Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (24 page)

We set up seventeen locations in the forest where Kanzi could reliably find specific foods. He could travel between them as he wished. Different games and activities evolved at each location, thus helping make each unique. For example, at LookOut Point, which was high off the ground, we often played a game of hiding objects. We hid pine cones in our shirts, pine needles under blankets, balls in the leaves, and so on. Kanzi loved these games of object hiding and would initiate them sometimes by hiding an object himself, and sometimes by saying things like
pine-needle hide
or
shirt hide
. At the location we called Treehouse, we rarely played hiding games with objects, but rather hid ourselves. Kanzi would sit high in the treehouse and wait while all of us hid ourselves in the dense foliage below. Then he would find us one by one. We always told him not to peek, but he hated that and would always look. Near the location
known as Midway, Kanzi was always the one who hid. Here the thicket and undergrowth were dense and we hated to go into it. Kanzi would therefore use this opportunity to vanish quietly, usually no more than four to ten feet away, but nonetheless out of sight. We would call and call and pretend that we could not see him. He thought it great fun that he had eluded us and would sometimes sit quietly under a bush for ten or fifteen minutes before showing himself.

Travel was always accompanied by tree climbing, looking at small animals and insects, and learning about the naturally edible plants that were in the forest. We assigned words to these activities and objects and used them whenever the occasion warranted. No day was planned; it simply evolved, and each day was different. Sometimes we had to contend with dangers like thunderstorms, snakes, or floods; at other times there were visitors and surprises. Initially, either I or one of the other caretakers decided where to go, as Kanzi did not know how to use the symbols to initiate travel to a particular location.

On a philosophical level, the switch from structured training to laissez-faire learning meant that Kanzi, not an experimenter, would decide which words were acquired and what they meant. By believing I had to teach language to Sherman and Austin, I also had implicitly assumed that their abilities were limited and that we should decide which words they were ready to learn given our experimental questions. It now seems odd that anyone had ever decided which words an ape was to learn—certainly no one does that with children, who elect to learn very different sorts of words, apparently focusing on the aspects of language that fascinate them.

Could it be that our assumptions of limited abilities had inextricably led to circumscribed learning, even though we had been attempting to press the skills of Sherman and Austin to the limit? Could the same assumptions have limited the progress of Washoe or Sarah? If I had simply assumed that Kanzi was able to learn as humans do, might not those very assumptions have produced a very different sort of ape?

With Matata gone, I, and the other humans who helped care for Kanzi, became the focus of his life. He was now free to be fully attentive to the things we were interested in, without the constant maternal monitoring that had previously occupied him. Even though we wanted Kanzi to learn to communicate, we did not aspire to rear him as a human child. Instead, we wanted him to be a happy, well-adjusted bonobo who liked people. Nonetheless, we did encourage some humanlike activities, such as toilet training, simply because they made daily life more pleasant for everyone. Unnecessary human cultural predispositions, such as the need for privacy with regard to elimination, bathing, and so on, were not requested of Kanzi. Similarly, we did not attempt to clothe him for the sake of appearances or decency. Sometimes, when it was chilly out, he wore a sweat shirt or sweater, but he ruled out pants and shoes early on.

Kanzi was aware that we employed the keyboard as a means of communication and apparently felt keenly motivated to do so as well. He also felt motivated to cooperate with toilet training, though he had been indifferent to this activity while Matata was present.

Kanzi’s communications soon began to revolve around his daily activities, such as where we were going to travel in the forest, what we would eat, the games we wanted to play, the toys Kanzi liked, the items we carried in our backpacks, television shows Kanzi liked to watch, and visits to Sherman and Austin. We found that the computerized keyboard was impractical for such outdoor use, and instead used a board on which photographs of the lexigrams were arrayed. Whenever Kanzi’s caretakers talked among themselves or directly with him, they combined spoken English with pointing to the appropriate symbols. They also treated Kanzi’s utterances as though they were intentional and conveyed what they appeared to convey, even if there was no “proof.”

From Sherman and Austin, I had learned that the attribution of meaning comes from the behavior of the receiver of the utterance—and that the behavior of the receiver is critical to the maintenance of veridicality as words are being acquired. For example, when Sherman was learning the word “wrench,”
he often selected the symbol for “key,” even though I knew he meant to say “wrench.” Instead of telling him what he should have said, I acted as though he had intended to say “key” and responded by looking for the key and then giving it to him. In so doing, I let my behavior define for Sherman the meaning of his utterance. Thus the symbol “key” meant the object key to me, and that was what I focused my attention upon, even though I knew Sherman was wrong and that he needed to use another word. I did not tell him so directly. I let my behavior speak for itself to clarify for Sherman what “wrench” meant to me, thereby preserving the veridicality between the word and its meaning. If Sherman wanted me to act differently, for example, to pick up a wrench and give it to him, then he had to request that using different symbols—ones that “meant” wrench to me.

By maintaining a veridical response to each other’s words, we establish a joint meaning for each word that is no more and no less than the sum of all such veridical responses within a community of common speakers. Therefore, the goal was not to determine whether Kanzi fully understood what a word meant when he said it, but rather to treat his saying it as a meaningful utterance and to respond as we would to any other party who used the word. Such responses, we had learned from Sherman and Austin, play a critical role in establishing “meaning.”

Within four months, Kanzi’s vocabulary rose from the original eight symbols to more than twenty. These symbols referred to foods, locations in the forest, activities, and people. By this time, too, he had learned the location of all seventeen food sites in the forest. He could announce his wish to go to any one of them, either by using the appropriate symbol or by pointing to a food that corresponded to a particular site (for example, at Treehouse there were always bananas and juice, at Crisscross Corners, blackberries, cheese, and orange juice were to be found, and so on); and he could guide us to any of the locations we named. After he had indicated his wish to go to, say, Treehouse, by pointing to a photograph of a banana, Kanzi might carry the photograph on the journey, frequently
pointing again to the picture and vocalizing. Soon the symbols replaced the photos.

To test Kanzi’s capacity to state his intentions to travel to various locations, we enlisted the aid of Mary Ann Romski, who works with children at the Language Research Center. Mary Ann and Kanzi had developed a close relationship during Kanzi’s frequent visits to the “childside,” but as Mary Ann was somewhat afraid of the snakes and creatures in the forest, she had never accompanied Kanzi into the woods. Mary Ann was therefore the perfect person for this experiment. She did not know the trails nor the locations where food was to be found. Moreover, Kanzi seemed anxious to show her around in his world, which led me to suspect that he would announce his intentions and lead Mary Ann to the locations he spoke of. I knew that Mary Ann would be completely lost in the woods without Kanzi’s help. If Kanzi said he was going to the Treehouse, for example, and then led Mary Ann there, his behavior could not be explained on the basis of subtle cues from Mary Ann. Moreover, Mary Ann, being somewhat fearful of the forest, would take great comfort in being with Kanzi, a companion who was totally at ease in this element. She would trust him and his intuitions, and Kanzi would do his best to make Mary Ann feel “at home” in his world and to show her around.

Mary Ann recorded Kanzi’s utterances and the route he led her along in going from one food site to another. During the test, Kanzi used photographs on five occasions and lexigrams on seven to announce a proposed destination, with 100 percent accuracy. Moreover, on all but one journey between two sites, Kanzi chose the most direct route possible. On that one occasion, he exploited the opportunity of being accompanied by someone who did not know that where they were to go was a part of the forest he normally is not allowed to go. Kanzi therefore demonstrated not only what he knew about himself, but also what he knew about Mary Ann.

Kanzi’s capacity to use lexigrams to state his intentions was clearly evident in the test in the forest. Sometimes it took twenty minutes for him to lead Mary Ann to the destination he
had earlier specified, and along the way he often talked of other things, without forgetting where he was going.