The book is just as much a biography of Irene Pepperberg as it is her relationship to Alex and the breathroughs made for animal cognition. It chronicles a sometimes tiresome series of disappointments, rejections, and failures (getting fired, not getting published, loosing grant funds, not being given tenure, having a tiny lab, moving to a tinier lab) told in a sort of up-and-down, manic-depressive way that goes from "couldn't be happier" to "another devasting blow." Even so, by the time I got done reading the book, I was willing to give her a pass for being a little self-indulgent . . . and, in spite of myself, to basically fall in love with Alex the parrot just as much as she (and everyone else who knew him) did. I didn't even want to read the book in the first place, as some kind of resistance to over-hype (really the first several pages are just a tallying up of all the emails, letters, phonecalls, and children's drawings that flooded Irene after Alex's death), but his charm sort of comes through anyway and it's pretty hard not to be truly disappointed that he's not around anymore.
Anyway, on to the book . . .
One thing mentioned early on regards the way that Alex was trained or taught. They used a particular method called . . . I don't remember . . . which meant that he always had two trainers, demonstrating what Alex was supposed to learn (one playing the teacher, one the student, and then sometimes reversing roles). I think this method was known to work in other animals. I don't remember. But it proved to be a much faster way of teaching. (Side note, this was also how this woman ended up teaching a deaf man who had never known any language how to label things . . . by modeling both teacher and student . . . as described in the Radiolab episode called Words).
I wonder if that's actually a faster way of teaching other things in the rest of life (drawing? :)) I wonder what that looks like in an art context?
Mirror test and Alex
She says that it became impossible to leave Alex alone in the lab for even a few minutes, because he'd break things and chew on stuff and generally destroy things, so the lab assistants would take him with them when they went to the "washroom".p. 96 of Alex and Me
"Now, these trips to the washroom brought up another issue --but first I must digress. Fairly early on I had palnned to use a two-way mirror in the lab for observing Alex unseen by him. Alex's cage was supposedly angled so that he would not see himself. But such was not to be. "Introduced Alex to the 'bird in the mirror' today,' I wrote in my journal. "What a flaky parrot--he's truly scared of himself.' We obviously can't know what he was thinking. But when I pulled back the screen that had until this time covered the mirror, all of a sudden there appeared to be a window in the room. Alex looked, saw "another bird," and was visibly scared. "He actually crawled to me for comfort," I wrote, "which shows how created out he was." I doubt that, from his viewing angle, he could really have made any connection between himself and this other creature; even to me, it looked like another room with another bird.
As time passed Alex grew less timid with the situation. That was a good thing, because the washroom where our students occassionally took him had a very large mirror above the sinks. Alex used to march up and down the shelf in front of the mirror, making noise, looking around, demanding things. Then one day in December 1980 when Kathy Davidson took him to the washroom, Alex seemed to really notice the mirror for the first time. He turned to look right into it, cocked his head back and forth a few times to get a fuller look, and said, "What's that?"
"That's you," Kathy answered. "You're a parrot."
Alex looked some more and then said, "What color?"
Kathy said, "Gray. You're a gray parrot, Alex." The two of them went through that sequence a couple more times. And that's how Alex learned the color gray.
We don't know what else Alex learned from the mirror that day, what thoughts were in his mind as he saw his reflection in the mirror. But it did mean that formal mirror tests were now impossible."
97
I think we passed that bridge a long time before that. :\
115
Here, she talks about how, at night, they recorded Alex "babbling, when he was free to 'practice' sounds and new labels before going to sleep, just as children do." (Mentioning the classic book "Crib Talk" about babies). This is a really interesting similarity. She also mentions how there are aspects of parrot's mimicry of other bird songs that are very similar to second-language acquisition in humans.
124
Cute anecdote: When Alex was at the vet's office next to an accountant working late one evening.
"You want a nut?" Alex asked her.
"No, Alex."
He persisted. "You want corn?"
"No, thank you, Alex, I don't want corn."
This went on for a little while, and the accountant did her best to ignore him. Finally, Alex apparently became exasperated and said in a petulant voice, "Well, what do you want?" The accountant cracked up laughing, and gave Alex the attention he was demanding.
Here is a part about language and its relationship to thought:
"Norman Malcom's 1973 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association said essentially the same thing: 'The relationship between language and thought must be . . . so close that it is really senseless to conjecture that people may not have thoughts, and also really senseless to conjecture that animals may have thoughts." p. 247
220
"Although language is no longer widely held to be a prerequisite for thinking--I often think visually, for instance, as many people do, and nonhuman animals might do this, too--language is necessary to prove another individual is conscious. Language allows us to explore the workings of another individual's mind as nothing else can."
And earlier, something about this whole human uniqueness thing that comes up all the time.
"Nevertheless, the fortress of human uniqueness came under attack in the 1980s and began to crumble. We once thought only humans used tools; not so, as Jane Goodall discovered her chimps using sticks and leaves as tools. OK, only humans make tools; again, not so, as Goodall and later others discovered. Only humans had languge; yes, but elements of language had been discovered in nonhuman mammals. Each time nonhuman mammals were found doing what was the supposed province of humans, defenders of the 'humans are unique' doctrine moved the goalposts."
246
149
And now a super-cute story about Alex tickling:
"After about a week, one day he looked intently at the suspended parrot [toy], walked up to it, and said, 'you tickle.' He then bent his head over toward the toy, the way he would to a student, who would then dutifully tickle Alex's neck. Nothing happened, of course. After a few seconds, he looked up at the toy, said, "You turkey," and stalked off in a huff. The students sometimes said, "You turkey" to Alex when he did dumb things. He had apparently learned how to use that stinging epithet without any training."
previous page, talks about a toy parrot that looked and sounded like a grey -- Alex was aggressive toward the toy, other one he just ignored, until he asked it to tickle him.
And finally, some stuff about language patterns that is kind of interesting.
on 142, talks about "anticipatory co-articulation" which is the term the fact that we pronouce letters differently based on what follows them, so that if we say "corn" and "key" we say the "kuh" differently . . . which shows that we learn these things as separate sounds, not just one sound. The fact that Alex (upon slowing his speech down and using fancy machinery) does the same thing that humans do (not just repeating "corn" and "key" as one sound) it shows that he demonstrates the kind of speech patterns that only humans were thought ot be able to have? --- she explains this whole thing alot more in the book "The Alex Studies" so if i need more info . . . yeah.
No comments:
Post a Comment