Nancy and I were talking about N'kisi the African grey parrot and how the BBC article seems to be getting some renewed attention. I was talking to Nancy about how there was no new data on N'kisis, just the same anecdotes about N'kisi meeting Jane Goodall and asking "Got a chimp?"

To understand what happens next, you must know who Dr. Irene Pepperberg and Alex the African grey parrot are. Dr. Pepperberg is a researcher in animal intelligence who is exacting in what is permitted to be said about her research. If she claims an ability for Alex, it must be demonstrated in a statistically rigorous way that leaves no alternative interpretation. Dr. Pepperberg's research is renowned because of this, but it's also the butt of jokes. She's teaching Alex to associate magnetic letters with specific phonemes and then assemble those phonemes into words Alex already knows. Anyone else on the planet would say "She's teaching Alex to read." Not Dr. Pepperberg. Such a statement would not be exact.

Do you want an idea of how extreme it is? I bought her book The Alex Studies. Even I found the scientific papers boring and skipped everything but the anecdotes and the conclusions. Yeah, even me.

So, anyway, I said "N'kisi is reported to have a vocabulary of 950 words, although that hasn't been rigorously demonstrated."

Cirrus, our African grey parrot started with her chuckle.

I continued, "Of course, that hasn't been demostrated with the rigorousness that Dr. Pepperberg would let even an undergraduate student get away with."

I stopped speaking. Cirrus was laughing even louder. And then she spoke, in a sarcastic, ordering voice:

"…you can't say a word."

Cirrus went back to laughing, and Nancy and I just stared at each other.

Now, this may be an Eliza-type effect. There are computer programs that will make you think they are listening to you, but really aren't. In all likelyhood, that's all that happened with Cirrus.

But you know what? Every single hair on my body is still on end and I am seriously creeped out.