Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(34)

In the meantime, language-inspired studies have dispelled the notion that natural animal communication is purely emotional. We now have a far better grasp of how communication is geared to an audience, provides information about the environment, and relies on interpretation by those receiving the signals. Even if the connection with human language remains contentious, our appreciation of animal communication has greatly benefited from this flurry of research. As for the handful of language-trained animals, they have proven invaluable at showing what their minds are capable of. Since these animals respond to requests and prompts in a way that we find easy to interpret, the results speak to the human imagination and have been instrumental in breaking open the field of animal cognition. When Alex hears a question about the items on his tray, he inspects them carefully and comments on the one that he was asked about. We have no trouble putting ourselves into his shoes, given that we understand both the question and his answer.

I once asked Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who worked with Kanzi, the bonobo who communicates by pressing symbols on a keyboard, “Would you say that you study language or intelligence, or is there no difference?” She replied:

There is a difference because we have apes who have no linguistic abilities in the human sense, but who do quite well on cognitive tasks such as solving a maze problem. Language skills can help elaborate and refine cognitive skills, though, because you can tell an ape who is language-trained something that he does not know. This can put a cognitive task on a whole different plane. For example, we have a computer game in which apes put three puzzle pieces together to make different portraits. After having learned this, they get four pieces presented on the screen, and the fourth piece is from a different portrait. When we first did this with Kanzi, he would take the piece of a bunny face and put it together with a piece of my face. He kept trying, but of course it wouldn’t fit. Since he understands spoken language so well, I could say to him: “Kanzi, we’re not making the bunny, put Sue’s face together.” As soon as he heard this, he stopped making the bunny, and stuck to the pieces of my face. So, the instructions had an immediate effect.30

Since Kanzi lived for years in Atlanta, I met him multiple times and was always impressed by how well he grasped spoken English. What struck me was not his self-produced utterances—which were rather basic, certainly below the level of a three-year-old child—but the way he reacted to those by the people around him. In one videotaped exchange, Sue asks him “Put the key in the refrigerator,” while she wears a welding mask to prevent Clever Hans Effects. Kanzi picks up a chain of keys, opens the fridge, and puts the keys into it. Asked to give his doggy a shot, he picks up a plastic syringe and injects it into his stuffed toy dog. Kanzi’s passive comprehension is greatly helped by his familiarity with a large number of items and words. This has been tested by playing spoken words to him through headphones while he sits at a table and selects a picture of the object that he hears being mentioned. But that he is excellent at word recognition still doesn’t explain why Kanzi appears to understand entire sentences.

Such understanding is something I also know of my own apes despite the fact that none of them have had language training. Georgia is a naughty chimpanzee prone to furtively collecting water from the faucet so as to spray unsuspecting visitors. Once I told her, in Dutch, while pointing a finger at her, that I had seen her. Immediately, she let the water run from her mouth, apparently realizing that there was no point trying to surprise us. But how did she know what I had said? My suspicion is that many apes know a few key words and are highly sensitive to contextual information, such as our tone of voice, glances, and gestures. After all, Georgia had just collected a mouthful of water, and I was giving a range of clues, such as pointing a finger at her and calling her by name. Without necessarily following my exact words, she had the cognitive talent to piece together what I probably meant.

When apes guess correctly, we get the distinct impression that they must have understood everything we said, but their understanding may be more fragmentary. A striking illustration was given by Robert Yerkes after an interaction with Chimpita, a young male chimpanzee:

I was feeding grapes to Chimpita one day and he swallowed the seeds. I told him he must give the seeds to me, for I was afraid they might cause appendicitis, so he gave me all the seeds he had in his mouth and then picked up some from the floor with his lips and his hands. Finally, there were two left between the cage wall and the cement floor which he could not get well with either lips or fingers. I said to him “Chimpita, when I have gone you will eat those seeds.” He looked at me as if he asked why I bothered him so much. Then he went into the next cage, looking at me all the while, got a little stick, and with it poked the seeds out of the crack and gave them to me.31

It is easy to think that Chimpita must have understood the whole sentence, which is why an astonished Yerkes added, “Such behavior demands careful scientific analysis.” But more likely, the ape was following the scientist’s body language more closely than we are used to. I regularly have this eerie impression that apes look right through me, perhaps because they are not distracted by language. By directing our attention to what others have to say, we neglect body language compared to animals, for whom it is all they have to go by. It is a skill they employ every day and have refined to the point that they read us like a book. It reminds me of a story by Oliver Sacks about a group of patients in an aphasia ward who were convulsed with laughter during a televised speech by President Ronald Reagan.32 Incapable of understanding words as such, aphasia patients follow what is being said through facial expressions and body language. They are so attentive to nonverbal cues that they cannot be lied to. Sacks concluded that the president, whose speech seemed perfectly normal to others around, so cunningly combined deceptive words and tone of voice that only the brain-damaged were able to see through it.