Alex & Me by Dr Irene Pepperberg
As part of my lazily continuing '101 in 1001', I have to read biographies of people I'm interested in. Or in this case, birds.
I first heard of this pair a few months ago on a podcast I listen to called ‘The Moth’. I highly recommend it. ‘The Moth’ is where people from all walks of life tell a true story without notes to a live audience. Each week there is a theme but on the podcast, we only get to hear one story, which usually goes for about fifteen minutes.
Irene told her story simply. It was a story about a scientist and the theory she had spent most of her life working on, if people can teach apes sign language, what’s to stop us from talking to parrots- who can already ‘talk’. Her experiment involved a parrot called Alex, or as it should be A.L.E.X, short for Avian Learning Experiment.
I wanted more. I found the book she had written a few years back and devoured it in one sitting.
A bird has the brain a size of a walnut… that’s where we get our term ‘bird brain’ from. She suffered funding setbacks on every level, even when she started achieving real results- results that were kicking the butt of signing chimpanzees.
But Alex made it all worth while. She had to treat him as a subject but somewhere along the way, as most animals do, he snuck into her heart.
I really recommend the book. It’s so fascinating and explains the science behind the cute little parrot, but in a really easy way. Trust me, science and I are not friends (we’re not even nodding acquaintances if we pass in the street) but even I understood what was going on in the book. And the antics of Alex just make the story. He was a real live wire and a total diva. She explains that his capability was much like a four year old child and he would often throw tantrums if he didn’t get his way. He knew the phrase ‘wanna go back’, which meant returning him to his cage and would love to use it to try and disrupt their sessions, the little minx!
One of my favourite stories was when somebody had brought into the lab a figurine of a parrot. Alex liked to show off how smart he was by helping to teach other parrots, something he was good at. He sauntered over to this ‘parrot’ and repeated a few words to him. When the bird failed to respond, Alex shook his head and sighed ‘turkey’ and walked off. Irene couldn’t stop laughing when she witness this because the grad students in her class always called Alex a ‘turkey’ on the days when he was particularly unresponsive. Alex understood that a ‘turkey’ was a bird who didn’t talk back!
I absolutely bawled my eyes out when he died… and that’s not a spoiler alert, the book starts with his unexpected death and works backwards. So even from the first few lines, I was hooked.
And this is my very favourite story as told by Irene in an essay on the Internet.
“There are some things that the birds do that, colloquially speaking, "just blow us away." We were training Alex to sound out phonemes, not because we want him to read as humans do, but we want to see if he understands that his labels are made up of sounds that can be combined in different ways to make up new words; that is, to demonstrate evidence for segmentation. He babbles at dusk, producing strings like "green, cheen, bean, keen", so we have some evidence for this behavior, but we need more solid data.
Thus we are trying to get him to sound out refrigerator letters, the same way one would train children on phonics. We were doing demos at the Media Lab for our corporate sponsors; we had a very small amount of time scheduled and the visitors wanted to see Alex work. So we put a number of differently colored letters on the tray that we use, put the tray in front of Alex, and asked, "Alex, what sound is blue?" He answers, "Ssss." It was an "s", so we say "Good birdie" and he replies, "Want a nut."
Well, I don't want him sitting there using our limited amount of time to eat a nut, so I tell him to wait, and I ask, "What sound is green?" Alex answers, "Ssshh." He's right, it's "sh," and we go through the routine again: "Good parrot." "Want a nut." "Alex, wait. What sound is orange?" "ch." "Good bird!" "Want a nut." We're going on and on and Alex is clearly getting more and more frustrated. He finally gets very slitty-eyed and he looks at me and states, "Want a nut. Nnn, uh, tuh."
Not only could you imagine him thinking, "Hey, stupid, do I have to spell it out for you?" but the point was that he had leaped over where we were and had begun sounding out the letters of the words for us. This was in a sense his way of saying to us, "I know where you're headed! Let's get on with it," which gave us the feeling that we were on the right track with what we were doing. These kinds of things don't happen in the lab on a daily basis, but when they do, they make you realize there's a lot more going on inside these little walnut-sized brains than you might at first imagine”
I’ll leave you with Alex in action. He looks a little featherless in a few shots. Irene explains in her book that he plucked his feathers because he was stressed at being away from her, not because he was over worked as some people state. When their grants continually didn’t go through, Irene would have to travel to speak at different functions to try and get out their message and raise funding, meaning she was away from Alex a lot.
And stay until the end of the video to hear the announcer read out Alex’s last words to Irene
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yGOgs_UlEc&feature=related
I first heard of this pair a few months ago on a podcast I listen to called ‘The Moth’. I highly recommend it. ‘The Moth’ is where people from all walks of life tell a true story without notes to a live audience. Each week there is a theme but on the podcast, we only get to hear one story, which usually goes for about fifteen minutes.
Irene told her story simply. It was a story about a scientist and the theory she had spent most of her life working on, if people can teach apes sign language, what’s to stop us from talking to parrots- who can already ‘talk’. Her experiment involved a parrot called Alex, or as it should be A.L.E.X, short for Avian Learning Experiment.
I wanted more. I found the book she had written a few years back and devoured it in one sitting.
A bird has the brain a size of a walnut… that’s where we get our term ‘bird brain’ from. She suffered funding setbacks on every level, even when she started achieving real results- results that were kicking the butt of signing chimpanzees.
But Alex made it all worth while. She had to treat him as a subject but somewhere along the way, as most animals do, he snuck into her heart.
I really recommend the book. It’s so fascinating and explains the science behind the cute little parrot, but in a really easy way. Trust me, science and I are not friends (we’re not even nodding acquaintances if we pass in the street) but even I understood what was going on in the book. And the antics of Alex just make the story. He was a real live wire and a total diva. She explains that his capability was much like a four year old child and he would often throw tantrums if he didn’t get his way. He knew the phrase ‘wanna go back’, which meant returning him to his cage and would love to use it to try and disrupt their sessions, the little minx!
One of my favourite stories was when somebody had brought into the lab a figurine of a parrot. Alex liked to show off how smart he was by helping to teach other parrots, something he was good at. He sauntered over to this ‘parrot’ and repeated a few words to him. When the bird failed to respond, Alex shook his head and sighed ‘turkey’ and walked off. Irene couldn’t stop laughing when she witness this because the grad students in her class always called Alex a ‘turkey’ on the days when he was particularly unresponsive. Alex understood that a ‘turkey’ was a bird who didn’t talk back!
I absolutely bawled my eyes out when he died… and that’s not a spoiler alert, the book starts with his unexpected death and works backwards. So even from the first few lines, I was hooked.
And this is my very favourite story as told by Irene in an essay on the Internet.
“There are some things that the birds do that, colloquially speaking, "just blow us away." We were training Alex to sound out phonemes, not because we want him to read as humans do, but we want to see if he understands that his labels are made up of sounds that can be combined in different ways to make up new words; that is, to demonstrate evidence for segmentation. He babbles at dusk, producing strings like "green, cheen, bean, keen", so we have some evidence for this behavior, but we need more solid data.
Thus we are trying to get him to sound out refrigerator letters, the same way one would train children on phonics. We were doing demos at the Media Lab for our corporate sponsors; we had a very small amount of time scheduled and the visitors wanted to see Alex work. So we put a number of differently colored letters on the tray that we use, put the tray in front of Alex, and asked, "Alex, what sound is blue?" He answers, "Ssss." It was an "s", so we say "Good birdie" and he replies, "Want a nut."
Well, I don't want him sitting there using our limited amount of time to eat a nut, so I tell him to wait, and I ask, "What sound is green?" Alex answers, "Ssshh." He's right, it's "sh," and we go through the routine again: "Good parrot." "Want a nut." "Alex, wait. What sound is orange?" "ch." "Good bird!" "Want a nut." We're going on and on and Alex is clearly getting more and more frustrated. He finally gets very slitty-eyed and he looks at me and states, "Want a nut. Nnn, uh, tuh."
Not only could you imagine him thinking, "Hey, stupid, do I have to spell it out for you?" but the point was that he had leaped over where we were and had begun sounding out the letters of the words for us. This was in a sense his way of saying to us, "I know where you're headed! Let's get on with it," which gave us the feeling that we were on the right track with what we were doing. These kinds of things don't happen in the lab on a daily basis, but when they do, they make you realize there's a lot more going on inside these little walnut-sized brains than you might at first imagine”
I’ll leave you with Alex in action. He looks a little featherless in a few shots. Irene explains in her book that he plucked his feathers because he was stressed at being away from her, not because he was over worked as some people state. When their grants continually didn’t go through, Irene would have to travel to speak at different functions to try and get out their message and raise funding, meaning she was away from Alex a lot.
And stay until the end of the video to hear the announcer read out Alex’s last words to Irene
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yGOgs_UlEc&feature=related