Shane Bergin

speaker

128 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 5 Jul

Shane Bergin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea · Is photographic memory a real thing? · 5 Jul 2026 podcast

So other Finch are able to figure out what they're saying and they know who's saying it.

So basically they have a name and they know each other's names.

So they have like an accent.

And so they'd know Tara is speaking or Jessamyn speaking.

You'd pick up the differences in the way that listeners are able to do.

And she saw that the finches can do this too.

And she did lots of tests with them once she'd figured out the vocab where she'd play back the various kind of words, the tweets for the birds.

And sometimes they'd be associated with treats, sometimes they wouldn't.

And she was doing this to kind of be able to figure out, did the birds know what she was talking about?

Like, you know, was she able to do, was there more than just knowing their words, but being able to speak back to them?

Exactly.

And sometimes they got them right.

Sometimes they made mistakes.

But she found that when they made mistakes, it was often not that the words sounded the same, but they had similar meanings for the words.

So I thought that's rather ingenious.

Now, of course, you know, we have to be really careful when doing this sort of science because we tend, as Jessamyn again was telling me before the show, that we tend to anthropomorphize animals and imagine that they're able to do things, you know, we project onto them.

But whilst that's true, that principle is true, I think what this research is showing that there's an awful lot more to what these birds are saying than just making random noise beyond here, I'm alive, this is my patch, go away.

You know, that's what I tend to think most birdsong is, is that I'm here, I'm alive, this is my patch, stay away from me, or I'm interested in meeting people.

Like, I suppose that the way she would have, she would have had to train up her, like it wouldn't have been a large language model that she was using.

You know, it would have been a much smaller model that she...

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