Contributed by Alina Lilova

African grey parrot, photo by Michael Gwyther-Jones

What is going on in the mind of an African Grey who mimics human speech? Is he little more than a voice recorder that “parrots” whatever you say? Some people still hold on to the old belief in the “dumb bird,” but over the years plenty of evidence has accumulated that points to the very opposite.

Early scientific attempts to test the language abilities of birds failed—not because the birds didn’t live up to the hype, but because researchers underestimated them. In the mid-twentieth century, mynah birds took part in studies where they would hear human speech on tape while housed in sound-proof boxes. The mynah birds learnt nothing despite the food rewards. That is, the experimental subjects learnt nothing: their buddies who were kept as pets in the laboratory, listening to the natural flow of human conversation, talked loads. It turned out that just like natural song learning, the retention of words needed a social context, with someone real to imitate.

A social context was provided to African grey parrots trained by Todt and subsequently Pepperberg. Their techniques involved two humans talking to each other, and proved much more successful. Irene Pepperberg’s famous parrot Alex (1976-2007) knew the vocabulary for different shapes, colours and materials. He could also answer the questions “What’s different?” and “What’s same?” about two unfamiliar objects — the shape, the colour, or the “matter,” pronounced “mah-mah” — as well as questions like “What object is round?” or “What object is bigger?”. Alex was also clever enough to know when to answer “None.” Similarly, he could use the numbers from 1 to 7 in a meaningful fashion and had a concept of zero. He used and understood about 100 English words and even invented a new one, “banerry” to mean “apple” (because he already knew the words for “banana” and “cherry”). Another famous African grey parrot, N’kisi, similarly used “flied” for “flew” and once said “pretty smell medicine” to mean his owner’s aromatherapy oils. Such innovative use of words points to some genuine understanding of vocabulary and grammar taking place in the psittacine brain.

When Virginia Morell, author of the article “Minds of Their Own” which appeared in National Geographic, visited Dr. Pepperberg a few years ago, she witnessed Alex practicing on his own, without the need of constant treats and encouragement. She also saw him tell off other parrots when they mispronounced words, and occasionally he would deliberately give a wrong answer to a question, as a joke, just to be contrary. It is only natural, she writes, that a species of such longevity and complexity of social organisation would have to rely on more than just instinct to survive.

Even more interesting—and certainly more controversial—is the telepathy research with N’kisi, who was mentioned above. His owner, Aimée Morgana, has recorded hundreds of bizarre telepathic incidents. For example, once, when she was in a room on a different floor but could hear N’kisi, she happened to look at the image of a beautiful purple car. She was marvelling at the colour when she heard the parrot upstairs say, “Oh wow, look at the pretty purple.” Scientist Rupert Sheldrake helped Morgana test N’kisi in a formal experiment. Morgana was looking at photographs which corresponded to some key words of N’kisi’s vocabulary. In the meantime, the parrot was recorded as he talked in another room, and his speech was subsequently interpreted by three independent transcribers. It turned out he’d scored far more “hits” than would be expected by chance. The methodology was criticised, as always in paranormal research, but that doesn’t make the study any less worthy of attention.

But if parrots can reason, joke and even ‘read minds,’ would they make great pets? I’m not sure, though I have never owned one. They seem to be like human children who need to be brought up very carefully and educated over long years. Like teenagers, even. At 31, Alex died relatively young, and Dr. Pepperberg said that he’d lately become “moody” and “like a teenage son.” (Interestingly, chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall also talks about how difficult, even dangerous, chimps become in their teen years—and how unwise it would be to keep one as a pet.)

Alex changed forever the way people would view parrots, but Dr. Pepperberg’s training and research took many years and a huge effort, and on the downside, this bird lived his whole life in captivity. He had a favourite elm tree that he loved to look at through the window. He would say, “Wanna go tree,” and perch on Dr. Pepperberg’s hand to go to the hallway for a taste of the green wilderness that was never to be his home.

Sources:

Griffin, Donald R. (2001). Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness. The University of Chicago Press, pp. 180-186.

Morell, Virginia (March 2008). “Minds of their own.” National Geographic.

Sheldrake, Rupert and Aimée Morgana (2003). Testing a language-using parrot for telepathy. Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 601-616.