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

  Still, he was very good when it came to something called “equivalence.” Again, he figured this out himself. No training.

  Alex knew the vocal labels for Arabic numerals up to six. (We had started this work in the late 1990s, in Tucson, but returned to it in November 2004.) He also could label quantity for collections of objects, whether they were toy trucks, keys, or wooden cubes, and so on, again up to six. But we had never paired the Arabic numerals with sets of objects. The question was, did he understand that the squiggle that is the Arabic numeral six represents sixness? This is what is meant by equivalence. We also weren’t sure that Alex knew that the numeral six is bigger than five, five is bigger than four, and so on. Alex had not learned his numbers in order, as children do. Learning numbers in the proper order implies increasing quantity. Could he overcome this disadvantage?

  Now, in a trial of one type of test, we would place a green plastic Arabic numeral five next to three blue wooden blocks and ask, “What color bigger?” Physically, the collection of wooden blocks was bigger than the Arabic numeral. If Alex were guided only by physical size, he would have said “blue.” He didn’t. He said “green.” To a very high degree of accuracy he repeatedly judged the question according to number. In another series of test trials, we showed him two Arabic numerals of different value and different color. Again we asked, “What color bigger?” Again he almost always got the right answer. We hadn’t trained Alex to do this. He figured out for himself that the Arabic numeral six represents six somethings, the numeral five, five somethings, and so on. And he knew that six is bigger than five, and so on down the number string. Chimpanzees cannot do this without extensive training.

  These are truly sophisticated numerical abilities, once assumed to be the sole province of the human brain, and supposedly made possible by human language. Once again, Alex had done what he was not supposed to do.

  Mike Tomasello is a brilliant primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, and a good friend. His specialty is the evolutionary origin of certain higher cognitive functions in humans, including language. We often laugh about how he sometimes finishes his talks at scientific meetings. Like most of his colleagues, Mike believes that all the scientific evidence points to the fact that these “higher” functions in humans arose uniquely from the primate brain, and states as much at the end of his talks. But then he often throws up his hands and says with humor and frustration, “Except for that damn bird!” Alex.

  The media loved the “none” and “equivalence” stories, particularly the zerolike concept. Comparisons with Europeans’ late invention of a label for zero made it an easy mark. I felt that Alex’s recognition of equivalence deserved more attention than it got, however, because it demonstrated a degree of abstraction and cognitive processing that even I had not imagined possible. It was increasingly clear to me that our future together was going to produce amazing achievements that would make Alex’s previous few decades look intellectually pedestrian by comparison.

  My glorious year of intellectual freedom and financial security on the Radcliffe Fellowship came to an end in the summer of 2005. I was uncovering cognitive abilities in Alex that no one believed were possible, and challenging science’s deepest assumptions about the origin of human cognitive abilities. And yet I was without a job. I was also without a grant. I had to apply for unemployment insurance. I ate fourteen tofu meals a week, and I kept my thermostat at 57 degrees during the winter to minimize household expenses. It was only thanks to generous donors to The Alex Foundation that I could keep working with Alex.

  The media portrayed Alex as a brainiac, and he was—a bird brainiac. But there were many more sides to Mr. A. than just his cognitive achievements. He was bossy and obstinate. He was playful, not just with toys but intellectually, when he deliberately gave wrong answers. He was mischievous and affectionate. And he projected a sense that, while dependent on us for his material needs, he was supremely confident in who he was as an individual. He owned us as much as we owned him. Overall, he was a Puck-like character.

  A favorite excursion was to a small lobby close to the lab. “Go see tree,” he would say at least two or three times a week. Students would follow his orders and take him to the lobby. They usually took his perch, too. But Alex much preferred to sit on the back of a small couch next to the window. He liked to look at birds in the tree close to the window, and at trucks that went by on the road below. Students passing on the staircase below the window were oblivious of Alex’s rapt attention to their comings and goings and to the cheerful whistles he produced for their benefit. He liked to wolf-whistle at boys who walked through the lobby, much to the consternation of the girl students tending him.

  His favorite lobby activity, though, was to dance to “California Dreamin’,” which the students rendered enthusiastically on every visit. That tradition started a few years back when someone was playing the Mamas and Papas version in the lab, and Alex began bobbing his head vigorously along with the music. After that he head-bobbed to the students’ version, especially after Arlene taught everyone the lyrics.

  We had lab schedules, of course: meal times and work times. But Alex had his own daily activities. After lunch of warm grain, he often liked to retreat to the top of his cage or inside his cardboard box. Eyes half closed, he entered into a monologue of words and phrases: “Good boy…Go eat dinner…You be good…What’s your problem?…C’mon.” He did the same thing at around four-thirty each day: “Wanna go chair…What color?…Shou-wah.” Arlene called these monologues the “Alex Chronicles,” his ruminations on events of the day. Sometimes he’d practice a new label, so, for example, we could track how he approached “seven” as “s…one,” then “s…none,” then “seben.”

  The birds always had the company of a couple of students and Arlene during most of the day. I usually arrived in the late afternoon. And there were occasional visitors, sometimes quite distinguished. One such was the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood. A few years back a copy of Oryx and Crake had arrived on my desk, with no explanation. The book is Atwood’s fantasy about humanity’s final days. I realized why I’d been sent a copy when I came across a passage in which a boy, Jimmy, is watching old television footage of a Grey parrot that can identify colors, shapes, and numbers, and uses the term “cork-nut” for almonds. That was Alex, of course. Back in the Purdue days, Alex had said “cork” when I first showed him an almond. That was reasonable, because superficially an almond shell resembles cork. We therefore started to use “cork nut” for almonds, which Alex learned.

  Shortly after I received Atwood’s novel, I heard that she was to be at The Radcliffe Institute to receive its annual gold medal. I thought she might enjoy meeting the real Alex, so I contacted her publicist and suggested a visit. I picked her up from Radcliffe and drove her to Brandeis. She was elegantly dressed, friendly but reserved. For whatever reason, however, Alex decided to be completely uncooperative. I tried for fully twenty minutes to get him to say “cork nut.” Nothing. When he finally did condescend to utter a word, it was “walnut…walnut.”

  Frustrated and apologetic, I turned to Griffin, who loves almonds and was, I thought, certain to say “cork nut,” as he so often does with great alacrity. Yet all he would say was “walnut…walnut.” Eventually Atwood’s driver arrived, and she left, politely thanking me for the visit. She was barely through the door before both Alex and Griffin were impishly piping up, “Cork nut…cork nut…cork nut.”

  I have my own cork nut story. I once went into Trader Joe’s and asked a sales assistant where I could find the cork nuts. The guy looked at me as if I were crazy. It took me a few seconds to realize what his problem was. “Oh, almonds, I mean almonds,” I said, embarrassed. “Cork nuts is what my child calls them.” I turned and scooted out of sight as fast as I could. It is very easy to lapse into the language of the lab. The students do it all the time, mimicking Alex’s particular cadence: “Shou-wah…foo-wah…thu-reeh.” It’s an
in-joke that occasionally escapes to the outside world.

  I’ve said earlier that Alex preferred guys to girls and expressed his special likes by performing the Grey’s mating dance. During the early part of 2007, Alex became hyper-sexual with his favorites. Poor Steve Patriarco. For about six months, whenever Steve picked up Alex, he raced up to Steve’s shoulder, where he puffed up his feathers, danced from foot to foot, and regurgitated food. It got to be quite ridiculous. Alex was also distinctly uninterested in working during this period.

  On the advice of our vet, we took away Alex’s cardboard box. Ever since Tucson, Alex had enthusiastically chewed windows and doors in cardboard boxes. He loved to spend time in his “house,” chilling out, producing monologues, and commenting on activities in the lab. The box was a nest substitute. The vet thought that it might be exacerbating whatever hormones were raging within Alex. We also fed Alex tofu to temper them.

  By August he was stable again, working again, and no longer quite as frequently performing his mating dance for Steve. We gave him back his box. One of the students brought birthday cake into the lab at about that time, and we all shared it, as usual, including the birds. “Yummy bread,” Alex said appreciatively. He had known “yummy” previously, and “bread.” But “yummy bread” was his creation.

  At the end of August, workmen cut down the tree just outside the window in the lobby. Alex could no longer watch the birds.

  I had been thinking about doing work on optical illusions with Alex ever since I was at the Media Lab. In the summer of 2005, I teamed up with Patrick Cavanagh, a psychology professor at Harvard, to put the idea into practice. The human brain plays many tricks on us, so we sometimes see things not as they are. Patrick and I planned to ask a simple but profound question: does Alex literally see the world as we do? That is, does his brain experience the optical illusions just as our brains do?

  I envisaged this work as the next horizon in my journey with Alex, beyond naming objects or categories or numbers. Bird and human brains diverged evolutionarily some 280 million years ago. Does that mean that bird and mammalian brains are so different structurally that they operate very differently, too?

  Until a landmark paper by Eric Jarvis and colleagues in 2005, the answer to this question had been a resounding yes! Look at a mammalian brain and you are struck by the multiple folds of the massive cerebral cortex. Bird brains, it was said, don’t have such a cortex. Hence, their cognitive capacity should be extremely limited. This, essentially, was the argument I had faced through three decades of work with Alex. He was not supposed to be able to name objects and categories, understand “bigger” and “smaller,” “same” and “different,” because his was a bird brain. But, of course, Alex did do such things. I knew that Alex was proving a profound truth: brains may look different, and there may be a spectrum of ability that is determined by anatomical details, but brains and intelligence are a universally shared trait in nature—the capacity varies, but the building blocks are the same.

  By the turn of the millennium, my argument was beginning to gain ground. It wasn’t just my work with Alex but others’ work, too. Animals were being granted a greater degree of intelligence than had been previously allowed. One sign of this was that I was asked to co-chair a symposium at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, called “Avian Cognition: When Being Called ‘Bird Brain’ Is a Compliment.” The preamble read as follows: “This symposium demonstrates that many avian species, despite brain architectures that lack much cortical structure and evolutionary histories and that differ so greatly from those of humans, equal and sometimes surpass humans with respect to various cognitive tasks.” Even five years earlier, such a symposium would have been a difficult sell. That was progress. Jarvis’s paper three years later effectively said that bird and mammalian brains are not so very structurally different after all. More progress.

  When Patrick and I submitted our grant proposal to the National Science Foundation in July 2006, we were expecting that, in some respects at least, Alex would see our world as we do. We didn’t wait to hear whether we would be funded before we embarked on some preliminary work. We chose a well-known illusion as the first test. You have probably seen it in psychology textbooks and popular articles: two parallel lines of equal length, both with arrows at the ends, one with the arrows pointing out, the other with the arrows pointing in. Despite being the same length, the line with the arrows pointing in looks longer to human eyes. That’s the illusion. We had to modify the test a little so as to use Alex’s unique abilities; we varied the color of the two lines, keeping the arrows black. We then asked, “What color bigger/smaller?” Right away, and repeatedly, Alex selected the one that you or I would choose. He did see the world as we do, at least with this illusion. That was a very promising step.

  By June 2007, Patrick and I were pretty sure that we would get our grant, and by the end of August we learned that it would start on September 1, a Saturday. We would have money for a year. The following Monday we threw a party to celebrate, on the seventh floor of Harvard’s William James Hall. I was especially happy, and relieved to see my financial woes lessen.

  I’d been teaching part-time at Harvard’s Extension School since 2006 and in the psychology department beginning in 2007. I survived with a little extra income from The Alex Foundation, but it still had meant tofu and a 57-degree thermostat setting for me. The new grant would change all that. I would become a regular research associate, with a small but decent salary and benefits. And 35 percent of the lab costs would be covered. That was $35,000 less I would have to raise for that year. I could not have been happier. It wasn’t a tenured professorship, but it was quite an improvement.

  Alex was a little subdued that week, though nothing out of the ordinary. The birds had had some kind of infection the previous month, but they were now fine. The vet had given them all a clean bill of health. On the afternoon of Wednesday the fifth, Adena Schachner joined me and Alex in the lab. She is a graduate student in the psychology department at Harvard, researching the origins of musical abilities. We thought it would be interesting to do some work with Alex. That evening, we wanted to see what types of music engaged him. Adena played some eighties disco, and Alex had a good time, bobbing his head in time with the beat. Adena and I danced to some of the songs while Alex bobbed along with us. Next time, we promised ourselves, we would get more serious about the music work.

  The following day, Thursday the sixth, Alex wasn’t much interested in working on phonemes with two of the students during the morning session. “Alex very uncooperative in the task. Turned around,” they wrote in Alex’s work log. By midafternoon he was much more engaged, this time with a simple task of correctly selecting a colored cup, underneath which was a nut. I arrived at five o’clock, as usual. Arlene had left for the day. She and the students had already moved the floor mats to one side for the regular Friday morning cleaning by the maintenance crew. Shannon Cabell, a student, was with me. We sat at the computer, with Alex between us on his perch, looking at the screen. I was working on new optical illusion tests, trying to get the colors and shapes right—nothing demanding, just fiddling with things. Alex was affectionate and chatty as usual.

  At six forty-five the supplemental lights went on, as usual, a signal that we had a few minutes left to clean up. Then the main lights went off, and it was time to put the birds in their cages: Wart first, then Alex, then the always reluctant Griffin.

  “You be good. I love you,” Alex said to me.

  “I love you, too,” I replied.

  “You’ll be in tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ll be in tomorrow.” That was our usual parting exchange. Griffin and Wart said nothing, as usual.

  I left and drove forty minutes to my home in Swamp-scott, on the North Shore. I went through e-mail, had a bite to eat and a glass of wine, and went to bed.

  The following morning I was up by six-thirty, as usual. After showering and stretching,
I took a walk by the ocean, which I loved doing each day. It was an important reason why I chose to live where I do. The sun was already way up but still low enough to project scintillating tracks across the calm ocean. It was one of those glorious crystal-blue early September New England days. Captivating.

  I was back at the house eating breakfast in front of my computer by eight-thirty. There was an e-mail message waiting for me. “This is to confirm that we have been successful with the ITALK grant application,” the message read. “You are one of our consultants. Congratulations! We’ll be contacting you again soon.” The message was from a colleague in Europe. He was part of a consortium of researchers that had proposed a major project on the evolution of language involving computer models and robotics. The project had been ranked first out of thirty-two competing proposals and was awarded six million euros, to begin in February 2008. Although I wasn’t going to be an active member of the research team, I would be flying to Europe at least once a year to brainstorm about results and ideas.

  Coming just days after the formal approval of our NSF grant, this European news was thrilling, a bonus really. I jabbed the air with both fists and declared out loud, “Yes! Things are really turning round at last!” I immediately wrote back to my colleague, got up, went to the kitchen, and poured myself another cup of coffee.

  As I stood quietly there for a few minutes, savoring the coffee’s rich aroma, a thought crossed my mind, as it did from time to time, something that my friend Jeannie once said: had I gotten a different Grey that day back in 1977, Alex might have spent his life, unknown and unheralded, in someone’s spare bedroom. I didn’t, of course, and here we were with a history of astonishing achievements behind us, and poised to journey to the next horizon and beyond in our work together. And we had the resources we needed. I allowed myself to savor all this, too, a sense of happiness, excitement, and security that had eluded me since the heady days at the Media Lab. Yes! I then returned to my computer.