CHAPTER 04

Following Instructions and Going with the Flow

view of the brain was applied here to the dolphins. Instead of using the limited psychological framework of conditioned refiexes, negative and positive reinforcement, and stimulus-response, I derived a new set of theories and procedurcs based on the theory called "reprogramming."

This particular theory we deal with in greater length in this book. The basic postulate is that the dolphin has a very large biocomputer, which can be reprogrammed through his natural inputs and outputs in a continuous interlocking feedback relationship with the human and his biocomputer and his natural inputs and outputs aided by instrumental means.

During the transition period, while I was transferring tbe dolphin work to others, I pursued a peculiar efifect we had noticed when working with the communication systems of the dolphin. In order to study the dolphin humanoid vocalizations, we put what the dolphin said onto a repeating tape loop where we could study it. We then had a group of people guess what thc dolphin had bcen saving. We obtained a list of, say, ten different words that they thought the dolphin was saying. To complete our study we then had to take the vocalization of the human, which had just preceded the dolphin vocalization, and put that on a tape loop. We quickly found that listening to a repeating word in clear highfide ity English generated more alternates than did the dolphin emission. If one listens to a tape loop of a repeated word for fifteen minutes, one may hear as many as thirty different words other than the one which is on the tape loop. We did an extensive study of the word "cogitate." We exposed something of tbe order of three hundred subjects to this word for periods of fifteen minutes to six hours. We asked each subject to write down the words that he heard or to report them

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