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The Dolphin House

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posted on Mar, 23 2021 @ 09:36 PM
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When I was a wee lad I had a mystical device called a Sega Genesis. It was a gateway to a 2-Dimensional realm of wonderment! One such journey I took through this heavenly portal was known as Ecco The Dolphin.

At the time, it was an annoying wussy video game we never played for very long. It was frustratingly difficult to make progress with your video game dolphin, plus it was a girls' game that lacked explosions and muscles. As I recall, there is time travel involved and some aquatic alien invasion in the sky. The video game was actually inspired by experiments conducted by John C. Lilly in the mid-1960's.

The purpose of the experiment was to teach dolphins to understand and speak English (Yeah, the 1960's.) Part of achieving this goal involved giving the dolphins L.S.D. and sexual gratification (Did I mention it was the 60's?)

Childhood ruined? Or made awesomer?!

While it may sound ludicrous at first, the experiments had some merit in my opinion. NASA and Carl Sagan championed these experiments with the belief that it would be practice for a first contact situation with extraterrestrial beings.

However, the results of the experiments fell very far from the intent. John C. Lilly himself became lost in his own experiments with drugs and sensory deprivation tanks, while his colleague Margaret Howe was left to educate the dolphins without interference or supervision. I'll give you a hint: she didn't teach a dolphin to speak English. However some of the vocalizations they managed to record are intriguing to say the least (video below.)

As you can imagine, neither produced any significant, lasting scientific results, but the legend lives on.


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 scale conservation efforts to protect them.

www.vice.com...







edit on 23-3-2021 by NarcolepticBuddha because: (no reason given)



posted on Mar, 24 2021 @ 04:18 AM
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a reply to: NarcolepticBuddha

Seems he may have went a bit too far down the road of L S D.

I was kinda surprised to hear the other guy not only admit to 'fingering' the dolphin(and she liked it), but to admit that he had actually considered sneaking in on the weekend to take it even further....




I haven't listened to it for quite some time, but I've had the Oysterhead CD for 20 years, yet I never had any idea who Dr. John C. Lilly actually was. Near the end of the video you posted, they show a very short clip of this↓ performance of Oysterhead Live on Conan O' Brian.

Oysterhead is Trey Anastasio (Phish), Les Claypool (Primus), & Stewart Copeland (the Police)




edit on 3/24/21 by BrokenCircles because: L S D apparently needs spaces



posted on Mar, 24 2021 @ 05:05 AM
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a reply to: NarcolepticBuddha

Great post and thanks for sharing, a while back i saw a review video of the game Ecco the Dolphin, felt like i really missed out with that game. Very cool to see their inspiration came from a very interesting research project.
Will watch the docu now, it looks very promising.
The 60s with their wacky research programs interest me so much more compared to the docu's you see today, maybe because they just followed their instinct combined with their limited scientific experience in much cases where today it is always by the book or you will get in trouble because everybody is watching everyone in real time.
Of course realize the 60s way was counter productive in the end and most of the research they did was considered pseudo science because of it but i don't care, it is a lot more fun to watch.

For others that are interested in the game review:



posted on Mar, 24 2021 @ 07:42 AM
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a reply to: NarcolepticBuddha

Gerald




posted on Mar, 24 2021 @ 08:02 AM
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Great intro paragraph!

I remember reading about this "study" years ago. Perhaps it was the way the story was framed when I read it, or the omission of any recognition/support from Dr. Sagan, but if struck me as a cringe-worthy bout of directionless pseudoscience. Acid trips and bestiality seem a little off the research beaten path.

As an aside, it strikes me as odd that Dr. Sagan had a very dim view of many 'non-scientific' theories about UFOs, but then didn't run away from this endorsing this experimentation as fast as he could (maybe he wasn't privy to some of the deprivations involved in the "research")

All that being the case, given the incredibly high intelligence of the dolphin species, and how far we've come with medical science and technology since the 60's, maybe a repeat of this research might be worth re-attempting, minus the sex, drugs and rock 'n roll?

Nice thread



posted on May, 21 2021 @ 12:08 PM
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We are currently creating the SSE why do I say this? Each Datacenter in major companies is quickly switching to solid state drives ones that use little power, store Petabytes of information and are more resistant to errors that traditional storage, with lightning fast speeds.

We are creating a planetary brain...




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