Here's a video obituary from ABC news that shows some of Alex's responses, and as well, here's a CNN live interview with Irene Pepperberg after Alex's death. The part when he asks Irene about Alex also being her friend was very moving for me. I interpret Irene as trying to protect Alex's legacy, as well as her work, by refusing to explicitly acknowledge any emotional attachment she felt for her avian colleague. Perhaps more revealingly, she also doesn't explicitly deny caring for him as a friend.
In Alex's memory, I'm also including a favourite anecdote about him from "That Damn Bird", a 2003 talk with Pepperberg:
We were training Alex to sound out phonemes...to see if he understands that his labels are made up of sounds that can be combined in different ways to make up new words... Thus we are trying to get him to sound out refrigerator letters, the same way one would train children on phonics. We were doing demos at the Media Lab for our corporate sponsors; we had a very small amount of time scheduled and the visitors wanted to see Alex work. So we put a number of differently colored letters on the tray that we use, put the tray in front of Alex, and asked, "Alex, what sound is blue?" He answers, "Ssss." It was an "s", so we say "Good birdie" and he replies, "Want a nut."Well, I don't want him sitting there using our limited amount of time to eat a nut, so I tell him to wait, and I ask, "What sound is green?" Alex answers, "Ssshh." He's right, it's "sh," and we go through the routine again: "Good parrot." "Want a nut." "Alex, wait. What sound is orange?" "ch." "Good bird!" "Want a nut." We're going on and on and Alex is clearly getting more and more frustrated. He finally gets very slitty-eyed and he looks at me and states, "Want a nut. Nnn, uh, tuh."
Not only could you imagine him thinking, "Hey, stupid, do I have to spell it for you?" but the point was that he had leaped over where we were and had begun sounding out the letters of the words for us. This was in a sense his way of saying to us, "I know where you're headed! Let's get on with it," which gave us the feeling that we were on the right track with what we were doing. These kinds of things don't happen in the lab on a daily basis, but when they do, they make you realize there's a lot more going on inside these little walnut-sized brains than you might at first imagine.
I also figured out how to update the links section on the right sidebar of my blog, so now there are finally some real links in there instead of the dummy default links. Amongst others, I've included a link to The Alex Foundation, where more information on Pepperberg's research can be found. I even managed to hack a bit of html in the template (which is really not my forte, so this is a big deal for me!) to include an inspiring bit from Unger in my sidebar, so I hope these changes will improve the blog and encourage further exploration.
Rest in peace, Alex.
2 comments:
At 31, Alex certainly died of young age for an African Grey. Could this be the result of his involvement in the lab experiments that expanded a lot of his energy? Or being too intelligent for a bird?
Pepperberg claims to have chosen Alex randomly from a pet store, so I think he should be an average representative African Gray. Presumably any African Gray with a comparable amount of training could achieve what Alex did.
But maybe Alex did use up a lot of his life energy on the research. Or perhaps, by doing so well in the studies, he ate too many nuts? Perhaps the treats he ate were excessive and gave him a diet imbalance or were otherwise bad for his health.
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