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African Grey Parrots Are Smarter Than You Think!
With Guest: Irene M. Pepperberg, head of The Alex Foundation and author of "Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence - and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process.
Original Air Date: 12-04-2009
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Alex, the African Grey parrot. In today's episode, Dr. Irene Pepperberg will share why Alex was so special, what this means for all parrot lovers and what is needed to ensure that African Grey's continue to exist in the wild. From her book, Alex & Me, she writes that "a bird with a brain the size of a shelled walnut could do the kinds of things that young children do. And that changed our perception of what we mean by "bird brain." It changed the way we think about animal thinking."
(photo courtesy of The Alex Foundation)
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(Cover image courtesy of Harper Collins Publishers)
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Irene and Alex.
(photo by Arlene Levin-Rowe)
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A range map for where African Grey Parrots live in the wild. They naturally dwell in the primary and secondary rainforests of West and Central Africa.
(photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike)
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An example of what the Grey's natural habitat looks like. This is the Nyungwe rainforest in South-west Rwanda.
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Portrait of a wild African Grey Parrot.
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Alex is answering questions about the items on the tray.
(photo by Arlene Levin-Rowe)|
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Alex doing phoneme (the sounding out of words) work, as in the (in)famous, "n-u-t" incident. Here the question is "What sound is blue?"
(photo by Jenny Pegg)
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There are many other kinds of parrots and birds that can talk. Are they all as smart as African Grey's? (Examples of other tropical birds, (not necessarily talking birds) from left to right are a Yellow-Crowned Amazon Parrot, a Rosy-faced Love Bird, an African Grey (you should recognize that one by now) and a Crimson Rosella Parrot)
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Alex enjoyed being tickled.
(photo by Karla Zimonja)
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Alex with an "Alex Foundation" coffee mug. Watch what happens in the next photo.
(photo by Arlene Levin-Rowe)
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The mug acted like an echo chamber, amplifying sounds when he put his head inside and talked.
(photo by Arlene Levin-Rowe)
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Dr. Pepperberg continues to work with two additional parrots. Griffin, the African Grey Parrot.
(photo by Arlene Levin-Rowe)
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Arthur, aka. Wart doing a string pulling session.
(photo by Jenny Pegg)
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Balancing all three birds for a "beauty shot"; Alex has to be closest to Irene's face.
(photo by Mike Lovett, courtesy of The Alex Foundation)
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On Alex's "hatchdays' he joined in the celebrations. Alex made up his own word for cake, "Yummy Bread."
(photo by Arlene Levin-Rowe)
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An African Grey sitting on a tree perch in a bird store.
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A wild African Grey. What does the future hold for this remarkable bird and what other secrets of avian intelligence does it hold?
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 Dr. Irene Pepperberg received her SB from MIT and MA and Ph.D. fromHarvard. She is currently a Research Associate and Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Harvard and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Brandeis University's Psychology Department. She has been a visiting associate professor at MIT's Media Lab, later accepting a research scientist position there, leaving a tenured professorship at the University of Arizona. She has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, won a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, was an alternate for the Cattell Award for Psychology, won the 2000 Selby Fellowship (Australian Academy of Sciences), won the 2005 Frank Beach Award for best paper in comparative psychology, was nominated for the 2000 Weizmann, L'Oreal, and Grawemeyer Awards, the 2001 Quest Award (Animal Behavior Society) and was renominated for the 2001 L'Oreal Award. She has also received fellowships from the Harry Frank Guggenheim and Whitehall Foundations, and numerous grants from NSF. Her book, The Alex Studies, describing over 20 years of peer-reviewed experiments on Grey parrots, received favorable mention from publications as diverse as the New York Times and Science. Her memoir, Alex & Me, is a New York Times bestseller. She has presented her findings nationally and internationally at universities and scientific congresses, often as a keynote or plenary speaker, and has published numerous journal articles, reviews, and book chapters. She is a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the American Ornithologists' Union, AAAS, the Eastern Psychological Association, and presently serves as consulting editor for four journals.
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Additional Resources
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