'Psychic' parrot expected to ruffle scientific feathers By Tara McKelvey, USA TODAY N'Kisi may look like an ordinary Congo African gray parrot, but she's the subject of a series of telepathy experiments by a former Cambridge University researcher who says the results are "astounding." "The parrot seems to be able to pick up her owner's thoughts with an amazing degree of accuracy," says Rupert Sheldrake, a former Royal Society researcher at Cambridge and author of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals. N'Kisi's owner, Aimee Morgana of Manhattan, read Sheldrake's 1999 book and contacted him through his Web site (www.sheldrake.org). Morgana, 42, a production designer who has worked for Comedy Central and VH1, thought Sheldrake might be interested in her parrot. "I thought, 'Gee, if he thinks a dog waiting by the door is interesting, wait till he hears about this.' " She says she first noticed N'Kisi's psychic abilities when she saw an explicit picture in the Village Voice personals. "I was thinking, 'Wow, that's a pretty naturalistic work.' " Then, she says, N'Kisi spoke from the parrot's cage across the room: "Oh, look at the pretty naked body." Sheldrake was interested. He explored N'Kisi's psychic abilities using a double-blind test. He asked Morgana to look at photographs in one room while the parrot was in a cage in another. One camera videotaped Morgana looking at photographs, another camera about 55 feet away videotaped the parrot, who made comments that seemed to correspond to many of the photos Morgana was looking at. In one taped session, for example, Morgana is examining a photo of a woman embracing a man when N'Kisi, who was upstairs in her cage and could not see the photograph Morgana was holding in her hand, calls out: "Can I give you a hug?" According to Sheldrake, N'Kisi made 123 comments during the test sessions, and 32 of those were "direct hits" corresponding to the images Morgana was looking at. The chances of that occurring, Sheldrake says, are less than 1 in a billion. Telepathy is made possible, he says, by the emotional bonds between people and animals. "In the case of N'Kisi, there's a very strong connection between her and Aimee." Morgana spends roughly six hours a day teaching N'Kisi vocabulary words by using a children's touch-tone telephone and other toys, and has transcribed the parrot's vocabulary of 560 words into an electronic log. Sheldrake presented preliminary findings on N'Kisi in November at Cambridge University's Department of Clinical Veterinary Medicine. "The general reception here is he made a well-organized and sensible presentation and reported on work that looks to be competent. He seems to have done a good job," says Donald Broom, a professor of animal welfare at the university. "That's not to say everybody will be completely convinced by it. It's reasonable to be more critical when it's a more unusual result, shall we say." So it's no surprise that the N'Kisi Project, as it's known on Sheldrake's Web site, has been met with skepticism among some scientists. "What is this form of energy which the parrot must be able to perceive and yet we can't measure it?" asks Michael Klymkowsky, University of Colorado professor of biology. "And why doesn't all of modern physics fail because it doesn't take it into account? "If it were true, there'd be companies like General Psychic doling out the information bit by bit, making a fortune." The parrot's telepathic skills may be controversial, but Broom says N'Kisi's communicative abilities are "extremely impressive," perhaps surpassing the capabilities of those studied by Irene Pepperberg, a visiting associate professor at MIT and author of a 1999 seminal work, The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots. Pepperberg's 20 years of research shows gray parrots are capable of more than mimicry. Her main research subject, Alex, learned how to identify such ordinary objects as a key, box and chalk, and classify them by color and shape. "Her evidence stands up to the closest scrutiny," writes Marian Dawkins of the University of Oxford, "and Alex the parrot turns out to have cognitive abilities that were not even suspected before Pepperberg began her work." Alex already is a minor celebrity in the animal-cognition field. N'Kisi's day may come. "The results of what this bird (N'Kisi) can do should be presented to the scientific community," Broom says. Note: Do you have a 'psychic' parrot? Does your parrot: appear to 'read your thoughts' in the absence of any visual or other cues?

know when someone is coming home or for a visit at unexpected times?

know who is calling on the phone before you answer it?

demonstrate foreknowledge of any unusual events? We would be very interested in hearing about any such incidents that you may have witnessed. Please note down a brief description of these incidents, giving any relevant contextual details, and email them directly to Pam Smart. (pam@telepet.demon.co.uk) Your stories will then be added to our comprehensive research database on unexplained animal behavior. Would you like to take part in our groundbreaking research, in partnership with your pet? The first thing to do is to begin to keep a log of your pet's possibly telepathic behaviors. This can be easily done by keeping a notebook in the room where you interact with your pet, and noting down the date and a brief description of any such incidents as they occur. If we find that your parrot is able to regularly demonstrate potentially telepathic behavior, this log will help us to determine how to design simple experiments that you could perform with your pet, which could reproduce these phenomena in controlled conditions. If you would like, you may then be able to participate in simple experiments with your pet, like those that Aimee Morgana did with Nkisi or Pam Smart did with Jaytee. (For more info about these experiments, please see Dr. Sheldrake's website at www.sheldrake.org.) We welcome participation by pet owners in this research, and some kinds of research with pets make ideal student projects.