They were seated – she at her desk, he on top of his cage – in her lab, a windowless room about the size of a boxcar, at Brandeis University. How, then, does a scientist prove that an animal is capable of thinking – that it is able to acquire information about the world and act on it? “That’s why I started my studies withAlex,” Pepperberg said. Gut instinct is not science, and it is all too easy to project human thoughts and feelings onto another creature. But such claims remain highly controversial. We see the love in our dogs’ eyes and know that, of course, they has thoughts and emotions. They were simply machines, robots programmed to react to stimuli but lacking the ability to think or feel.Any pet owner would disagree. “I thought if he learned to communicate, I could ask him questions about how he sees the world.”ī When Pepperberg began her dialogue with Alex, who died last September at the age of 31, many scientists believed animals were incapable of any thought. She brought a one-year-old African gray parrot she named Alex into her lab to teach him to reproduce the sounds of the English language. At a time when animals still were considered automatons, she set out to find what was on another creature’s mind by talking to it. This book is a wonderful tribute to a remarkable parrot.A In 1977 Irene Pepperberg, a recent graduate of Harvard University, did something very bold. His accomplishments proved a great deal about the power of bird brains. Alex died at age thirty in 2007, twenty years earlier than expected. She also conveys the long and at times lonely struggles she endures in her career, as an academic outside the mainstream, dependent on grant funding or a university brave enough to hire her.
Pepperberg does a good job describing the experiments, conveying Alex's talents and personality. Because he could do things that no one thought a bird could do: develop a decent vocabulary, count, add, spell, reason, communicate, he became a bit of a media celebrity. He was a roguish and imperious bird, but awfully sweet. Alex and Me describes Alex in charming detail.
After some self-study, she embarked on a new career. in chemistry from MIT but fell out of love with it around the same time that she learned that serious science was being conducted on the topic of animal behavior and communication. Pepperberg, fell in love with birds as a lonely, shy, sad and silent little girl. Alex and Me tells the surprisingly moving story of a 30 year professional relationship, scientific experiment, and dare I say "friendship" between Alex the parrot and his owner, the author Irene Pepperberg.
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