Book Review

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

N Engl J Med 2009; 360:1467-1468April 2, 2009

Article

Alex and Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence — And Formed a Deep Bond in the Process
By Irene M. Pepperberg. 240 pp., illustrated. New York, Collins, 2008. $23.95 (cloth); $18.95 (e-book). ISBN: 978-0-06-167247-7 (cloth); 978-0-06-171723-9 (e-book).

The question “What matter?” is put to Alex the parrot by animal behaviorist Irene Pepperberg, who wants him to differentiate among wood, paper, and wool. Forget for a moment that Alex is quite a character, a bird who shamelessly manipulates his human handlers, obstinately demands nuts before he will continue training sessions, condescendingly corrects other birds, and poses questions to make sense of the world — all this with a brain the size of a nut. Alex and other psittacines, as well as birds from the corvid family, identify objects, colors, and materials, use ordinal and cardinal numbers, and formulate combined categories — for example, “How many green?” or “Which red key?” What emerges in this book — and is missing from popular accounts of primates who have been taught to communicate with people — is the seductively special connection with a creature that has a faux human voice. Unlike the manual signing of a chimp, the communication of parrots requires no translation.

Alex Being Tickled by a Student.

There is an implicit question: if the bird talks, then does he think? The burden of proof is high, first because of a long history of sideshow horses whose owners claimed they could do calculations (and talking horses — which of you Journal readers watched Mister Ed?), and second, because we as humans cannot decide what it means to think. On the first issue, Pepperberg seems beyond reproach. She has a right to gloat after enduring 30 years of doubt from members of the scientific and academic establishments. The technical aspects of her work are solid and appear in her previous book, The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), as well as in journal articles. As a girl, she had an almost monomaniacal fascination with birds, but her career progressed only because of her ambition and her personal sacrifices. Pepperberg's account of devotion to a bird is quite different from the more familiar stories of dreamers who set out as children to cure cancer or save the world from malaria. In this story, subject becomes object becomes subject, and when Alex dies unexpectedly, the reader is devastated.

Pepperberg estimates that Alex has the intelligence of a 5-year-old child and the emotional disposition of a 2-year-old, but his skills are subtly different from those of a child. The bird is right about four fifths of the time, whereas a child generally does not miss. But give the creature credit: to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, it is not that the thing is done well — it is surprising to find that it is done at all. Is Alex's intelligence fundamentally similar to ours? Here we encounter the argument between constructionists and naturalists about what it means to think. If Russian words go into a box and English words come out, does the box “know” the languages, and does it matter if the end result is the same? The constructionists would argue that for the box — and the parrot — it does not.

Pepperberg wisely avoids making claims that animals think or use language in the same way as humans, but the data come close to demonstrating that the parrot “knows.” Alex's ability to build understanding and verbal output from experience and to create new words means that he is manipulating mental symbols, which is in itself “thinking.” There is even a hint of William James's “stream of thought” because Alex's articulations have inferential connections to recent events. Other aspects of knowing may not be testable — for example, does Alex count three objects, or does he have a child's essential appreciation of “threeness”? Self-awareness, or consciousness, is also another matter, but given the way he manages complex relationships and expresses moods, Alex comes close enough for me.

Comparison with his roommates suggests that there is a bell-shaped curve of intelligence for Grey parrots, and despite the fact that Alex came from a pedestrian pet store in Chicago, he is pretty damned smart. It is best not to look too closely, as we are just to the right on the curve.

Allan H. Ropper, M.D.
Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA 02115