N'kisi & the N'kisi Project

N'kisi (pronounced ‘‘in-key-see’’) is a captive bred eight or nine-year-old hand raised African Grey Parrot whose owner, Aimée Morgana, thinks uses language. She doesn't think he just sounds out words. She thinks he communicates with her in language, which would in effect make N'kisi a rational parrot. For example, N'kisi utters "pretty smell medicine" when he wants to describe the aromatherapy oils that Aimée uses.* Furthermore, Aimée says her parrot has a fine sense of humor and knows how to laugh. Imagine having conversations with a humorous parrot. Think of all the things you could talk and joke about, besides aromatherapy. You could discuss the fame that would come to anyone who had a parrot that can think and converse in intelligent discourse, like pretty smell medicine and look at my pretty naked body.* And when some nasty skeptic makes fun of you, the two of you can joke about it.

I'm afraid that this story stretches the boundaries of reasonable credibility, though stories of rational parrots go back at least to the 17th century. John Locke, for example, relates a tale of a Portuguese-speaking parrot of some note in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (II.xxvii.8). These cases are more likely cases of self-deception, delusion, and gullibility than of language-using parrots. Listen to this audio clip of N'kisi, Aimée, and a toy that "talks" when a button is pushed. First listen without reading the transcript. Some of it is intelligible, especially after the fourth or fifth repetition, but it is difficult to understand the "conversation," especially with the toy making its sounds as Aimée stimulates her parrot. Some of the tape sounds like gibberish until you are told what to listen for. When you listen while reading the transcript something amazing happens: you can hear just what you're reading. Why is that? The same thing happens when you listen to audio tapes played backward. When you just listen without anyone telling you what to listen for, you usually don't understand anything intelligible. But as soon as someone shows or tells you what to listen for, you can hear the message. Such is the power of suggestion and the way of audio perception. Hearing is a constructive process, like vision, in that bits of sensory data are "filled in" by the brain to produce a visual or auditory perception that is clear and distinct, and in accord with your expectations. Consider the following from an interview with Dr. Irene Pepperberg, Morgana's inspiration, who has been studying Alex, an African Grey Parrot, for many years:

We were doing demos at the Media Lab [at MIT] 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.*

Dr. Pepperberg thinks the bird is responding cognitively to her questions rather than simply responding to a stimulus. She thinks the bird is getting frustrated, but she has stipulated earlier in the interview:

I never claim that Alex has full-blown language; I never would. I'm not going to be able to put Alex on a "T" stand and have you interview him the way you interview me.

So, whereas you or I might say "give me the nut or this interview is over" were we parrots with intentionality and language, the parrot's movements and sounds have to be less direct and more complex, so that they have to be interpreted for us by Pepperberg. In her view, Alex is "clearly getting more frustrated" and his frustration culminates with a "very slitty-eyed" expression. But this is Pepperberg's interpretation, as is her hearing the bird sound out the letters of the word 'nut'. It could have been a stutter for all we know, but Pepperberg is facilitating Alex's communication by telling us what she hears. The final paragraph indicates that Pepperberg is having a hard time drawing the line between imagining what a parrot might be thinking and projecting those thoughts into the parrot's movements and sounds. She's also having a hard time getting grant money (NIH turned her down), so she started her own private foundation, the Alex Foundation.

When news of N'kisi broke on the pages of BBC online, there was no mention in the article by Alex Kirby of the parrot having conversations with people other than Aimée Morgana. (The story was originally told in USA Today in the February 12, 2001, edition.) Despite the headline "Parrot's oratory stuns scientists," there was no evidence given that the parrot had stunned anyone during a conversation. It seems that Aimée is to her parrot what the facilitator is to her client in facilitated communication, except that the parrot is actually providing data to interpret and is more like clever Hans, the horse that responded to unconscious movements of his master, than a disabled human who may not be providing any content or direction at all to the facilitator. It is Aimée who gives intentionality to the parrot's sounds. She is the one who attributes 'laughter' to his shrieks and conscious awareness to his responses, though those responses could be due to any one of many stimuli, consciously or unconsciously provided by Aimée or items in the immediate environment. Nevertheless, Dr. Jane Goodall, who studies chimpanzees, met N'kisi and said that he provides an "outstanding example of interspecies communication." There is some evidence, however, that much of the work with language-using primates also mistakes subjective validation by scientists for complex linguistic abilities of their animal subjects (Wallman 1992).

According to Mr. Kirby, N'kisi not only uses language but has been tested for telepathy and he passed the test with flying colors: