Dogsters and Catsters know that dogs, cats and others animalshave a different yet important type of intelligence. So this National Geographic article will probably not surprize you too much. Bit it will confirm some of what you already feel and know.
Personally, I’m thrilled to see this information talked about openly by reputable publications because there are way too many people who still believe that there is nothing we can learn from dogs and other animals.
Those of you who have visited me at the science fiction conventions know I am usually on panels about how humans view and write about non-humans. A few years ago I was on a panel with a successful writer who actually has a good-selling series with aliens. But he has little interest in non-human animals on THIS planet. When i asked him why he said it was because there was nothing else we could learn from other species on Earth. I hope this writer gets a chance to read this article. There are so many excellent scientists who know better. I hope the writer and others like him can learn from these true scientific pioneers.
There is so much we can learn about and from our canine and feline symbiotes, as well as the other species with whom we share this planet.
Thanks to Michael K. (who saw the convention panel with the other writer) for barking in this article from National Geographic.
Minds of their Own
Animals are smarter than you think.
By Virginia Morell
Photograph by Vincent J. MusiIn 1977 Irene Pepperberg, a recent graduate of Harvard University, did something very bold. 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. 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. “I thought if he learned to communicate, I could ask him questions about how he sees the world.”
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. They were simply machines, robots programmed to react to stimuli but lacking the ability to think or feel. Any pet owner would disagree. We see the love in our dogs’ eyes and know that, of course, Spot has thoughts and emotions. But such claims remain highly controversial. Gut instinct is not science, and it is all too easy to project human thoughts and feelings onto another creature. How, then, does a scientist prove that an animal is capable of thinkingthat it is able to acquire information about the world and act on it?
“That’s why I started my studies with Alex,” Pepperberg said. They were seatedshe at her desk, he on top of his cagein her lab, a windowless room about the size of a boxcar, at Brandeis University. Newspapers lined the floor; baskets of bright toys were stacked on the shelves. They were clearly a teamand because of their work, the notion that animals can think is no longer so fanciful.
Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others’ motives, imitating others, and being creative. Bit by bit, in ingenious experiments, researchers have documented these talents in other species, gradually chipping away at what we thought made human beings distinctive while offering a glimpse of where our own abilities came from. Scrub jays know that other jays are thieves and that stashed food can spoil; sheep can recognize faces; chimpanzees use a variety of tools to probe termite mounds and even use weapons to hunt small mammals; dolphins can imitate human postures; the archerfish, which stuns insects with a sudden blast of water, can learn how to aim its squirt simply by watching an experienced fish perform the task. And Alex the parrot turned out to be a surprisingly good talker.
Thirty years after the Alex studies began, Pepperberg and a changing collection of assistants were still giving him English lessons. The humans, along with two younger parrots, also served as Alex’s flock, providing the social input all parrots crave. Like any flock, this oneas small as it washad its share of drama. Alex dominated his fellow parrots, acted huffy at times around Pepperberg, tolerated the other female humans, and fell to pieces over a male assistant who dropped by for a visit. (“If you were a man,” Pepperberg said, after noting Alex’s aloofness toward me, “he’d be on your shoulder in a second, barfing cashews in your ear.”)
Pepperberg bought Alex in a Chicago pet store. She let the store’s assistant pick him out because she didn’t want other scientists saying later that she’d deliberately chosen an especially smart bird for her work. Given that Alex’s brain was the size of a shelled walnut, most researchers thought Pepperberg’s interspecies communication study would be futile.
“Some people actually called me crazy for trying this,” she said. “Scientists thought that chimpanzees were better subjects, although, of course, chimps can’t speak.”
Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas have been taught to use sign language and symbols to communicate with us, often with impressive results. The bonobo Kanzi, for instance, carries his symbol-communication board with him so he can “talk” to his human researchers, and he has invented combinations of symbols to express his thoughts. Nevertheless, this is not the same thing as having an animal look up at you, open his mouth, and speak.
Pepperberg walked to the back of the room, where Alex sat on top of his cage preening his pearl gray feathers. He stopped at her approach and opened his beak.
“Want grape,” Alex said.
“He hasn’t had his breakfast yet,” Pepperberg explained, “so he’s a little put out.”
Alex returned to preening, while an assistant prepared a bowl of grapes, green beans, apple and banana slices, and corn on the cob.
Under Pepperberg’s patient tutelage, Alex learned how to use his vocal tract to imitate almost one hundred English words, including the sounds for all of these foods, although he calls an apple a “banerry.”
“Apples taste a little bit like bananas to him, and they look a little bit like cherries, so Alex made up that word for them,” Pepperberg said.
Alex could count to six and was learning the sounds for seven and eight.
“I’m sure he already knows both numbers,” Pepperberg said. “He’ll probably be able to count to ten, but he’s still learning to say the words. It takes far more time to teach him certain sounds than I ever imagined.”
After breakfast, Alex preened again, keeping an eye on the flock. Every so often, he leaned forward and opened his beak: “Ssse … won.”
“That’s good, Alex,” Pepperberg said. “Seven. The number is seven.”
“Ssse … won! Se … won!”
“He’s practicing,” she explained. “That’s how he learns. He’s thinking about how to say that word, how to use his vocal tract to make the correct sound.”
It sounded a bit mad, the idea of a bird having lessons to practice, and willingly doing it. But after listening to and watching Alex, it was difficult to argue with Pepperberg’s explanation for his behaviors. She wasn’t handing him treats for the repetitious work or rapping him on the claws to make him say the sounds.
“He has to hear the words over and over before he can correctly imitate them,” Pepperberg said, after pronouncing “seven” for Alex a good dozen times in a row. “I’m not trying to see if Alex can learn a human language,” she added. “That’s never been the point. My plan always was to use his imitative skills to get a better understanding of avian cognition.”
In other words, because Alex was able to produce a close approximation of the sounds of some English words, Pepperberg could ask him questions about a bird’s basic understanding of the world. She couldn’t ask him what he was thinking about, but she could ask him about his knowledge of numbers, shapes, and colors. To demonstrate, Pepperberg carried Alex on her arm to a tall wooden perch in the middle of the room. She then retrieved a green key and a small green cup from a basket on a shelf. She held up the two items to Alex’s eye.
“What’s same?” she asked.
Without hesitation, Alex’s beak opened: “Co-lor.”
“What’s different?” Pepperberg asked.
“Shape,” Alex said. His voice had the digitized sound of a cartoon character. Since parrots lack lips (another reason it was difficult for Alex to pronounce some sounds, such as ba), the words seemed to come from the air around him, as if a ventriloquist were speaking. But the wordsand what can only be called the thoughtswere entirely his.
For the next 20 minutes, Alex ran through his tests, distinguishing colors, shapes, sizes, and materials (wool versus wood versus metal). He did some simple arithmetic, such as counting the yellow toy blocks among a pile of mixed hues.
And, then, as if to offer final proof of the mind inside his bird’s brain, Alex spoke up. “Talk clearly!” he commanded, when one of the younger birds Pepperberg was also teaching mispronounced the word green. “Talk clearly!”
“Don’t be a smart aleck,” Pepperberg said, shaking her head at him. “He knows all this, and he gets bored, so he interrupts the others, or he gives the wrong answer just to be obstinate. At this stage, he’s like a teenage son; he’s moody, and I’m never sure what he’ll do.”
“Wanna go tree,” Alex said in a tiny voice.
Alex had lived his entire life in captivity, but he knew that beyond the lab’s door, there was a hallway and a tall window framing a leafy elm tree. He liked to see the tree, so Pepperberg put her hand out for him to climb aboard. She walked him down the hall into the tree’s green light.
“Good boy! Good birdie,” Alex said, bobbing on her hand.
“Yes, you’re a good boy. You’re a good birdie.” And she kissed his feathered head.
He was a good birdie until the end, and Pepperberg was happy to report that when he died he had finally mastered “seven.”
Many of Alex’s cognitive skills, such as his ability to understand the concepts of same and different, are generally ascribed only to higher mammals, particularly primates. But parrots, like great apes (and humans), live a long time in complex societies. And like primates, these birds must keep track of the dynamics of changing relationships and environments.
“They need to be able to distinguish colors to know when a fruit is ripe or unripe,” Pepperberg noted. “They need to categorize thingswhat’s edible, what isn’tand to know the shapes of predators. And it helps to have a concept of numbers if you need to keep track of your flock, and to know who’s single and who’s paired up. For a long-lived bird, you can’t do all of this with instinct; cognition must be involved.”
Being able mentally to divide the world into simple abstract categories would seem a valuable skill for many organisms. Is that ability, then, part of the evolutionary drive that led to human intelligence?
Charles Darwin, who attempted to explain how human intelligence developed, extended his theory of evolution to the human brain: Like the rest of our physiology, intelligence must have evolved from simpler organisms, since all animals face the same general challenges of life. They need to find mates, food, and a path through the woods, sea, or skytasks that Darwin argued require problem-solving and categorizing abilities. Indeed, Darwin went so far as to suggest that earthworms are cognitive beings because, based on his close observations, they have to make judgments about the kinds of leafy matter they use to block their tunnels. He hadn’t expected to find thinking invertebrates and remarked that the hint of earthworm intelligence “has surprised me more than anything else in regard to worms.”
To Darwin, the earthworm discovery demonstrated that degrees of intelligence could be found throughout the animal kingdom. But the Darwinian approach to animal intelligence was cast aside in the early 20th century, when researchers decided that field observations were simply “anecdotes,” usually tainted by anthropomorphism. In an effort to be more rigorous, many embraced behaviorism, which regarded animals as little more than machines, and focused their studies on the laboratory white ratsince one “machine” would behave like any other.
But if animals are simply machines, how can the appearance of human intelligence be explained? Without Darwin’s evolutionary perspective, the greater cognitive skills of people did not make sense biologically. Slowly the pendulum has swung away from the animal-as-machine model and back toward Darwin. A whole range of animal studies now suggest that the roots of cognition are deep, widespread, and highly malleable.
Just how easily new mental skills can evolve is perhaps best illustrated by dogs. Most owners talk to their dogs and expect them to understand. But this canine talent wasn’t fully appreciated until a border collie named Rico appeared on a German TV game show in 2001. Rico knew the names of some 200 toys and acquired the names of new ones with ease.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig heard about Rico and arranged a meeting with him and his owners. That led to a scientific report revealing Rico’s uncanny language ability: He could learn and remember words as quickly as a toddler. Other scientists had shown that two-year-old childrenwho acquire around ten new words a dayhave an innate set of principles that guides this task. The ability is seen as one of the key building blocks in language acquisition. The Max Planck scientists suspect that the same principles guide Rico’s word learning, and that the technique he uses for learning words is identical to that of humans.
To find more examples, the scientists read all the letters from hundreds of people claiming that their dogs had Rico’s talent. In fact, only twoboth border collieshad comparable skills. One of themthe researchers call her Betsyhas a vocabulary of more than 300 words.
“Even our closest relatives, the great apes, can’t do what Betsy can dohear a word only once or twice and know that the acoustic pattern stands for something,” said Juliane Kaminski, a cognitive psychologist who worked with Rico and is now studying Betsy. She and her colleague Sebastian Tempelmann had come to Betsy’s home in Vienna to give her a fresh battery of tests. Kaminski petted Betsy, while Tempelmann set up a video camera.
“Dogs’ understanding of human forms of communication is something new that has evolved,” Kaminski said, “something that’s developed in them because of their long association with humans.” Although Kaminski has not yet tested wolves, she doubts they have this language skill. “Maybe these collies are especially good at it because they’re working dogs and highly motivated, and in their traditional herding jobs, they must listen very closely to their owners.”
Scientists think that dogs were domesticated about 15,000 years ago, a relatively short time in which to evolve language skills. But how similar are these skills to those of humans? For abstract thinking, we employ symbols, letting one thing stand for another. Kaminski and Tempelmann were testing whether dogs can do this too.
Betsy’s ownerwhose pseudonym is Schaefersummoned Betsy, who obediently stretched out at Schaefer’s feet, eyes fixed on her face. Whenever Schaefer spoke, Betsy attentively cocked her head from side to side.
Kaminski handed Schaefer a stack of color photographs and asked her to choose one. Each image depicted a dog’s toy against a white backgroundtoys Betsy had never seen before. They weren’t actual toys; they were only images of toys. Could Betsy connect a two-dimensional picture to a three-dimensional object?
Schaefer held up a picture of a fuzzy, rainbow-colored Frisbee and urged Betsy to find it. Betsy studied the photograph and Schaefer’s face, then ran into the kitchen, where the Frisbee was placed among three other toys and photographs of each toy. Betsy brought either the Frisbee or the photograph of the Frisbee to Schaefer every time.
“It wouldn’t have been wrong if she’d just brought the photograph,” Kaminski said. “But I think Betsy can use a picture, without a name, to find an object. Still, it will take many more tests to prove this.”
Even then, Kaminski is unsure that other scientists will ever accept her discovery because Betsy’s abstract skill, as minor as it may seem to us, may tread all too closely to human thinking.
