https://www.sheldrake.org/research/animal-powers/the-nkisi-project
I attended a Rhine science meeting where the scientists were debating the study that Rupert Sheldrake did with a remarkable African Grey parrot named N’kisi. I read this study years ago because my husband and I had an African Grey parrot named Nicodemus for thirty years. There are several AGs in captivity that have developed a really good vocabulary and have been tested using their acquired ability to tell us about their intelligence. However, in this instance, Dr. Sheldrake is testing N’kisi’s psychic ability.
It was 2003 when N’kisi’s human “Aimée Morgana noticed that her language-using African Grey parrot, N’kisi, often responded to her thoughts and intentions in a seemingly telepathic manner.” She had heard of Dr. Sheldrake’s previous work regarding dogs that knew when their humans were coming home and decided to get in touch. For the experiment, they put N’kisi into another room where the parrot would be unable to have any input from Aimée at all. N’kisi may or may not have been told what was going on, but that wasn’t in the paper. So, the parrot spent time just vocalizing and saying random words which is what happy parrots do. Aimée was asked to take photos out of envelopes and look at them for a period of two minutes each for a total of 149 trials. The researchers working with Dr. Sheldrake and Aimée decided on a set of keywords based on N’kisi’s vocabulary that matched the pictures Aimée looked at.
They used a videotape of the parrot and had three different people interpret what N’kisi said while they were conducting the experiment. Aimée wrote down when the two-minute window occurred so they could narrow down the time frame on the videotape.
Parrots can be notoriously difficult to understand for people who aren’t their humans very much like two-year-old kids are, so the interpreters may not have been able to understand N’kisi very well. This narrowed down the trials from 149 to 71 where the parrot uttered the keywords clearly. In twenty-three of those, N’kisi said one or two keywords associated with the pictures Aimée was looking at at the time.
Now it’s time to look at N’kisi’s results based on a possible set of random answers. If N’kisi was just to say words at random while Aimée was looking at pictures, the parrot should have only got about 12 by accident. Statistically, it’s significant that the parrot got almost twice that. Where skeptics frequently have a problem is this interpretation of the statistics so this study wasn’t well received.
However, based on the stories told by average people everywhere, whether or not their animals can speak human, is that they appear to know more than they should. Now, we know that dogs have a really good sense of smell, and that’s arguably why they can sense the changes in their human’s smell that might mean a diabetic event or seizure, but how do they know it’s going to be a medical emergency? If I were a dog, I would notice my human’s scent is different and then go back to my nap rather than dial 911 with my paw.
Look up “animal communicators”, “pet psychics”, or “animal intuitive” and you’ll find quite a few people specialize in psychic bonds with creatures. Try to look up studies done with animal communicators and you’ll be pretty disappointed. I was able to find some researchers who studied animal psi, but not much about human/animal psychic links. Once, years ago, I stumbled upon a poorly designed horse communicator experiment where the horses had a medical problem and “told” the psychic who then had that confirmed by a veterinarian. I think there was also one done with a dog whisperer who could diagnose pets before their veterinarian visit. But look at the number of happy customers these intuitives have. Something about the human/animal relationship changes when an intuitive becomes their counselor. I don’t have the data on how many of these meetings fail compared to the successes so I cannot speak to anything beyond the anecdotal.
What’s important here is that we need to expand past our anthropocentric views of the world. Animals appear to be much more than the sum of their chromosomes and the instincts that scientists claim drive them. We need to take seriously that there is something far more basic than speech involved in communication, so basic that animals can grasp it and are able to communicate across species.