...
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? Starting from a little bit of an "over-simplified" assumption initially, developing into a profound scientific theory.
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. (Surprise, I mean it's a little hard to conduct a peer reviewed study when you're bombed on LSD)
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. (Lucky them right?)
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.
Lilly saw the real effect of LSD when a human or another dolphin entered the tank that contained the dolphin on LSD—this would cause the vocalization to rise to about a 70 percent duty cycle for about three full hours (during control sessions where the dolphin wasn't on LSD, interactions with other people or dolphins only raised the duty cycle to about 10 percent). In other words, as soon as the dolphin on LSD had contact with another intelligent mammal, it wouldn't shut up. If the dolphin was trying to communicate with Lilly doesn't it raise more questions?
Was the dolphin aware of his altered state of mind and potentially attempting to communicate? Isn't this a normal effect in those on LSD? Blood flow to other lobes of the brain sparking analytical reasoning, linguistic channels, visual stimulation, and communication expansion.
As Lilly goes on to describe in his article about LSD and dolphins, his work provided important insights into LSD and psychotherapy, even if he failed to prove that he could establish meaningful communication with his subjects. Instead, Lilly and the dolphins communicated in a "silent language," that was made up of nonsense vocalizations and physical contact.
Follow Us
Click below to get exclusive content straight to your feed.
"They will tell us when they don't want us in the pool, they will tell us when they do want us to come in," Lilly said. "They do this by gestures, by nudging, stroking, and all sorts of this nonverbal, non-vocal language. It is a very primitive level, but it is absolutely necessary to make progress on other levels." It's the same idea as body language, just on an inter-species scale. Next time you think it's hard to tell if the cute girl in your office has a thing for you, imagine she's a dolphin. (Well maybe not given the context of this article) talk about difficult.
Although Lilly's experiments into dolphin communication were in many ways an ethical and scientific failure, his work had a profound and positive impact on the way we think about drugs, psychology, and interspecies communication. Thanks in part to Lilly's humanizing approach to dolphin intellect, they're now recognized as one of the most intelligent creatures on Earth, which has prompted a number of large scales conservation efforts to protect them.
Even researchers at the SETI Institute, the California-based extra terrestrial research institute, are continuing Lilly's legacy by investigating how dolphin and other animal communications can help them design a filter that will be able to determine whether a radio signal from space is extraterrestrial in origin.
Today, the field of human-dolphin communication is alive and well: There are now machine interfaces that are capable of"translating" dolphin vocalizations and other research has found that dolphins exhibit vocalization complexity that rivals that of human language (although the existence of a dolphin language, or dolphinese, is still a controversial subject).
Ultimately, however, much of Lilly's work with dolphins and LSD occurs only at the limits of language, allowing for meaning even when words might fail. This idea might be translatable beyond the world of dolphins and humans. What are the implications of testing say LSD on parrots already capable of vocalizations?
"The important thing for us with the LSD in the dolphin is that what we see has no meaning in the verbal sphere," wrote Lilly. "The meaning resides completely in this non-verbal exchange. This is where our progress has been made. We are out of what you might call the rational exchange of complex ideas because we haven't developed communication in that particular way as yet. We hope to eventually, [but] we accept communication on any level where we can reach it."
