hmmm amazING

�That�s why I started my studies with Alex,� Pepperberg said. They were seated�she at her table, they 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.

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

Positive skills are thought about key signs of higher mental abilities: nice memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others� motives, imitating others, and being creative. Tiny by tiny, in ingenious experiments, researchers have documented these talents in other species, gradually chipping away at what they thought made human beings unique while offering a glimpse of where our own abilities came from. Scrub jays know that other jays are thieves and that stashed food can spoil; sheep can recognize faces; chimpanzees use a variety of tools to probe termite mounds and even use weapons to hunt little mammals; dolphins can imitate human postures; the archerfish, which stuns insects with a sudden blast of water, can learn how to objective its squirt basically by watching an experienced fish perform the task.