Yes, the intelligence and ability of parrots to communicate concepts IS interesting. But wow! This book has far too much technical detail to keep me turning pages. I bought the book to learn about how Alex was trained and how he progressed through the training. But the book goes into too much detail about Pepperberg's scientific and psychological study to keep me awake. Certainly not bedtime reading. I only wish she'd written the book I wanted to read.

I can almost hear Irene Pepperberg saying that to us as she describes the significance of THE ALEX STUDIES. She herself offers a few humorous anecdotes about Alex, but for the most part there is definitely nothing funny about this book. It's written in a deliberately prosaic style for the following reasons. The very tendency for the media and general public to treat Alex as simply the "talking parrot", when in reality his vocalizations represent something much more important in terms of animal cognition and communication. Also stemming from the fact that her findings about bird cognition are so significant, Pepperberg in making her case to scientific colleagues, writes with them in mind. She is incredibly detailed in describing her experiments and the controls used. This is in order to avoid the possibility of cueing and thus comparisons to "clever Hans"; she wants to remove the possibility of persons saying the evidence is that most dreaded scientific epithet - merely "anecdotal". The book is replete with references and Pepperberg places them in the body of her text instead of as footnotes. The book is not a smooth read and only a scientist could describe it as "a delightful and easy read" as ethologist Marc Bekoff says on the cover. This is not a popular science book. But equally it takes an evoltionary biologist and ornithologist to see the "groundbreaking" significance of the book as Bernd Heinrich does.

Where does that leave us, the general reading public? If you take it in small pecks (couldn't resist one bird metaphor) you will be rewarded by some incredible insights into the cognitive powers of animals. We learn of abilities that scientists said perhaps (and that's a capital "P") resided only in Great Apes. Never was it imagined that birds possesed them. Pepperberg spends chapters discussing different capabilities such as numeric cognition, categorization, and word comprehension. Alex responded to Pepperberg's questions about "what color?" "what shape?" and "how many?" with appropriate answers. By far the most interesting responses were Alex's answers to conceptual problems. When asked "what's different" Alex showed he understood the concept of relativity by answering "larger".

The traditional view was that we know that animals are not sentient. Pepperberg's experiments show that what we "know" about animal cognition is not that much at all. How else can it be. Science has a history of a few hundred years and it was not that very long ago that we "knew" that the earth was flat or that it was at the center of the universe. Cognitive Ethology (the study of animal intelligence) is less than a generation old. Perhaps he's not the best source to quote since he's from a comedy, but that man in black, Tommie Lee Jones as "K" was absolutely right when he said "just imagine what we'll know tomorrow."

This is a very interesting read. It's a bit technical and outlines Dr. Pepperberg's research is great detail. However, anyone who has experience Alex on television will be facinated by his abilities.