[Ed. note: A pioneer in the study of animal behavior and the founder of Rockefeller University’s noted centerfor ethology, Donald Griffin was one of the first scientists to challenge the dogma that animals are mindless automatons, controlled solely by instinct and reflex. “The flexibility and appropriateness of animal behavior suggest both that complex processes occur in their brains, and that these events may have much in common with our own conscious mental experiences,” he wrote in a 1976 book, The Question of Animal Awareness (Rockefeller University Press).
Griffin’s own research has ranged from probing the mysteries of bird migration to analyzing the underwater hearing capabilities of fish. But he is best known for his discovery of echolocation, a phenomenon he named back in 1944. Now Professor Emeritus at Rockefeller University and a visiting lecturer at Princeton University, Griffin looks back on the experiments that led to the discovery]
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