How I Fell in Love with the Cetacean Brain

We all know that dolphins and whales (cetaceans) are highly intelligent, but what we’ve discovered about cetacean brains in recent decades has rewritten our understanding of how complex intelligence evolves.
Over 95 million years ago, a humble small-brained ancestor of both humans and cetaceans began to evolve in separate directions. Over the tens of millions of years that followed, two different kinds of large complex brain emerged - each of them among the most sophisticated on the planet.
Dr. Lori Marino, President of the Whale Sanctuary Project, has been studying cetacean brains for more than 30 years. And every year, we’ve been learning more and more amazing things about them.
“Five years ago,” she says, “when we used a special imaging technique to study the brain of a dolphin (who had died naturally), we were astonished by what we learned.” What she and her colleagues had discovered is that while we humans and most other animals have a single pathway from the inner ear up to the first ‘stopover’ for auditory information coming into the brain, it turns out that dolphins have two!
What does this mean? Could it mean that they process echolocation echoes in one region of the brain and whistles and other sounds in an altogether region? “We’re still trying to understand how these two kinds of sound information come together.”
It’s just one of the endlessly fascinating questions Dr. Marino will be exploring with us in the upcoming seminar “How I Fell in Love with Cetacean Brains.”
But be careful: you may fall in love, too!
To learn more about the Whale Sanctuary Project: whalesanctuary...