Today I met Pierre Lavagne, a French university researcher who uses music to communicate with humpback whales. Pierre has designed a unique, shell-shaped musical instrument that produces frequencies remarkably like those produced by whales. He free dives 80 feet down, then rises to the surface playing the shell, accompanied by the whales, who rise with him.

Apparently whales have several known sound patterns, which are easily distinguishable for scientists. But Pierre has identified another pattern – previously unexplained.

First of all, whales communicate about logistics — about getting together, for example, to create a ‘bubble net’ in which to trap fish. Secondly they communicate while traveling together. Thirdly they sing, just for the pure pleasure of it. Apparently the males do the singing; the females shut up when the men are around, and only sing when they are alone with their calves. (This is not the only blatantly sexist thing in the marine mammal world, and in that it raises interesting questions, but they’re another story.)

So let’s not digress from the other sound pattern…

This other sound pattern has been recorded dozens of times. The male whales make it while hanging head downward for hours at a time, coming up only to breathe and then invert themselves again. What on earth could they be doing? Pierre and the other researchers were mystified by this until their research project was visited by a Tibetan monk.

“What do you think of this?” asked Pierre, playing the mystifying tones and showing footage of the upside-down-hanging whales.

“Isn’t it obvious?” answered the monk. “It’s an OM. They’re meditating.”

Once he had pointed this out, Pierre said, it seemed obvious.

I did not make up this wonderful story of how diverse cultural knowledge can lead to breakthroughs that Western scientists would never get if they stayed enclosed, but I shall be using it for the rest of my days. It’s especially touching to me that the interspecies connection had a common element of shared experience that was not present between the two cultures of humans. To a skilled meditator, another skilled meditator is obvious, even if he is of a different species

The story also underlines for me that there’s a lot about humans that is really just about us being mammals. It’s not specific to homo sapiens at all. Up till now, meditation seemed pretty much a human activity, but why wouldn’t it be a mammalian thing? Gorillas have been spotted watching sunsets. Wolves collect to howl (sing?) at the moon.

For more about Pierre Lavagne and communication with whales via music, go to his Shelltone project website.