Free Inside Animal Minds: The New Science of Animal Intelligence by and Peter Miller Mary Roach Virgina Morell Page A

his human researchers, and he has invented combinations of symbols to express his thoughts. Nevertheless, this is not the same thing as having an animal look up at you, open his mouth, and speak.
    Pepperberg walked to the back of the room, where Alex sat on top of his cage preening his pearl gray feathers. He stopped at her approach and opened his beak.
    “Want grape,” Alex said.
    “He hasn’t had his breakfast yet,” Pepperberg explained, “so he’s a little put out.”
    Alex returned to preening, while an assistant prepared a bowl of grapes, green beans, apple and banana slices, and corn on the cob.
    Under Pepperberg’s patient tutelage, Alex learned how to use his vocal tract to imitate almost one hundred English words, including the sounds for all of these foods, although he calls an apple a “ban-erry.”
    “Apples taste a little bit like bananas to him, and they look a little bit like cherries, so Alex made up that word for them,” Pepperberg said.
    Alex could count to six and was learning the sounds for seven and eight.
    “I’m sure he already knows both numbers,” Pepperberg said.“He’ll probably be able to count to ten, but he’s still learning to say the words. It takes far more time to teach him certain sounds than I ever imagined.”
    After breakfast, Alex preened again, keeping an eye on the flock. Every so often, he leaned forward and opened his beak: “Ssse … won.”
    “That’s good, Alex,” Pepperberg said. “Seven. The number is seven.”
    “Ssse … won! Se … won!”
    “He’s practicing,” she explained. “That’s how he learns. He’s thinking about how to say that word, how to use his vocal tract to make the correct sound.”
    It sounded a bit mad, the idea of a bird having lessons to practice, and willingly doing it. But after listening to and watching Alex, it was difficult to argue with Pepperberg’s explanation for his behaviors. She wasn’t handing him treats for the repetitious work or rapping him on the claws to make him say the sounds.
    “He has to hear the words over and over before he can correctly imitate them,” Pepperberg said, after pronouncing “seven” for Alex a good dozen times in a row. “I’m not trying to see if Alex can learn a human language,” she added. “That’s never been the point. My plan always was to use his imitative skills to get a better understanding of avian cognition.”
    In other words, because Alex was able to produce a close approximation of the sounds of some English words, Pepperberg could ask him questions about a bird’s basic understanding of the world. She couldn’t ask him what he was thinking about, but she could ask him about his knowledge of numbers, shapes, and colors. To demonstrate, Pepperberg carried Alex on her arm to a tall wooden perch in the middle of the room. She then retrieved a green key and a small green cup from a basket on a shelf. She held up the two items to Alex’s eye.
    “What’s same?” she asked.
    Without hesitation, Alex’s beak opened: “Co-lor.”
    “What’s different?” Pepperberg asked.
    “Shape,” Alex said. His voice had the digitized sound of a cartoon character. Because parrots lack lips (another reason it was difficult for Alex to pronounce some sounds, such as ba), the words seemed to come from the air around him, as if a ventriloquist were speaking. But the words—and what can only be called the thoughts—were entirely his.
    For the next 20 minutes, Alex ran through his tests, distinguishing colors, shapes, sizes, and materials (wool versus wood versus metal). He did some simple arithmetic, such as counting the yellow toy blocks among a pile of mixed hues.
    And, then, as if to offer final proof of the mind inside his bird’s brain, Alex spoke up. “Talk clearly!” he commanded, when one of the younger birds Pepperberg was also teaching mispronounced the word
green
. “Talk clearly!”
    “Don’t be a smart aleck,” Pepperberg said, shaking her head at