Alex & Me is a touching memoir of a special relationship between a scientist and a bird that will forever change the way we think about animal intelligence. Dr. Irene Pepperberg spent 30 years conducting research on Alex, an African grey parrot. The research with Alex ended abruptly due his unexpected death in September of 2007.
I was taken on a fascinating and at times emotional journey through the years that these two “colleagues” worked together. The author touches on the scientific research just enough to give readers an understanding of how she taught Alex and to offer proof of his intelligence.
Dr. Pepperberg chose an African grey for her research because of the clarity of their speech and the prior work on their number competence performed in Germany in the 1940s and 1950s . Her relationship with Alex started with a trip to an ordinary pet store back in 1977, where she asked the salesman to select an African grey at random.
Funding for Dr. Pepperberg's research wasn't easily obtained. She survived on small grants and later from donations to The Alex Foundation. Pepperberg's work wasn't initially given a lot respect from other scientists, especially when she opted for a form of training called “the model/rival program,” a system very different from the standard psychological procedure used at that time.
Alex competed with a student for the reward of playing with an object when he correctly identified it. During this time, a deprivation type of program was more popular: the scientist starved the animal to a predetermined low weight and then would require the animal to give correct actions for food. Deciding on a unconventional and more humane type of program was just the start of problems for Pepperberg within the scientific community.
During the early part of the 20th century other people had gotten attention for their so-called ability to communicate with animals. One example was a horse that appeared to count. Scientists were later able to show that the handler gave subtle cues that the animal noticed and reacted to accordingly. In order to prove that Alex wasn't responding to any cues, Pepperberg made sure that people training Alex never tested him. She tested him on many different topics at once, so that he couldn't expect an answer to come from a small subset of possibilities. She made sure she didn't know what object he was being given during a test, so that she couldn't expect a particular answer. Because she repeated tests several times to be sure of her results, Alex often became bored with the repetitiveness of it all.
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