Wonderfest: Animal Talk

In The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1920), author Hugh Lofting imagines a physician who enjoys two-way communication with non-human animals. In 2026, for real, neuroscientist Dr. Julie Elie, earned the Coller Dolittle Prize for Two-way Interspecies Communication, describing a breakthrough in genuine animal talk. Dr. Elie and her team were able to classify zebra finch vocalizations into “core words” based on their significance. Then Dr. Elie verified that the “chatty songbirds” could distinguish — and derive meaning — from those sounds!

Our Wonderfest speaker, Dr. Julie Elie, is Associate Project Scientist in the neuroscience lab of Frédéric Theunissen at UC Berkeley.