Once I was in a waiting room, about to be interviewed, and a bizarre thing happened to me. There were sets of pamphlets in a credenza, and some of them were upside down. I had the utter belief, for some reason, that there was meaning in the placement of these pamphlets, and their positions contained information on how to interpret what would be said to me. The upside-downness of some of the pamphlets meant that in some situations, when someone said something to me, I should respond with the opposite of what i thought was true. But in the other cases, I should respond directly. The problem to decipher was: when direct, and when slant? I looked and looked at the credenza very hard, trying to draw out meaning. It was very important. Maybe, I thought, in my weird emotional state, a matter of life and death. But I couldn't do it. I was making that situation -- the meaningfulness of the credenza -- up.

Maybe the meaning to that is that there is no sense in isolation -- a single person can't decipher the meaning in the world around her, because there's nowhere and nothing to check against, Deciphering alone means you have no sanity checks.. there's no figure, only ground. We have two eyes for a reason -- parallax creates 3D and depth of field.

And in Bizah's and Leela's case, they don't speak bird language, so all they can do is test different theories. In the absence of shared speech, even though they are very interested, there is no meaningful data. So all they can do is observe.