From Leadership to Science but Still Dwelling in Nonfiction

Well, I guess I wasn't really fully back when I announced my return to posting three months ago was I?  I must admit retirement is a lot like taking a cure.  There are plenty of things I keep doing from my pre R-day life, like fancy cooking, reading and my new hobby -- home improvement construction supervision -- but my urge to communicate has dropped below freezing.  Because I restrain myself from calling or writing my former staff, as my voice is now only a weak impression or reminiscence without authority, my brain has concluded that others are equally unaffected by my literary reviews.

Too bad, I will really try over the next couple of days to at least array all the books I have read this fall and winter even if my clever turn of phrase is somewhat rusty.

Since I last posted I did figure out a theme for 2018 -- moving from my quest to understand what makes a good national leader, to reading in the sciences.  Let me start with a book I read yesterday in just a couple of hours.  (Remember readers, you can always tell an easy book if it has book club discussion questions in the back.)  Nonetheless, I found some interesting concepts and contrast and compare opportunities in Irene Pepperberg's Alex and Me.

Pepperberg is a chemist who ended up doing experiments in biology, specifically to determine whether and how language develops in non-mammals; as opposed to those scientists who were working at teaching sign language to chimps and gorilla, she worked with grey parrots that vocalized.
Isn't it the knee jerk reaction that parrots echo back words and phrases in mindless repetition of noises they heard from humans?  Was the bird really hungry when Polly asked for a cracker?  Dr. P found out her parrot Alex was no birdbrain, as he not only learned how to say colors, numbers, shapes, not to mention food, but also could answer questions to distinguish between them.  He understood categorization, comparison.

He listened to what the lab workers said to him and each other in jest and knew under what emotional conditions to say a particular phrase, from wanna go back (into his cage) for both when he was bored doing his experiments to when he was frightened by seeing raptor owls out a window.  He could sense human feelings, when to say I'm sorry, and he displayed a sense of humor.  When he was bored with a repetitive experiment that he had mastered, he would intentionally give every wrong answer associated with a test (like if there were two items on a table, he would say, 5, 3, 1, 4, everything but 2).

His higher reasoning was evidenced by his ability to associate color, size and number among various items and could answer which category had more of some characteristic in it.  Dr. P wanted to see if he understood that words were made up of distinct sounds that could be recombined.  Like a baby babbling in a crib, she had heard Alex vocally play with "green" saying cheen, been, keen.  Strongly evidencing this insight, one day when he wanted food during a test and kept saying "want a nut" he grew so frustrated he said, "want a nut .... nnn, uh, tuh" and spelled it out for her.  When she got a second parrot, Alex would pipe out answers when Griff was slow to reply and often told him to "say better."

Rather than continuing to marvel at the thoughtful language Alex developed, I will now act more like a book reviewer.  Pepperberg writes like she is teaching Alex.  She seems to be condescending  when she tells us the behavioral terms of language development.  She stays rigidly within her boundaries of seeing how language develops not making any assumptions about what the ability to speak actually empowers a speaker to express.  She sees emotions in her bird, humor, boredom, insistence, authority but does not make the leap between being and saying.

Lastly as I inevitably do, Alex and Me parallels themes and observations expressed more angrily in the book I read just before A&M,  Rosalind Franklin The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox.  (See next post.)