All of the parrot studies up to then had used a classical operant conditioning format. Operant conditioning, also called instrumental conditioning or stimulus-response teaching, is when an animal learns to do something in order to get what he wants. A rat who’s learned to press a lever to get food pellets has had operant conditioning. Using operant conditioning the experimenter would show the bird a red triangle and a blue triangle and say “touch blue,” then reward him with a piece of food whenever he happened to peck at the blue triangle by chance. If he happened to peck the red one he didn’t get the food. After a while he was supposed to learn blue, because he had been rewarded for pecking the blue triangle every time he heard “touch blue.” That’s classic behaviorism.
The problem was, no bird ever learned blue. They didn’t learn red, either. They didn’t learn anything, really. Apes weren’t learning too much in those setups, either, but no one wanted to hear about it, because everyone thought it was much more scientific to do a stimulus-response experiment in the lab than to watch an animal learn things naturally in his normal habitat. When a few researchers began teaching apes in more naturalistic settings they were criticized for being unscientific and performing uncontrolled experiments. In science, there’s nothing worse than an experiment that’s uncontrolled.10
Dr. Pepperberg decided to give up on operant conditioning and try a different branch of behaviorism called social modeling theory. Albert Bandura developed social modeling theory at Stanford University in the 1970s, based on how he thought real people and real animals probably learned in the real world.11 For years behaviorists had assumed that animals and people learn everything they know through either operant or classical conditioning. (Classical conditioning works with innate, reflexive responses like eye blinks and salivation. Pavlov’s dog learning to salivate at the sound of a tone is classical conditioning.)
But Dr. Bandura pointed out that the stimulus-response learning animals did in labs was just learning by trial and error. The animal does more of whatever behaviors he gets rewarded for doing, and less of whatever behaviors he’s been punished or negatively reinforced for doing.
That sounds like a logical way to learn until you think what it would mean in the wild. In the real world, trial and error learning would get a lot of animals killed. If the only way a baby antelope could learn to run away from a lion was by finding out what happens if you don’t run away from a lion, there wouldn’t be any baby antelope left. Pretty soon there wouldn’t be any lions left, either, since they wouldn’t have baby antelope to eat.
In Dr. Bandura’s view, animals and people had to do a huge amount of observational learning. He thought that a baby antelope would learn to run away from lions by watching other antelope run away from lions and doing the same thing. Today we know Dr. Bandura was right, partly thanks to Susan Mineka’s research on monkeys and snakes.
Dr. Bandura had obviously hit on something with social modeling theory, but it didn’t occur to anyone to try using it in their research on animal learning. That was Dr. Pepperberg’s innovation. She set up a social modeling situation for Alex. Instead of teaching Alex one-on-one she taught him two-on-one, two people to one bird. And instead of teaching Alex directly, she taught the other person, while Alex sat on his perch and watched. No one had ever done that before.
She also used items a parrot really, really wants, like a nice, crunchy piece of bark, for her learning materials. Animals and people both pay more attention to things that are important to them, like food, and you have to pay attention to learn. A parrot in the wild doesn’t care about blue triangles, so why should he care about blue triangles in the lab? He doesn’t.
So if Dr. Pepperberg wanted Alex to learn the color blue, she took a nice, crunchy piece of bark and painted it blue. Then she’d sit down with Alex and her research assistant and ask the assistant, “What color?”
If the assistant got the answer right, he got to play with the bark. If the assistant got the answer wrong, he didn’t get to play with the bark. All Alex got to do was watch. Dr. Pepperberg called her technique model/rival, because the assistant was a model for Alex to copy and also a rival for whatever item Dr. Pepperberg was using in her lesson. She set up a competition for scarce resources between Alex and the assistant.
Using modeling theory was the breakthrough. Alex learned so much that he started asking questions on his own! One day he looked at his reflection in the mirror and asked Dr. Pepperberg, “What color?”
After he’d asked about his own color six different times, and heard answers like “That’s gray; you’re a gray parrot” six different times, he knew gray as a category. From then on he could tell his trainer whether or not any object she showed him was gray.
This is nothing short of miraculous as far as I’m concerned. Alex was never taught to ask questions; he just did so on his own, spontaneously. That’s incredible, because question asking seems to be a separate skill from making statements, judging by the language of autistic children. Autistic children who can talk rarely ask questions; some of them never do. I know a mom whose sixteen-year-old has been talking since the age of two, and she says to this day she can count on one hand the number of questions he has asked.
Question asking is so important that Bob and Lynn Koegel, of the Autism Research and Training Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, made major breakthroughs in their autism clinic when they started teaching autistic children to ask questions.12 I wonder whether we would have major breakthroughs in language comprehension with apes and dolphins if we taught them to ask questions, instead of just having them answer questions all the time.
LEARNING THAT’S EASY FOR PEOPLE, HARD FOR ANIMALS
Most birds and animals are almost certainly smarter than we know, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have some limitations that humans don’t. (Humans have limitations animals don’t, too. I’ll get to that in the next chapter.)
I’ve said several times now that one of the major differences between people and our fellow mammals is that we have larger, better-developed frontal lobes. One of the benefits of having bigger frontal lobes is that we have more working memory. Since working memory is an important factor in general intelligence, if animals have less working memory overall, that’s going to make a difference in their general cognitive abilities.
The question is, what differences are you going to see in a person or animal with lots of working memory versus a person or animal with a lot less working memory? I think my own brain is a good place to start, since I have terrible working memory. If I were a computer I would have a huge hard drive memory and a very small microprocessor. As a result, I have a hard time doing things that involve multitasking, like trying to make change and talk at the same time. Another problem area for me: mental arithmetic. I can’t hold one number in memory while I manipulate another. For me to try to add up two two-digit numbers inside my head would be a stretch, and I couldn’t even begin to add two three-digit numbers together without writing them down where I can see them.
Since we never ask animals to multitask or add numbers in their heads, one of the main places you can see this difference is in situations that require an animal to be good at sequencing. (I’m talking about primates and domestic animals, not birds and sea mammals like dolphins. Birds and dolphins have different brain structures from ours, and I don’t know enough about their sequencing abilities to comment.) Animals are not good at sequencing. A good example is dogs getting tangled up in leashes or tie-outs. Owners are always amazed at how helpless a dog is once he’s gotten his tie-out wrapped around a tree.
A big part of the problem is that he can’t remember the sequence of events that got him to where he is, so he can’t retrace his steps. He has the same problem if he just tries to start fresh and figure it out. If one move doesn’t work he has to be able to hold that failure in mind while testing other moves. A dog probably doesn’t have enough working memory to do that. He’s like a person who gets mixed up driving unfamiliar s
treets after dark. A normal person with an excellent working memory can end up going around in circles in that situation, because he’s hit the limits of his working memory. He can’t hold all of the different routes he’s tried in working memory while he tries new ones, so he keeps going over the same route all over again without realizing it until he ends up back where he started.
Dogs can learn sequences, like the ones working dogs perform at show, with a lot of direct training. However, I think it’s probably as hard for a dog to learn show sequences as it was for me to learn the sequence of events that take place in a large meatpacking plant. When I first went into a big plant the place looked so complicated I was amazed the managers were able to keep track of all the complex procedures. I didn’t know how anyone could understand and remember anything so intricate.
In the early 1970s I visited a big meatpacking plant every Tuesday afternoon for three years. I used to stand for hours on a catwalk overlooking the floor where the carcasses were processed and dressed by about a hundred employees altogether. The place was a mass of visual details, and every Tuesday afternoon I downloaded more details into my brain.
At first I tuned in to all the really minute details that attracted my attention. Bob, the plant superintendent, was surprised that I kept asking him questions about small details such as how they attached a chain to the hide during hide removal. Apparently nonautistic people could get the gist of the place without having to know every little thing about it. But I couldn’t.
One disadvantage of my type of thinking that I probably share with animals is that it takes a long time to download enough details to learn a complex sequence. To do it, I have to create a computer video in my imagination. With the plant, all told, it took six months to download a complete videotape of the entire place into my head. Twenty-four Tuesday afternoons.
Then one day I was standing on the catwalk and suddenly it all seemed simple. I didn’t have to worry about remembering the sequence anymore, because I could walk through the whole plant in my mind. Every step in the sequence was connected to the next step, so I didn’t have to hold hundreds of different, separate details in my working memory at the same time. I just had to remember one step at a time, and that step brought up the next step.
For me, trying to learn a sequence or add numbers in my head is like having more than one window open on your desktop. If I’m trying to add 49 to 56, first I add 9 and 6 to get 15 and carry the 1. That’s in the first window.
But then it takes a really long time for me to close the 9 plus 6 window and open a new window to handle 4 plus 5. By the time the new window is open I no longer remember the 4 and the 5. Or, if I do manage to remember the 4 and the 5 (plus the 1 I have to carry), it takes so long to close the 4 and 5 window and reopen the 9 and 6 window that I’ve forgotten the original 15. I can work inside only one window at a time, and it takes me forever to switch to a different one. I wonder if animals are like that, too.
The breakthrough with the meat plant came when I could put the whole plant in one window and not have to switch back and forth. Then I could understand and remember it, and after that when I visited other meat plants I could easily pick out the familiar machines even though the floor layout was different. A dog probably has to get any sequence he’s learning into one window, too. I suspect that once that happens, the dog “gets it” the way a person “gets it.” He understands what he’s doing and can apply it to new situations. That’s my guess.
THE MAN WITHOUT WORDS
In 1974 the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an essay called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” that researchers have been arguing about ever since.13 I think most researchers, thirty years later, would say it’s impossible to know what it’s like to be a bat, although they disagree with each other about why.
To me, “What is it like to be a bat?” isn’t the right question. It’s too absolute. I’m never going to know what it’s like to be a bat, and a bat’s never going to know what it’s like to be me. Of course, Professor Nagel wasn’t just talking about empathy; he was talking about the scientific method and whether you could ever fully explain consciousness in terms of brain biology. But that doesn’t change my point. The fact that it’s impossible to know what it’s like to be a bat doesn’t mean it’s impossible to know anything about being a bat.
Since almost all researchers believe that animals don’t have language, a good place to look for an answer is in the lives of people who have no language. We’ve already seen that autistic people have a lot in common with animals, but another source of clues comes from normal people with normal brains who don’t have language. How do language-less human beings think?
There are probably lots of language-less people in the world. Usually they are people who were born deaf into communities too small to have anyone who spoke sign language, and too poor to have schools for the deaf. But there are also some language-less people who were born into middle-class American homes but were never taught sign. Their brains are normal, and they had normal parents with normal incomes who loved them. They weren’t poor and they weren’t abused. The only reason they don’t have language is that they were never exposed to language. (Probably in many of these cases the parents believed that allowing their children to learn sign would prevent them from using whatever residual hearing they had.)
The strange thing is that practically no one has studied these people. When I did a Google search for the phrase “language-less people” only nine entries came up. It’s bizarre. It’s especially strange when you consider how much attention has been paid to feral children and to horribly abused children like Genie, the thirteen-year-old California girl who grew up without language because her father strapped her to a potty chair around the age of twenty months and didn’t allow her to have any human interaction. When Genie’s mother finally brought her to a welfare office, she had only two words, “stopit” and “nomore.”14 A case like Genie’s is extremely interesting, of course, but she was emotionally abused and nutritionally deprived. It’s hard to tell how much relevance her cognitive skills have to a normal language-less animal or autistic person’s cognitive skills.
Why aren’t normal language-less people on the agenda?
The best book on a normal language-less person is A Man Without Words by Susan Schaller. Susan Schaller has spent twenty years traveling and researching language-less people completely on her own. The experts she tried to get help from when she first started out were dismissive, uncooperative, or hostile. She even got yelled at by one researcher who shouted, “Who are you?” A graduate student told her, “Nobody’s interested in that subject anymore—that was popular last century.”15
Susan became interested in language-less people when she volunteered to teach Ildefonso, a deaf mute Mexican immigrant who was raised in a town that had no education for deaf children. A Man Without Words is the story of her work with him. Susan discovered that Ildefonso had no concept of language at all. Later she learned he had a deaf brother, and that the two of them had figured out some simple ways to communicate as children. But he had absolutely no idea that spoken or written language existed. He understood that the other children did something important with their schoolbooks, but he did not know what it was.
It took Ildefonso only six days with Susan to grasp the idea of language. In the book, he has a revelation that’s a lot like the water pump scene in The Miracle Worker when Helen Keller suddenly understands what language is.
Although he got the idea of language quickly, it took much longer for him to be able to learn and use the language Susan was trying to teach him. One of the most powerful parts of the book, for me, is the day when Susan tries to teach him the words for color. Susan is teaching him the names for colors, like red, yellow, and green, but when they get to “green” suddenly he becomes highly agitated and mimes running and hiding while signing “Green!! Green!!”
Susan couldn’t understand why he was so frantic, until she learned that green was the most important conce
pt in Ildefonso’s life. Ildefonso was an illegal immigrant who supported himself working harvesting crops and picking apples. All the good things in life and all the bad things in life were green. Green money and picking green crops let him feed his family in Mexico. Border Patrol agents wearing green uniforms and driving green trucks were the bad people who would grab him and take him back to Mexico, to the place where there was less work and food was scarce.
The most important thing in life was the Green Card that magically repelled the bad green men.
Susan writes that it was impossible for her to imagine Ildefonso’s world. I expect she knows a lot more about the world of language-less people now that she’s spent two decades searching them out, and I’m looking forward to her next book. She did perceive differences in Ildefonso that I think directly apply to animals, as well as to people with autism.
The main difference between Ildefonso and people who have language is that he was missing a layer of abstract thinking. For instance, he didn’t have the categories of real and fake. He just knew that some Green Cards worked to keep the green men from taking you back to Mexico, and some Green Cards didn’t. He didn’t know why.
He also didn’t have just and unjust as abstract categories. It’s not that he didn’t have morals or a conscience. Susan doesn’t say a lot about this, but she writes that Ildefonso became upset one day when she kept insisting on paying for his lunch after he had signed that he wanted to pay. Ildefonso got more and more angry until finally he signed, “God. Friend. Burrito buy I.”
“He connected God and friend and placed them above burrito buying,” Susan writes. “His anger was that of a religious instructor. I was properly rebuked for my concern for the material world. Who had more money was trivial.” Later on he asked her what “God” meant, but he had already figured it out on his own. Susan writes that he had guessed that the word “God” stood for “unseen greatness, apart from and more important than the tangible stuff in front of us.”
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