In 1977, after finishing her doctorate in theoretical chemistry at Harvard, our guest Dr. Irene Pepperberg purchased a 1-year-old African Grey Parrot at a pet shop and named him Alex, an acronym for “Avian Language Experiment.” At the time, birds were not considered smart — but Dr. Pepperberg believed otherwise. For the next thirty years, she and Alex forged a deep bond as each other’s closest companions, and revolutionized how scientists and the public understand what it means to be “bird-brained.” Grey parrots may have walnut-sized brains, but Alex and Dr. Pepperberg showed that those brains have many capabilities long thought to be unique to primates — including the ability to speak and understand a human tongue . This feat is all the more remarkable considering that Alex’s and Dr. Pepperberg’s last common ancestor was a dinosaur that lived over 300 million years ago.
