Birdbrain.(animal cognition, Alex)(Brief biography)

As the crowd at the Midwest Bird Expo waited for the cognitive scientist Irene Pepperberg to take the podium, the hum of human chatter was punctuated by the sound of parrots whooping it up--twittering and letting loose with wolf whistles, along with the occasional full-out jungle squawk. The birds, many of them for sale, were displayed in cages just beyond the curtained-off stage, which was inside the main hall of the DuPage County Fairgrounds, in Wheaton, Illinois. Nobody seemed particularly distracted by the commotion. People were too busy pulling out their cell phones and showing one another photographs of their cockatiels back home. It was a warm Saturday afternoon in early April, and a woman in the folding metal chair in front of me, who was wearing large parrot earrings, said that she had driven all the way from Florida to see Pepperberg. Indeed, if this were a political rally, the audience would be Pepperberg's base. Here were admirers who had sent in ten-dollar bills to help support her research with Alex, the African gray parrot that she worked with for thirty years; and here were people who, after Alex died, unexpectedly, of heart arrhythmia, on September 6, 2007, helped form an online community that comes together on the sixth day of every month to reflect about him.

Pepperberg, arriving onstage, picked up a microphone and said, "I have a feeling you all know how smart Alex was." Everyone clapped in assent. (The parrot had appeared on television many times, mainly on PBS and the Discovery Channel.) She explained to the audience, which was largely middle-aged and female, that, in the late nineteen-seventies, when she started working with Alex--whose name was an acronym for Avian Learning Experiment--other scientists had been dismissive of her ambition to communicate with him. As she put it, "My grant proposals came back basically saying, 'What are you smoking?' " The woman from Florida laughed heartily, her parrot earrings bobbing.

Pepperberg, who is fifty-nine years old, has imposing cheekbones and an abundance of long, dark hair; she wears smoky eye makeup, short skirts, and an armful of silver bangles. In Wheaton, she quietly worked the crowd into a pleasurable state of shared outrage. At one point, she said that colleagues had admonished her, "Birds can't do what you say he can do. They just don't have the brainpower." Linnea Faris, a woman from Michigan who was wearing a "Remember Alex" T-shirt, shook her head in disbelief. Faris told me, "My husband doesn't really understand it. I can't fully explain it myself. But I've spent hours crying over that damn bird." She went on, "People used to think birds weren't intelligent. Well, they used to think women weren't intelligent, either. They talked about the smaller circumference of our skulls as though it made us inferior to men! You know what? They were wrong on both counts."

Pepperberg has had an unconventional academic career: she rents a small lab at Brandeis, and holds a part-time lecturer position at Harvard. That afternoon, she was delivering what she calls her "It's a Wonderful Life" speech, so named because it's about how surprised and touched she was to learn, after Alex died, that he had meant so much to people. "You all are my Clarences," she said, referring to the angel who shows Jimmy Stewart the sorry state of a Bedford Falls without him in it.

It wasn't just parrot people who had found themselves moved by Pepperberg's three-decade relationship with Alex: obituaries of the bird ran everywhere from The Economist to the Hindustan Times. Within a few days of his death, Pepperberg told the audience, she had received some six thousand messages of condolence via e-mail.

As everyone knows, parrots are remarkably good at mimicking human speech, but they tend to repeat randomly picked-up phrases: obscenities, election slogans, "Hey, sailor." Many parrots kept as pets also imitate familiar sounds, like the family dog barking or an alarm clock beeping. But Pepperberg taught Alex referential speech--labels for objects, and phrases like "Wanna go back." By the end, he knew about fifty words for objects. Pepperberg was never particularly interested in teaching Alex language for its own sake; rather, she was interested in what language could reveal about the workings of his mind. In learning to speak, Alex showed Pepperberg that he understood categories like same and different, bigger and smaller. He could count and recognize Arabic numerals up to six. He could identify objects by their color, shape ("three-corner," "four-corner," and so on, up to "six-corner"), and material: when Pepperberg held up, say, a pompom or a wooden block, he could answer "Wool" or "Wood," correctly, about eighty per cent of the time. Holding up a yellow key and a green key of the same size, Pepperberg might ask Alex to identify a difference between them, and he'd say, "Color." When she held up two keys and asked, "Which is bigger?," he could identify the larger one by naming its color. Looking at a collection of objects that he hadn't seen before, Alex could reliably answer a two-tiered question like "How many blue blocks?"--a tricky task for toddlers. He even seemed to develop an understanding of absence, something akin to the concept of zero. If asked what the difference was between two identical blue keys, Alex learned to reply, "None." (He pronounced it "nuh.")

Pepperberg also reported that, outside training sessions, Alex sometimes played with the sounds he had learned, venturing new words. After he learned "gray," he came up with "grain" on his own, and after learning "talk" he tried out "chalk." His trainers then gave him the item that he had inadvertently named, and it eventually entered his vocabulary. (When Alex devised nonsense words--like "cheenut"--Pepperberg and his other trainers did not respond, and he quickly stopped saying them.) In linguistic terms, Alex was recombining phonemes, the building blocks of speech. Stephen Anderson, a Yale linguist who has written about animal communication, considers this behavior "apparent evidence that Alex did actually regard at least some of his words as made up of individual recombinable pieces, though it's hard to say without more evidence. This is something that seems well beyond any ape-language experiments, or anything we see in nature."