Arts and Minds

INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENTS

Fear, isolation, and a sense of numbing helplessness characterize the nursing home, the mental hospital and other institutional experiences for the majority of inmates. To enter a hospital, especially a mental hospital or a nursing home, either as a visitor or a patient, is to encounter an environment that has no equal in barrenness anywhere in our culture except for the prisoner's cell.

These environments may be described as dis-integrated or degraded because they lack wholeness; they are incomplete. Because the ordinary everyday settings for behavior are missing, they cannot adequately support the great range of human activities and behaviors that are associated with everyday life and particularly with the recovery process. Most institutions force inmates to ‘kill time’ without purpose. More typically and destructively, institutional environments may further impair the patients' faith in their own competence to take care of themselves and live normal independent lives. Prolonged institutionalization or hospitalization, especially in a mental hospital, nursing home, or prison may seriously impair the inmate’s mental health, as individual’s responsibilities and social behaviors fall away.

Psychiatry and psychology in particular, and medicine in general, all lack a clear vision or theory of mental health and ‘wellness’, as distinct from illness, that could inform and enrich the lives of patients in their care. Since the earliest records of institutional mental health treatment there have been relatively few reform revolutions during which the quality of the patients' experience, their environment, and their care were given enriching humane attention.

ALEX And Like-Minded Birds: Environmental Determinants In The Occurrence of Rival-Model Learning Among Four Birds.

Comparisons among four birds, their early development and behavioral determinants.

ALEX, our finest feathered colleague in the Laboratory of Cognitive Scientist Dr. Irene Pepperberg has died before his work, or hers, was completed. He was somewhat of an avian guru, a teacher, who participated in the Rival-Model learning method, ultimately developing clear human speech. He helped us answer many important questions about cognition and learning in general. He left Dr. Peppergerg and the rest of us who knew him and followed his progress with even more questions about the still largely unexplored animal-to-human interface.

Following the death of ALEX it seems the right moment to sum up some of my own informal observations about the linguistic and emotional language behavior of our own grays in the light of recent Rival-Model Learning discoveries.

ALEX, early years and environment:

ALEX was raised in Dr. Pepperberg’s laboratory, surrounded by students and researchers who kept him busy, interacting nearly all day as they explored his cognitive abilities, and as he learned to use human language. His was a formal, academic society. He lived a life of protocols, affection, repetition of protocols, affection, rest, and he slept alone, retiring gratefully (or so he seemed to indicate) to his cage at night. He did this work five days or more per week for thirty years.

There were also times when he visited friends with Dr. Pepperberg for days at a time. There were hours spent in the care of avian veterinarian Dr. Marjorie McMillan. , and many hospital days in Chicago, There were times he was interviewed in the company of strangers in small rooms or many in large auditoriums; he did not often disappoint.

He befriended Alan Alda, and it appears that ALEX impressed him, but more to the point ALEX made Alda laugh. That Alda laugh—that easy accepting sound—that accompanies so much of what he does, expresses his curiosity, and his pleasure in discovery. ALEX seems to have provided him with all of this in each meeting. Documented evidence of ALDA’s intelligent use of human language can be found on the Discovery Channel, and on video.

Nashi, early years and environment:

Nashi, my own African Grey Parrot is the same species (Psittacus erithacus) as ALEX, but she has had a different kind educational history, physical setting and social environment. Nashi’s life has not only been unlike ALEX’s, but also quite different from the lives of most domestically raised African Gray Parrots, and radically different from her conspecifics in wild flocks.