Boba-Kiki effect in 3-day-old chicks (cross-species mapping)

59:14>> That's it. I just wanted to go on a rant about how Ferrari is going to win. >> But um dude, this this paper is pretty insane. >> Okay. because it didn't make any sense to me why it should be possible. Have you ever heard of something called a Boba Kiki effect? >> I only know about Kiki. Do you love me? Are you riding? But I don't know about the boba. >> All right. So, let's let's pull up the the overlay. >> Okay. Okay. >> All right. So, you see the two um you see the two shapes. There's a green sort of blobby shape. >> Yeah. >> And then there's a blue pointed shape. >> Okay. And just for for listeners, so we're looking at an image that currently Can I say this? Yeah, go ahead. Okay. Okay. >> So, it currently has what appear to be

59:54two baby chickens or birds of some kind or ducks. >> Um, yeah. >> In the middle and these two shapes at the top right and left hand corners. The one on the left is a green blob. The one on the right is like a blue star kind of thing. >> Star kind of thingy. Pointy. >> All right. So, which one is Boba and which one is Kiki for those shapes? >> Oh, Boba's obviously the blob and Kiki is obviously the >> Okay. The thingy. >> Why did you say that? Oh, because in my head like I mean like this is I don't know like >> Kiki is like >> Yeah, it's like it's pointy and boba is is blobby. >> That's exactly >> like like phonetically

1:00:34>> Yeah. And this is the Boba Kiki effect. >> Oh, is it really? >> This that's entirely what it is. >> If anyone said the blue was was boba, you're crazy. >> No, literally nobody does. But here's what's crazy. You know, you would think that, okay, maybe we're we're you know, we grew up in a western society. we are we are um exposed to western language. Yes. >> And so perhaps that has something to do with it. >> I that makes sense. >> No, they have done research with multiple language groups. Most famously the Tamil language group which is in India, South India. That is an entirely different language group from um English. English comes from the Indo-Uropean family. >> These guys are Tamils. They're not even Hindi cuz Hindi and you know Sanskrit still comes from the Indo-European

1:01:15family. The Tamil language comes from the Dravidian family which is native to India. It is completely separate from Indo-Uropean family language and they still believe that the left is boba and the right is Kiki. You go to other cultures entirely, Boba Kiki works. You go to infants, Boba Kiki works. So it was thought that this Bobaki effect meaning Boba goes to blobby rounder things and Kiki goes to poer pointier things is something that is innate within human language. Okay. Across human languages. And so far so good until this paper. This paper played recordings of humans saying either Boba or Kiki to naive 3-day old chicks and

1:01:58presented them with two panels that had food behind it. >> Okay. >> And the chicks knew which one was boba and shut. >> These are these are three-day old chicks >> that had the Boba Kiki effect. >> I don't believe it. No, it but it works. >> That's so meaning there is, you know, >> this is not a language thing. >> It's not a language thing. Yeah, >> this is this is like >> there is something inherent in the sound of Boba versus Kiki that maps onto the architecture of physical objects. >> Okay. And and you can you can start thinking like why? And actually, it doesn't seem that weird anymore when you

1:02:40start thinking about the physics of sound >> and the physics of boba and kiki. >> The word boba and the sound b. That's lower frequency. You associate that with bass. Yep. >> Right. >> Kiki is like the ting like the the high frequencies. >> Yeah. rounder objects when sound goes through them, the higher frequencies are going to sort of get absorbed >> around the the rounder frequencies are going to get deflected and so so on and so forth. The sharper an interface is on the physics of an object, right? >> The the sharper the sound that is going to come out of that object just because of the way sound is. Right? The sharper

1:03:21the thing is, the shorter the wavelength, the shorter the wavelength, the higher the frequency, the more we get that ding sound. >> Right? It's literally just for analysis is what what we would think if someone's a electrical or sound engineer. It's it's like the forier analysis of sound around the physics of objects. The smoother an object is, the bassier the sound that comes out. And so even chicks, their brains, three-day old chicks, their brains, there's some innate physics calculation that's happening within them that's saying the higher frequency has to come from a pointier object. >> That is so >> It's so weird.

1:04:01>> Unbelievable. But the way that you explained it does >> Yeah. Then it kind of makes sense. Makes sense. >> What what I'm what I'm surprised about is that a 3-day old chick has neural mechanisms within its brain >> to make that distinction. >> That's this is so invariant across um anyone that has brains, I guess, because this is not even a mammal. >> Right. >> Right. This thing diverged very very far away from us hundreds of millions year of years ago before the dinosaurs. >> There's a there's a deeper architecture here. Yeah. There's there's a deep not architecture, there's a deeper insight um about why that would be true. Yeah. Not only because of the cross species level uh similarities, but also that you

1:04:45don't need >> brains that have developed >> Yeah. >> for a long amount of time to have some sort of like, you know, learned >> understanding of the physics of the universe. >> Yeah. Yeah. They've just made this association because like over the years this is what's true, right? The B sound comes from rounder objects and the C sound comes from pointier objects, right? And it's like even like a a short a small neural network that we train with reinforcement learning, for example, would come up with the Boba Kiki effect, >> right? Where let's say the input of this neural network was the sound and then the output was a decision between the two. through reinforcement learning, it would learn that the lower frequencies are the rounder things

1:05:25>> that >> but the fact that like you know we did this going all the way back to our common ancestor between birds and mammals which is 100 million years plus before the dinosaurs >> and it's still true >> and it's Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's across all these animals, right? I think that's so cool >> that is >> to think about and also what a weird experiment to run. >> Yeah. >> Right. Like who who was like, "Hey, let's test Boba and Kiki on Baby Chicks." >> Who knew Drake was so attuned to Frontier Science Research when he made that song? >> Mhm. >> Whatever that song's called, Do You Love Me? Uh, four great rundown stories.