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

  • Irene Pepperberg
HarperCollins: 2008. 240 pp. $23.95 9780061672477 | ISBN: 978-0-0616-7247-7

Alex and Me is the conjoined life story of cognitive psychologist Irene Pepperberg and her African grey parrot, Alex. Pepperberg sketches her life from lonely girlhood in Brooklyn, New York, through college and graduate school — she attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology aged 16, and gained a PhD in theoretical chemistry at Harvard University — to her acquisition of Alex in 1977. Pepperberg helped Alex to develop the use of spoken words to identify numbers, colours, materials, shapes and categories of objects. She struggled to gain respect and recognition from the academic community for her work, and this takes centre stage in her account.

The book starts and ends with Alex's death in September 2007. The public response to his demise underscored his celebrity status. Outpourings of grief reached Pepperberg from all around the world — even The Economist ran an obituary. She conveys effectively her shock at losing not just her main research subject, but also a beloved friend of some 30 years.

Similarly to many scientists whose lives revolve largely around their work, Pepperberg is impatient with her critics. She bemoans the reviewers of her work who force her to carry out more experiments when the results are already abundantly clear, and the funding agencies that fail to see the importance of her project. She calls their criticisms “denigrating”. Yet there are many good reasons to be sceptical of the exceptional abilities of a single animal.

More than 350 years ago, the philosopher René Descartes suggested that there was a fundamental difference between “teach[ing] a magpie to say good-day to its mistress, when it sees her approach” and the verbal expression of ideas by human beings. The magpie, declared Descartes, does not form words as expressions of its thoughts, only as responses to obtain a desirable reward, learnt through training.

Pepperberg insists that her work with Alex puts the final nail in Descartes' coffin, and shoos away the criticism of the behaviourists who are Descartes' heirs. She quotes her last interchange with Alex on the night before his death: '“You be good,” said Alex. “I love you.”'

Although she admits that her students would sometimes teach Alex entertaining sayings in the manner that Descartes suggested, she insists that her relationship with Alex was truly one of reciprocated affection. However, before concluding that a parrot proclaiming love knows whereof he squawks, one would want to be certain that nobody has been giving the bird a titbit for what he says.

A century ago in Berlin, a respected school teacher presented to the public a horse known as Clever Hans, who had the apparent intelligence of a 13-year-old child. A prestigious commission of experts was convinced that Hans could solve school-level arithmetic problems. However, psychology student Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not answering the questions as posed, but instead responding to the subtle head movements of those who asked the questions. The movements were so slight the questioners did not know they were making them, and there was no suggestion that the horse's owner had intentionally taught Hans to respond to them. Can we be confident that Alex was not deducing the correct response from subtle cues the experimenters were giving off?

One defence against the accusation that Alex was just another Clever Hans is that his responses were much more varied than the foot stomping that Hans used to answer questions. Whereas Hans only needed to be cued to start and stop moving his hoof, Alex needed to say many different things to answer a question correctly. However, the fact that Pepperberg always remained in the room to interpret Alex's utterances poses problems for this defence. We know that the human ear is easily tricked. Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven contains satanic lyrics when played backwards — but only if the words are shown to the listener. Without a script, the reversed sounds are perceived as nothing more than mixed-up phonemes. The squawking of a parrot often contains jumbled speech sounds, so the form these take to a listener might well depend on what that person expects to hear.

Alex and Me is an engaging narrative because it has the intimate relationship between one human and one parrot at its centre. But as an exploration in science, it is deeply worrying that nobody can replicate its central findings, given the ease with which the subjects and equipment can be acquired. Even Pepperberg has been unable to replicate Alex's achievements using other parrots.

Alex may have had some sense of number, shape, colour and material. Similar results have been obtained with pigeons, so it is not an absurd conjecture. For those who did not know him personally, the tragedy of Alex's passing is that the records that remain are not enough to prove the case one way or the other.