Nature 404, 929 - 930 (2000) Ĺ  Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Not just a pretty Polly JOHN C. MARSHALL John C. Marshall is in the Neuropsychology Unit, University Department of Clinical Neurology, Radcliffe Infirmary, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6HE, UK. The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots by Irene Maxine Pepperberg Harvard University Press: 2000. 434 pp.$39.95, Ł24.95 >From King Solomon to Walt Disney by way of Saint Francis of Assisi, the desire to converse with other species has run deep in the human psyche. The attraction furthermore appears to split we humans into two camps: those who wish to learn the 'language' of animals and those who are determined to teach them ours. On the whole, the former group has scored more scientific victories than the latter. The decipherment of bee dancing, for example, was a far greater achievement than any number of overexcited translations of chimpanzees waving their arms about in a bad imitation of American sign language. Worse, attempts to teach spoken English to apes was even less successful. The entire line of research in which we attempted to impose our communication system on another species was, it seemed, dead. The undertaking had run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. Not so. In The Alex Studies, Irene Pepperberg summarizes the first two decades of a project to communicate with African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus). Pride of place in this enterprise is given to the Alex of the title. In some ways, this research programme has the look of a rational pursuit: parrots, Pepperberg points out, have "a complex social system and a long life" and, more crucially, they do seem to 'mimic' human speech moderately well. On the debit side, many studies of mimetic birds have conspicuously failed to establish two-way speech communication with humans in properly controlled laboratory settings. Full text, subscribers only: http://www.nature.com/