Polly want a vocabulary?
Griffin knows the names of a dozen objects. He can identify five colors and six shapes, and grasps his numbers up to eight. He can ask for his favorite treats and tell you where he’d like to go. And if he likes you, he’ll let you tickle his head. Obviously, Griffin is not your average student. In fact, he’s an African grey parrot, one of the stars of a research effort to understand the origins of human intelligence by exploring how parrots learn concepts and communication skills. “This is a way of looking at the origins of intelligence and communication,” psychology researcher Irene Pepperberg explained. “Unlike apes, our closest relatives, parrots are vocal learners. It turns out that birds have the same number of vocal learning areas in their brains that humans do, though they’re organized somewhat differently. Parrots are separated from us by 280 million years of evolution, so the fact that...