Hear Willy

Morgan Maher

Expanding upon the work of such luminaries as John Lilly, Jeff Warren, author of The Head Trip: Adventures on The Wheel of Consciousness, explores the consciousness of whales in the fascinating CBC podcast; Ocean Mind.

Obsessed with an idea called the Umwelt, a German word that means environment, Warren meets with dolphins, whales and other researches to cast light into the deep inner life and profound sonic world that envelops cetaceans, "an animal that constructs its primary picture of the world, through sound."

According to Warren, "This animal is navigating through the ocean using its voice ... just like you and I memorize our world with sight, it memorizes its world with sound."

While humans have evolved big brains over the course of 2 million years, cetaceans have evolved their large brains for 20 million years.  They have lived in an environment of sound, developing systems of echo-location which, among other things, may allow cetaceans to"see" into the internal workings of physical bodies.

Download Ocean Mind Part One and Part Two.

Creative Commons Image: "Tiaki the Whale" by invervegas on Flickr