Lesley Smitheringale Fine Art

Animal Minds

This is a fantastic article, written by Virginia Morell with stunning photographs and video by Vincent J. Musi.  The article discusses the intelligence and cognitive skills of a variety of animals.  I know that my cat ‘Domino’, for instance is fairly intelligent and she has devised several ways of getting my attention when I ignore her such as “the stationery trick”  which involves her pawing my tray of envelopes and scattering them all the floor, or scratching and ripping the dust jacket spines of my collection of art books ….

Click on the picture to go to the site and read the full article, view the pictures and watch the video, on National Geographic

By Virginia Morell
Photograph by Vincent J. Musi

In 1977 Irene Pepperberg, a recent graduate of Harvard University, did something very bold. At a time when animals still were considered automatons, she set out to find what was on another creature’s mind by talking to it. She brought a one-year-old African gray parrot she named Alex into her lab to teach him to reproduce the sounds of the English language. “I thought if he learned to communicate, I could ask him questions about how he sees the world.”

When Pepperberg began her dialogue with Alex, who died last September at the age of 31, many scientists believed animals were incapable of any thought. They were simply machines, robots programmed to react to stimuli but lacking the ability to think or feel. Any pet owner would disagree. We see the love in our dogs’ eyes and know that, of course, Spot has thoughts and emotions. But such claims remain highly controversial. Gut instinct is not science, and it is all too easy to project human thoughts and feelings onto another creature. How, then, does a scientist prove that an animal is capable of thinking—that it is able to acquire information about the world and act on it?

“That’s why I started my studies with Alex,” Pepperberg said. They were seated—she at her desk, he on top of his cage—in her lab, a windowless room about the size of a boxcar, at Brandeis University. Newspapers lined the floor; baskets of bright toys were stacked on the shelves. They were clearly a team—and because of their work, the notion that animals can think is no longer so fanciful.

   

Person Vincent J. Musi

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