Alex & Me - How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--And Formed a Deep Bond in the Process

by Irene Pepperberg

  I had no idea what he was talking about. So I said, “No, Alex, apple.”

  “Banerry,” Alex replied, quickly but quite patiently.

  “Apple,” I said again.

  “Banerry,” Alex said again.

  OK, buddy, I thought. I’ll make it a bit easier for you. “Ap-ple,” I said, emphasizing the second syllable.

  Alex paused a second or two, looked at me more intently, and said, “Ban-erry,” exactly mimicking my cadence.

  We went through this double act several times: “Ap-ple.” “Ban-erry.” “Ap-ple.” “Ban-erry.” I was a little ticked off. I thought Alex was being deliberately obtuse. In retrospect, it was quite hysterical. When I told one of my students, Jennifer Newton, about it later, she literally fell off her chair laughing. But Alex hadn’t quite finished with me just yet. At the end of that session he said, very slowly and deliberately, “Ban-err-eeee,” just as I might do with him when I was trying to teaching him a new label. Maybe he was thinking, Listen carefully, lady. I’m trying to make this easy for you. I wrote in my journal that Alex seemed “almost angry with us.”

  I still had no idea what Alex was talking about, even though he obviously thought he did. Try as we might, he wouldn’t budge from “banerry.” No matter how hard we worked to get him to say “apple,” he stuck with his label. As far as Alex was concerned, “banerry” it was and “banerry” it was going to stay.

  A few days later I was talking to a linguist friend about all this. He said, “It sounds like lexical elision.” It’s a fancy term for putting parts of two different words together to form a new word. Alex might have thought the apple tasted a bit like a banana. Certainly it looked like a very large cherry (it was a red apple). “Banana” + “cherry” = “banerry.”

  Had Alex done this intentionally? It certainly seemed so, but intentionality is a hot-button issue in animal behavior circles, and proving it is very difficult. Alex often played with sounds, particularly when learning new labels, and especially when he was by himself in the evening. In contrast, these novel sounds typically were nonsensical. And until this point Alex had not said “banerry” in any session with an apple, nor in any informal setting. It really did look like some bird brain creativity of a sort never previously seen. Of course I can’t document that scientifically. I can’t report that he’d actually gone and decided that that’s what he was going to call an apple, and that he was not going to change his mind. It had to remain something remarkable just between Alex and me.

  The original proposal for The Alex Project that I wrote back in the spring of 1977 had been, I must concede, quite ambitious. It argued that my Grey would learn object labels (words), categories, concepts, and numbers in three years; that he would be able to communicate back and forth with a human; and that he would have some comprehension of what he was doing. I had complete confidence that my Grey would be able to do all this. But I have to admit that each time Alex met a challenge I set him, each time he did what no bird brain is supposed to be able to do; I was as thrilled as any parent can be when her child crosses a developmental hurdle, such as crawling, walking, or talking.

  As the list of scientific publications grew—and as our work garnered more and more public attention—I found a slowly growing acceptance that I wasn’t just “that woman who talks to a parrot.” I was beginning to be taken seriously in scientific circles. But the chorus of “Oh, he’s just mimicking” or “He’s just following her cues” still sounded loudly in my ears. At least that is how I perceived it. I found myself having to prove over and over that Alex had more going on in his bird brain than some mechanical trickery or other. One such challenge was, “Oh, he can produce labels all right, and he sounds convincing, but does he really understand what he’s saying? Does he comprehend the noises coming from his beak?”

  It seemed quite clear to me from my hundreds and hundreds of hours watching and listening to Alex that he did indeed know what he was saying. A simple example: if Alex said “Want grape” and you gave him banana, he’d spit it right back at you and repeat insistently, “Want grape.” He wouldn’t stop until you gave him a grape. If you were dealing with a child, you would accept without question that he or she really wanted a grape, and that banana simply wouldn’t do. But that’s not science. Science needs numbers. Science needs tests to be done over and over again—actually, sometimes sixty times or more—before the answer has statistical legitimacy, and before scientists will take you seriously. Poor Alex.

  A few years into our Northwestern period—my initial, temporary job ultimately stretched out to six and a half years—we embarked on a rigorous series of tests of Alex’s comprehension ability. Scientifically I can report that he passed each test, and move on to the next part of our story. But how he did it gives us insights into his mind that are striking, if not always quite so easily classified as scientific.

  The tests involved putting various of his “toys” on a tray and asking questions such as “What object is green?” “What matter is blue and three-corner?” “What shape is purple?” “How many four-corner wood?” At first, Alex answered correctly most of the time: “key” or “wood” or “wool” or “three,” et cetera. But before too long, he started to act up. He would say “green” and then pull at the green felt lining of the tray, hard enough that all the objects would fall off. Or he would say “tray” and bite the tray. Sometimes he’d say nothing and suddenly start preening. Or he’d turn around and lift his butt in my direction, a gesture too obvious to need translation. Once he grabbed the tray out of my hand and flung it on the floor, saying, “Wanna go back,” which meant, I’m done with this. Take me back to my cage.

  Who can blame him? None of the objects were new to him. He’d answered these kinds of questions dozens of times, and yet we still kept asking them, because we needed our statistical sample. You could imagine him thinking, I’ve already told you that, stupid, or simply, This is getting very boring. He was like the bright little kid at school who finds none of the work challenging and so passes the time by making trouble.

  Sometimes, however, Alex chose to show his opinion of the boring task at hand by playing with our heads. For instance, we would ask him, “What color key?” and he would give every color in his repertoire, skipping only the correct color. Eventually, he became quite ingenious with this game, having more fun getting us agitated rather than giving us the answers we wanted and he surely knew. We were pretty certain he wasn’t making mistakes, because it was statistically near to impossible that he could list all but the correct answer. These observations are not science, but they tell you a lot about what was going on in his head; they tell you a lot about how sophisticated his cognitive processes really were. Whether you would describe what he did as something to amuse himself or as making a joke at our expense, I cannot say. But he was definitely doing something other than routinely answering questions.

  We became ever more ingenious in presenting our questions, to keep a step ahead of his boredom. Sometimes we succeeded, sometimes we didn’t. In the end we did arrive at a statistically valid answer to the question “Does Alex know what he’s saying?” Yes, he did. His level of comprehension was equal to that of chimpanzees and dolphins, no small achievement for so small a brain.

  Alex faced the same boredom with the next major challenge we gave him: namely, would he understand the concept of “same” and “different”? It might seem like common sense that in order to survive in the wild, birds would, for example, have to identify the songs of individuals and distinguish among species. Surely this involves some grasp of “same” and “different.” Yet when I embarked on the “same/different” project with Alex, the scientists who test such things thought that apes were at par or slightly below humans in this conceptual ability, monkeys were below apes, and birds…well, they hardly counted at all.

  The concept of “same/different” is fairly sophisticated cognitively. We trained Alex to use color and shape as categories with which to determine same or different.
When presented with a pair of objects, such as green four-corner wood and blue four-corner wood, Alex’s correct response to “What’s same?” and “What’s different?” would be “shape” and “color,” respectively, not the specific color or shape. To answer the question correctly, Alex would have to take note of the various attributes of the two objects, understand exactly what I was asking him to compare, make that judgment, and then vocally tell me the answer. No small order for a bird brain.

  It took many months to train him, but eventually he was ready to be tested. Because many of the objects we used were familiar, boredom again became an issue. We tried to keep his interest by interspersing “same/different” tests with teaching him new numbers, new labels, and other novel tasks. He was a trouper. Overall, he got the right answer—“shape” or “color”—about three-quarters of the time. (We also included a third category, “matter,” or material.) When we gave him pairs of objects that were novel to him, colors he could not label, for instance, he was right 85 percent of the time, which is actually a better measure of his ability. The novelty obviously held his attention better.

  Now, when David Premack had tested chimps on this kind of test, all the animal had to do was indicate whether two objects were the same or different. Alex went a step further in our tests. He was able to tell me exactly what was the same or different: color, shape, or material. When I reported our results at the International Primatological Congress in Göttingen, Germany in 1986, a senior primatology professor—we called them “silverbacks,” referring to the markings of older gorillas—lumbered to his feet and said, “You mean to tell me that your parrot can do what Premack’s chimps can do, only in a more sophisticated manner?”

  I said, “Yes, that’s right,” wondering what onslaught might follow. Nothing. He simply said, “Oh,” and sat down. I might have burst into song, with “Anything chimps can do, Alex can do better,” but I restrained myself. Besides, my voice isn’t up to it. Nevertheless, this was a moment of triumph for Alex. Pity he wasn’t there to witness it.

  From the “same/different” challenge, it was natural to go on to relative concepts, such as size difference. Alex got that, too. I could show him two different-sized keys, each a different color, for instance, and ask him, “Alex, what color bigger?” and he could tell me. These various achievements attracted a lot of public attention. Bob Bazell, of NBC television, came to film Alex, as did crews from ABC and CBS. Alex was even on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Very smart bird!

  My time at Northwestern had begun wonderfully: a job, grant money, amazing results with Alex. It didn’t last. In the summer of 1986, I learned that my NSF grant request had been approved but, as had happened before with NIMH, there were no funds to give to me. I feared I might have to leave Northwestern. The department head told me he would have to find someone else to teach the animal behavior course: without the overhead from my grant, there was no money to pay me. My marriage, which was already rocky, came under even more strain. David essentially told me, “You’re a failure. Why don’t you close the lab and go get a real job? We need the money to live here in Chicago.”

  I was angry, a barely contained volcano. Nothing could have focused me more than to be told I was a failure and that I should give up what had become my life’s work, give up Alex. I frantically searched for somewhere to continue, contacting friends, acquaintances, and colleagues all over the country. Friends in Kentucky told me they might have an opening for me there, but only for a year. I lost thirty pounds in three months. My friends were my only comfort, aside from Alex.

  I was now spending virtually all my time in the lab, including evenings. Alex and I hung out together at the end of each day, me trying to make plans, Alex preening, the two of us occasionally exchanging words—not exactly a conversation, but as close as it gets with a nonhuman companion. Like all Greys, Alex was very empathic. He could sense when I was particularly blue. He would sit close with me at these times, just being Alex. Not Alex the mischievous imp; not Alex the boss of the lab; not the demanding Alex. Just Alex the empathic presence. He’d sometimes say “You tickle,” and bend his head so I could scratch his face. As I did, the white area around his eyes turned a subtle pink, blushing as Greys do when being intimate. His eyes would squint almost closed.

  Just as things seemed darkest, with a week to go before classes began, I was told that the department couldn’t find anyone else to teach animal behavior after all, and the job was mine if I wanted it. If I wanted it? Reprieved, but still without grant money, I ran the lab on a shoestring for a year. The students were now volunteering because I could no longer pay them. I had resubmitted my grant request; it was again approved, and this time it was fully funded. It had been a very hard twelve months.

  That wrenching episode proved to be the gateway to three years of extremely productive work for me at Northwestern. I worked with Alex on numbers, on why our particular training technique was so effective, and on how it related to what birds do in the wild. I collaborated with Linda Schinke-Llano, a specialist on second-language acquisition in humans, looking at how Alex’s learning of English words illuminated that process. We teamed up with people in biological sciences, showing how birds’ acquisition of other birds’ songs also resembled second-language acquisition. My students and I did some preliminary work on so-called object permanence: that is, the understanding that an object continues to exist even when it is hidden. This capacity develops gradually in children over their first year. Alex clearly had a good grasp of it and used it to have fun with our testing procedures.

  Denise Neapolitan, a student, and I did a little study that asked whether people talk differently to male and female parrots. Alex played both himself, the male, and “Alice,” the female, in this test. The answer was almost predictable: people used more “baby talk” when talking with “Alice” than with Alex. Another student, Katherine Dunsmore, received a small grant with which to buy recording equipment. We taped Alex’s evening babbling, when he was free to “practice” sounds and new labels before going to sleep, just as children do. Ruth Weir had published a now classic book, Crib Talk, on babies back in 1962. When Kathy and I wrote our paper, we wanted to call it “Cage Talk,” but the editors wouldn’t let us. Instead, we had to call it “Solitary Sound Play During Acquisition of English Vocalizations by an African Grey Parrot.” Boring, but accurate.

  All in all, I had a lot going on in my professional life at that point, partly because that is the kind of person I am, but also, I suspect, as a substitute for what was missing in the rest of my life. I was living a divided existence: much of me was relishing the exhilaration of the great strides I saw Alex making in our work together; the rest of me was an empty ache.

  Since my arrival at Northwestern, I had been applying for regular university positions, but after the scare in 1986, I began to do so in earnest. Not much had come my way, except what I called a few “affirmative action” interviews—I was clearly the lone woman called, and during the interview, one or more comments would make it clear that I was not being considered seriously. I wasn’t too concerned, at least until the fall of 1989, when Northwestern informed me that my position as a visiting assistant professor could be renewed at most until the end of 1990—not because Alex and I hadn’t done well, but because there were rules about temporary positions. David’s response was similar to what he’d said in 1986—why couldn’t I get a “real” job? Another round of applications, another round of interviews, and plenty of stress. This time I was offered a job that could lead to tenure at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, in May 1990. For a number of reasons, I decided to put off the move until the last possible moment, at Thanksgiving.

  Meanwhile, Alex continued to attract attention from local and national television. He seemed to enjoy performing for the media and was not at all camera-shy. We had many other visitors, too, one of whom stands out because the event was so nerve-wracking, at least for me. One day in the early fall of 1988, my friend Jeanne Ravid a
sked if she could bring someone to the lab to meet Alex. Jeanne explained that her friend was in town for a short while, staying at her house in Evanston, just south of campus. “Garrick loves Greys,” she said, “but he can’t have one as a pet because he travels so much. Garrick always stays with me when he’s in Chicago,” she continued, “partly because we have a grand piano, so he can play when he wants to, but also because of our Grey, Wok. He loves Wok.”

  I knew Wok because he had taken part in Alex’s object permanence study. And I knew Jeanne’s house, too: big, with a beautiful grand piano in the elegant front room. Something rang a bell: Hmm, Garrick, plays the piano, travels a lot…Jeanne explained that Garrick had heard of my work with Alex and knew that Jeanne and I were friends. “Wait a minute, Jeanne,” I said, “do you mean the pianist, the Garrick…?”

  “Yes,” she said, “Garrick Ohlsson.” Ohlsson was the first American to win the International Chopin Piano Competition, in 1970, and had a towering reputation in the world of classical music. It would be a privilege to meet him, but I was thinking, Oh, my God! I can see the headlines now: “Internationally Renowned Pianist Loses Finger to Parrot.” Please, Alex, don’t do anything awful.

  Jeanne brought Garrick into the lab the following day. He is a big man, standing more than six feet, with a trim, square beard and a great presence, a true star. But with Alex, he was like a kid on Christmas morning, such was his excitement at meeting my own star. Alex behaved wonderfully. He happened to like guys a lot, particularly tall ones, and he seemed thrilled to meet Garrick. He jumped on Garrick’s arm, scampered up on to his shoulder, and did his “I’m really happy to be with you” dance, which is actually part of a Grey’s courting ritual. Garrick was thrilled, too. He left with ten fingers intact. And we had tickets for symphony hall that night.