"TELL ME what’s different," asks the young woman with long dark hair. She holds two keys, one metal and one green, in front of a grey parrot.

The bird briefly eyes the keys. "Color," it answers in a clear, childlike voice.

"Yes, color. What color bigger?"

"Green."

"Green, you’re right!"

Ever since this astounding exchange between Alex, the now-famous talking African grey, and his trainer, Dr. Irene Pepperberg, aired on the Discovery Channel 20 years ago, parrot owners the world over have dreamed of teaching their own birds the art of good conversation.

"How was your day, Petey?"

"Just swell, Bob. How about some millet? And while you’re up, could you change the paper in my cage?"

Although such freewheeling chats probably will always remain in the realm of wishful thinking, Alex the parrot has proven just how much intelligence does dwell in the underestimated craniums of our feathered friends.

Today the talented psittacine can identify, categorize, request or refuse a total of 100 objects, including seven colors and five shapes. He has even begun learning a rudimentary form of reading.

From pet store to celebrity
Alex, a Chicago pet-store bird before he became an international celebrity, may be the most clever parrot in history. And he owes it all to Pepperberg, a professor at MIT.

A Ph.D. in chemistry turned avian researcher, Pepperberg has drilled Alex in his P’s and Q’s for a quarter of a century this year. She hopes to teach her famous protégé and his two younger African grey sidekicks, Wart and Griffin, a lot more, including how to use a computer.

Unfortunately, The Alex Foundation, a nonprofit entity Pepperberg created 10 years ago to help fund her work, is navigating troubled financial waters at the moment.

Despite last year’s publication of the ambitious 448-page The Alex Studies, Pepperberg’s first hard-cover account of her work for the popular press, the National Science Foundation has turned down her last several grant requests.

Without the support of her primary benefactor, Pepperberg has had to scale back her research, including graduate students’ trips to Africa to study wild greys. Instead, she has had to spend more time on the road herself to raise the $75,000 to $100,000 in funds she needs annually to continue.

Pepperberg speaks widely on her research at animal behavior conferences and other forums. Twice a month she participates in

Photo courtesy of David Carter. Visitors to the The Alex Foundation's Web site can buy this 8 X 10 portrait of Irene Pepperberg and her famous protege for $25.

pet-club fundraisers. Pepperberg’s Web site brings in a small amount of money selling her $35.95 videocassette, "Training Your Parrot the Alex Way," and an autographed, glossy color 8 X 10 of her and Alex for $25.

"Right now my hobby is trying to get more than six hours of sleep on the weekends," she comments wryly. "I enjoy dinners with friends, reading, listening to music, but there’s really not much time for any of that."

Pepperberg attributes her current financial difficulties to the scientific community’s continued resistance to the idea of a bird that can think.

"It’s been very difficult," she admits, "and I think it always will be because people do not want to think a creature with a brain the size of a walnut has - not the language ability - but the intellectual ability, of a four-year-old child.

"We can accept this with a chimpanzee, because they’re more like us. We can accept this with a dolphin, because it’s this big-brained mammal. But not a bird."

Goodall admirer
How did a chemistry whiz from Brooklyn wind up collaborating with a gabby parrot from the Windy City?

Pepperberg gives partial credit to her parents, a homemaker and an elementary school teacher, for bringing home a parakeet when she was 4 ½. The only pet the family could keep in their apartment, located over a storefront, it was the first of several budgies Pepperberg would own as a child.

The pioneering work of chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall, one of the few prominent female scientists at the time, also made an impression on the young Pepperberg.

“Like most girls growing up in the fifties, I followed her with interest,” she remembers.

With careers in animal behavior nonexistent at the time, Pepperberg at first decided to pursue chemistry, something at which she had always excelled. A gifted student, she entered MIT at the age of 16 and earned her master’s degree in chemistry from Harvard six years later in 1971.

But Pepperberg remained fascinated with animal intelligence. While a graduate student in chemical physics at Harvard, a TV special on animal communication inspired her to renew her dream of carving a career in the field. She began to take courses in avian biology and human language acquisition, followed by more intense studies in ethology, biology and neurobiology after she received her doctorate in 1976.

In 1977, Pepperberg moved to Purdue University with her then-husband, an assistant professor of electrical sciences and neurobiology, and set up her first lab in a corner of the biology department.

She chose the African grey parrot as the animal with which she would try to bridge the interspecies communication gap. German scientists who had done limited work with the birds in the 1940s and ‘50s had already proven grey parrots were intelligent.

She began to call around to find a pet shop that sold African greys and eventually purchased a year-old bird at a store 122 miles away in Chicago.

"I generally tell people that if they’re going to buy a pet bird, they should get it from a breeder or a pet store that does its own breeding so they know where it’s coming from," says Pepperberg of her decision to go the pet-store route. "But I had to show that Alex was not a specially-bred bird. He had to be chosen at random so I could show there was nothing special about him."

Pepperberg named the young bird Alex, for Avian Learning Experiment.

Rewards that made sense
In setting up her first experiments with Alex, Pepperberg decided to adopt some of the techniques used by the previous generation of researchers--but rejected others as flawed.

One teaching method she liked was the model-rival form of training pioneered by German ethologist Dietmar Todt.

In this method, Pepperberg and a volunteer student handled an object and discussed it while Alex watched. When the student correctly labeled an object, Pepperberg rewarded him by giving him the object.

If he was incorrect, Pepperberg took the object away. The demonstration was designed to both teach Alex and make him a little jealous, so he would want to handle and name the object himself.

To guard against teaching Alex to respond to only one person, Pepperberg modified the method slightly by reversing the roles occasionally, with the student questioning the trainer.

Another change Pepperberg made was to use intrinsic, or related-rather than extrinsic, or unrelated--rewards. This meant she would reward Alex with the object he correctly labeled, rather than an unrelated object, a common training method she believed only caused confusion.

For instance, when Alex correctly identified a cork, he was given the cork as his reward, not his favorite food, a cashew. To sweeten the exercise for Alex, Pepperberg then allowed the bird to request something he really wanted-such as the cashew (“nut”) or a slice of banana.

Mastering the letter "p"
The techniques paid off quickly. Within two weeks, Alex was attempting to identify his first object, a torn piece of index card, as "a-er."

"He left out the 'p’s' at first because they were too difficult to pronounce," recalls Pepperberg. It took several months for Alex to pronounce "paper" clearly, but after that he quickly mastered "key," "wood" and "rawhide."

For the color red, Alex was taught "rose" instead.

"Birds learn vowels first, and we already had a word with the ‘eh’ sound-‘peg’, for a wooden clothespin. We didn’t want to confuse him."

By 1981, Alex could identify objects by name, shape and color, averaging 80 percent accuracy in more than 200 tests, and Pepperberg wrote her first scientific paper, "Functional Vocalizations by an Africa Grey Parrot," the first of over 50 so far featuring Alex.

The reception was cool.

The paper "was rejected by major animal science and behavior experts first. I finally got it published in the Journal of Animal Psychology (now called Ethology)," Pepperberg recalls.

Two years later Pepperberg was formally appointed a research associate in biology at Purdue. She remained there until joining Northwestern as a visiting assistant professor in anthropology in 1984. She left Northwestern in 1991 for the University of Arizona at Tucson, where she became an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Psychology.

In 1999, Pepperberg returned to her alma mater as a visiting associate professor in MIT’s Media Laboratory. Last month, she became a permanent half-time staff member, a position that leaves her plenty of time to travel on behalf of her research.

Two for the road
Except during Pepperberg’s first year back at MIT, Alex has accompanied his mentor everywhere. And over the last decade, as Alex has approached middle age, a few fellow African greys have joined him in the lab to help share the workload.

Alo, who came aboard in 1990 and whose name means "spiritual guide" in Hopi, dropped out after only a few years because she had trouble coping with student turnover, says Pepperberg. She now lives happily with a friend of Pepperberg’s.

Kyaaro, added at the same time, also did not meet expectations. A parrot behaviorist who also works with children diagnosed Kyaaro with attention deficit disorder, says Pepperberg, and he now takes on a lighter load back in Tucson.

In the last few years, two more young trainees have joined Alex. Griffin, now 6 ½, is following in Alex’s footsteps, albeit a little more slowly. With a dozen labels under his belt, he’s beginning to learn his first shapes and colors.

Interpet Explorer
Wart, the ingénue of the group at 3, is the avian star of Interpet Explorer, one of several relatively new experiments Pepperberg is overseeing in the Media Lab, a somewhat unorthodox degree-granting group dedicated to researching the future of society’s interaction with technology.

Essentially a computer set up for a parrot’s use, Interpet Explorer includes a "smart perch" equipped with red and blue paddles as controllers, a 17-inch LCD screen, speakers and a Web cam.

Although the press instantly pounced on the fantastic idea of a Web-surfing parrot--and Pepperberg’s own Web site asks the question, "Could a parrot use the Internet?!?"--that’s not what Interpet is about, she says.

Rather than give parrots a way to, say, order seed treats from www.Lafeber.com when their owners aren’t looking, Interpet’s purpose is to entertain birds so that boredom-and destructive neurotic tendencies such as screaming and featherpicking-don’t set in when owners are away all day at work.

One of the Media Lab’s graduate students, Ben Resner, previously a software programmer at Berkeley Systems, maker of the flying toasters screensaver, is working on several parrot-pleasing computer applications.

They include a video and music browser, a four-note musical instrument, a live video feed of wild parrots and interactive puzzles and mazes. Resner may even eventually develop tools that allow a bird to engage in remote interaction with its owner, much like rover@home, an experimental program already being tried with dogs.

Rover@home lets owners see their dogs over a Web cam, issue commands and even dispense food when the dog requests it by bumping a "mouse" consisting of a flexible stalk with a plastic ball on the end.

It’s all fascinating stuff, but Pepperberg is tightlipped about progress so far in developing computer programs for parrots. The most she’ll allow is that it’s been more difficult than anticipated to come up with an application that will hold a psittacine’s interest.

"They’re good at finding ways to get around us," she says drolly.

See Alex read
In another experiment launched at MIT, Alex reads. Sort of. It’s really more of an attempt to prove that Alex understands the concept that sounds can be recombined to form different words, says Pepperberg. She got the idea for the experiment after hearing Alex rhyme words.

"Sometimes he plays around with words-‘green, bean, keen.’ That makes us believe he realizes the words are made of individual sounds. If we can get him to sound out the sounds, and combinations of sounds, then we would have some proof."

To teach Alex his letters, Pepperberg uses children’s plastic refrigerator magnets and relies on the bird’s impressive knowledge of colors. She combines a few letters of the same color and asks Alex what "sound" purple, for instance, makes.

After two years, Alex can recognize and pronounce several letter combinations, including "sh". However, he’s still not accurate enough to move on to longer words, says Pepperberg.

Life in the lab
Alex and his fellow lab birds enjoy a good, if unorthodox, life for a parrot. They spend between 8 and 12 hours a day playing and working with graduate students who run them through their paces in the MIT laboratory. Each bird has its own large cage with toys.

At night, rather than go home with a student or faculty member, for security reasons the birds are taken to a separate animal-care facility on campus.

The birds get half an hour of low lighting to simulate dusk, then 12 hours of darkness before another half hour of low light to simulate dawn. They then return to the main lab to begin another day.

Some animal-rights extremists who do not believe people should own animals "hang around the lab, asking when Alex is going to be released," says Pepperberg.

Others have seen pictures of Alex in his small, toyless sleeping cage and become upset, thinking the cage is his around-the-clock living quarters. However, "most people have praised Alex’s treatment as humane research," says the professor.

Alex has feather picked intermittently all of his life, including his wings. He suffers bouts of the habit when Pepperberg is away from him, traveling.

"Right now he’s fully feathered. The students here in Boston are so excellent and so involved with their work, I think he’s okay with my not being here all of the time."

Except for a tendency toward bossiness, Alex is a well-mannered bird with simple tastes-his favorite "toys" include cardboard boxes, telephone books and, perhaps for sentimental reasons, pieces of index cards.

Pepperberg characterizes him as merely run-of-the-mill in brain power, for an African grey.

"I think birds vary in their ability just like people. I think Alex is average. There are probably birds smarter than he is, that work really fast. Then there are going to be great birds that never talk at all."

Alex gets his own mail, much of it from children, at the e-mail address provided on Pepperberg’s site, alex@alexfoundation.org .

"In fact, one of our experiments, on object permanence [continued existence of hidden objects], was suggested by a letter from a child who had tried this with his own parrot and thought it would be a cool experiment for a young bird," says Pepperberg.

Long-term goals
Pepperberg hopes her research into African grey communication will accomplish several things. Preserving wild-parrot habitat, particularly the African grey’s, is one goal.

In recent years, several of Pepperberg’s University of Arizona graduate students have researched grey behavior and living conditions in their native Africa, from which tens of thousands of birds are still legally exported each year.

Pepperberg hopes her research will help bring changes to a country where parrots are still being poached in reserves with machetes.

"We all know that if you find an attractive point to peg a conservation issue onto--think of the dolphins and the tuna industry--you can get the public interested and outraged at what’s happening. We’re hoping that by showing how intelligent these birds are, we can work with the people in elephant and chimpanzee conservation and save some of these areas," she says.

"But it’s very scary. Some of these areas are war torn and people are starving. Anything that lives is bushmeat. People will kill anything to feed their children. It’s hard to argue that. But habitat destruction is something we can do about. We can’t prevent harvesting, but renewable resources are a possibility."

An area on which Pepperberg’s research has already had a positive influence is teaching handicapped children.

Therapist Diane Sherman with Newfound Therapies in Monterey, Calif., has successfully used Pepperberg’s modified rival/model technique with autistic children since 1993.

In one dramatic example, Sherman and an assistant were able to help a boy improve from flapping his hands and speaking gibberish to standing quietly and using complete sentences to request a coveted red toy Lamborghini.

The model/rival technique works because it’s like real life, says Sherman. "Take the example of the older sibling playing ball with a friend. The younger brother runs out and says, ‘Mom says you have to let me play, too.’ He tries but he throws the ball wrong and humiliates the older brother.

"The older boy then takes the ball and says, 'This is how you do it. Put four fingers on the seam and hold it back by your ear. This is how you’re doing it. You’re throwing it like a girl.’ The little brother tries again and does better, so he’s allowed to play."

A third prong of influence Pepperberg hopes her work will have is on understanding how human and animal brains work to aid in rehabilitation.

Although she has used magnetic resonance imaging, better known as MRI, to study how African greys vocalize, MRI’s resolution is not yet precise enough to show areas of activity in a bird’s much smaller brain, she says.

The state of consciousness
When such MRIs become possible, they might shed some light on the biggest question of all: Alex’s amazing feats of object labeling aside, just what degree of consciousness do animals possess?

It’s an area Pepperberg prefers not to discuss in depth.

"I just don’t know [how far it extends with birds or animals]. Most tests are very human centered. And even for those test results, you can come up with alternative explanations.

"We believe human beings are conscious. I know I am and I have to believe that you are and vice versa, but showing it in a scientific manner is very difficult."

Even memory, a capacity animals appear to possess because they respond in the same way to certain repeat situations, just as humans do, does not stand up to traditional science. "Behaviorists argue that it’s a simple stimulus response," notes Pepperberg.

Although she won’t be pinned down, it’s fairly obvious Pepperberg leans toward more progressive theories. After all, Alex acts only too human at times.

For one, he shows what most people would immediately recognize as the all-too-human trait of impatience.

"If he says, ‘I wanna go here or want x or y, and doesn’t get his way, he will repeat the phrase. If he still does not get his way, he will bang his beak," a common frustration behavior, says Pepperberg.

Once, when a research sponsor stopped by the lab to see Alex show off his "reading" skills, Alex seemed to show the visitor another type of behavior--condescension.

"He asked for a nut--'Wanna nut'--after each successful answer," remembers Pepperberg, chuckling. "Each time we asked him to perform one more time. And each time he repeated, ‘Wanna nut.’

"Finally, he said, ‘Wanna NUT!’. And then he sounded out the word the same way we taught him: ‘Nnn-uhhh-TUH!’ as if to spell it out for us."

Humans. Sometimes we’re just not that bright.

ParrotChronicles.com. Published Fall 2001.

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