The electric organ of the elephantnose fish (Gnathonemus petersii) of the Congo River of Central Africa evolved from muscle cells over 200 million years ago, when the continents of Africa and America were starting to break apart (Arnegard 2010; Gallant et al. 2014).  Presently, each motor unit of the electric organ has its own independent control of voltage (see Figure 1) to communicate with conspecifics when hunting in groups (Nagel et al. 2018).  Pet owners of the elephantnose fish, which is typically housed in tanks greater than 60 gallons per individual, have attributed a high level of intelligence to this species making it quite different from regular freshwater aquarium fishes (Wikipedia, Peter’s elephantnose fish, Dec. 3, 2024). Interestingly, this fish has the largest brain-to-body oxygen ratio of any vertebrate (Nilsson 1996), which attests to its immense cognitive capacity (Herculano-Houzel 2011).  The electric pulses generated by the electric organ are of 1-ms duration (Kawasaki 2011) and controlled by several hundred motor units giving the organ high temporal and combinatorial voltage resolution for the purpose of communication (Fukutomi and Carlson 2020, see Footnote 1).  Based on our understanding of the interaction between the telencephalon and cerebellum (Tehovnik, Hasanbegović, Chen 2025), studies of how the telencephalon of the elephantnose fish programs its enormous cerebellum (see Footnote 2) deserved empirical and theoretical focus to extend Chomsky’s universal grammar (Chomsky 2019) to non-human vertebrates, which would make neurolinguistics (e.g., Poeppel and Assaneo 2020) once-and-for-all a biological science.

Footnote 1: The temporal and combinatorial voltage resolution should be able to deliver pulses that surpass 10 bits per second (over 1,000 possibilities per second), which is enough to qualify as rudimentary speech that is resolvable with a cochlear implant (Tehovnik and Chen 2015; also see Mineault, Tolias et al. 2024).

Footnote 2: The cerebellum of the elephantnose fish is an efference-copy encoder whose size approximates that of a mouse brain, Fukutomi and Carlson (2020).

Figure 1: From Markham (2013) as posted in Wikipedia, Electronic organ (fish), Dec. 3, 2024.