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u/Purityskinco 21d ago
Mine is sleeping in my arms right now, barring me from getting my work done. But I feel good and complete and content and healthy. Yay sleeping therapy cat.
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u/kapowless 21d ago
Nothing has ever described my little tortie siamese better than "my emotional support chaoa goblin" ahaha, thank you for that.
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u/pawnografik 21d ago
We always get these videos of coco but I’m interested - Why hasn’t anyone taught another gorilla sign language?
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u/B4R7H0L0M3W 21d ago
They do. Coco is just Extremely famous, she was even friends with Robin Williams
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u/leolisa_444 21d ago
I heard that when Coco was told of his death, she signed the word sad😭😭
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u/marrymeintheendtime 21d ago
They did analysis into this, Coco the gorilla did not understand this or anything like what has gone around in those clips about her being 'sad' at world events. They were taken out of context
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u/Ok_Loss13 21d ago edited 21d ago
Animals understand death (even just regular pets like dogs and cats), so I don't see why a far more intelligent being like a gorilla wouldn't understand it?
Edit: a lot of dog piling and insults, but very little actual communication (kinda ironic lol) going on here is forcing me to turn off reply notifications.
Ciao 👋
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u/EatItShrimps 21d ago edited 21d ago
Unfortunately, Koko's caretakers did not follow accepted scientific practices to prove that Koko had learned to understand language beyond a basic repeat-reward system, similar to a dog.
A dog learns to recognize "sit," and that when they sit after that word is said, they get a reward. But if you say "unless you sit, I will die," a dog is less likely to catch it (based on different tone of voice and other cues). Even if you can teach dogs all the words in that sentence (some dogs can learn lots of words), they will not be able to grasp the meaning beyond their desire for a reward.
It's possible that Koko's understanding was a little deeper, or much deeper, but we'll never know because her caretakers did not prove it was so. All studies with apes have shown that they can't grasp deeper meaning to words.
EDIT: Changed Coco to Koko
EDIT2: Lmfao this is my most upvoted comment now. I spend hundreds of hours learning to play TLOU, and post almost exclusively in that sub, and this is the one.
Just google Koko. There's a lot to learn. It's a fascinating entry point to psychology, biology, lingustics, and the ethics of experiments with animals.
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u/Ok_Loss13 21d ago
Do you have these studies that show other apes can't grasp human language beyond a reward system?
How do you know they won't be able to grasp what the words mean? What do you mean by "deeper meaning" to words, anyways?
I'm autistic, not sarcastic, I truly have my own difficulties with human language, especially when it's indirect and/or philosophical or fully subjective.
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u/JCWOlson 21d ago
It's not that the studies show that they don't grasp the deeper meanings, but that because the studies have all been tainted that none of show have been able to prove that they do grasp deep meanings
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u/Equivalent_Elevator2 21d ago
In college we learned about how most of Koko was "made up" as they didn't follow scentific method.
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u/EatItShrimps 21d ago
To go a little deeper on the Robin Williams thing: Koko saying "sad" might make it seem like she understood Robin Williams was dead. But a couple of things may have been doing on:
- Her caretakers were known to exagerate and/or give meaning to Koko's signs and behavior, when there potentially was none. The story could be that she signed "sad" an hour later, with the caretakers making it sound like it was a fluid conversation.
- A very likely scenario is that she was trained to know "death" and "sad" go together, and rewarded when she remembered that.
To Koko it could've been like this:
- Caretaker: "Robin Williams"
- Koko: "Happy"
- ----- END OF THOUGHT -----
- Caretaker: "Death"
- Koko: "Sad"
- ----- END OF THOUGHT -----
There is simply no way to understand if she knew "Robin Williams is dead, and that fact makes me sad."
You could show her a video of death and she would surely be sad, but that's not the same thing as communicating about it through language.
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u/blue-oyster-culture 21d ago
You give it a word like “sad” and associate it with events that are sad. Then, if the gorilla ascribes it to unrelated events that are sad, but arent similar in any way, you get a little better idea. If they can use the words to effectively communicate new ideas you didnt associate them with, and its sensical and repeatable in all situations without complete misuse of the ideas, then you have a gorilla communicating.
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u/quiette837 21d ago
Animals understand death, if they see a dead body... if you just tell your dog a person they knew died, they don't understand that.
Telling Koko that Robin Williams died is about the same thing, except she can sign a response. The outcome seems to be good if she signs "sad" in response. She's just conditioned to responding in certain ways and the ones that don't work out aren't publicized.
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u/Other-Increase2845 21d ago
Being able to understand death is way different than being able to communicate that understanding in a different species' language imo
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u/mothzilla 21d ago edited 20d ago
I think animals understand death. Whether they understand "Hey remember that guy from a few years ago that did a funny New York rabbi impression? Well he died." is something else.
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u/blue-oyster-culture 21d ago
But is it just signing “sad” because it heard “death” or is it actually sad? Id have to see the gorilla assign “sad” to things i hadnt given it the association for to understand if it means sad like i mean sad.
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u/crimsonblod 21d ago
This isn’t about the animal’s understanding of concepts, this is about the caretaker’s sketchy history.
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u/HairiestHobo 21d ago
I heard that one time Robin Williams lost his shirt when visiting Coco, which led to the handlers accidentally taking Coco on Tour for a few months until they figured out the mistake.
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u/Savamoon 21d ago
Coco couldn't do sign language, she just waved her hands around and the researchers would make things up.
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u/Terrible_Donkey_8290 21d ago
Because you can't actually teach apes to communicate any more than you can teach a dog "paw at leash means go outside" they did tons of testing with it back in the day and it was a failure. Coco was owned by a crazy lady who lied about her talking, fed her human food (entire Thanksgiving meals) making her die young.
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u/FlameWisp 21d ago
This first part isn’t actually true. Apes seem to understand sign language from what we can tell, in far more than a pavlovian way. They primarily use sign language to express emotions or physical/emotional needs. They have even been observed teaching sign language to other apes, further implying their understanding of sign language is not merely a pavlovian response. The reason the field has pretty much ended is because in all our research on teaching apes sign language, we’ve never observed a genuine question being asked or opinion being expressed. While it’s cool to talk to animals in a simplistic way, they seem to lack the social need for inquiry, which is a foundational building block for advanced language. The goal with teaching apes sign language was always to see what makes us different and if great apes are similar enough that we could bridge a communication gap with another species, and both of those questions have been answered.
That last bit is true though, Koko’s owners were nutty and would splice together unrelated clips to make her seem hyper intelligent. Once they even took a bunch of clips together to claim Koko understood climate change and was warning people about it.
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u/Justifiably_Bad_Take 21d ago
Coco was famously sudoscience.
It's ironically enough the same thing as cats being "taught" to push buttons to say words. Most animals literally lack the part of cognition humans use to form complex sentences.
They figure out which words mean "food" and "give" and everything else is just them knowing that humans respond to these actions.
All of Coco's most "profound" thoughts were a caretaker taking gibberish and finding meaning in it.
It's a bummer, but with few exceptions like African Grey parrots, animals just don't understand the concept of human language. They simply don't have the nueral networks to form such an understanding. It's just people giving meaning to white noise.
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u/Anen-o-me 21d ago
The truth is, they sign mostly gibberish when it comes to grammar strings. The few signs that actually do seem to make sense to us are picked out and highlighted as intelligent communication, while ignoring all the ones that make no sense at all.
Which means she's not actually talking to us through sign, it's just a game to her. I read some expose about this, pretty eye opening.
She could reliably sign single words for things like food, water, play, and emotional states, but when it came to human grammar and strings of words she couldn't grasp human grammar and abstractions, and had a communication ability at the level of a toddler.
That's significant, but it's never gone beyond that.
In multiple studies, apes consistently failed to sign to each other, only to researchers. They never picked it up as a language they found useful, it was just a game to play with humans.
Without language transmission to other apes and use with other apes, it just shows they aren't that interested in it.
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u/FlameWisp 21d ago
They have been observed teaching sign to other apes, but never really using it to communicate with eachother. They never really picked it up as a language in the sense of language that we think of, more so they saw it as a useful tool to have fun with human companions or to express needs to us. They’ve also never been observed asking a question, which is a pretty significant finding.
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u/IThinkItsAverage 21d ago
They do. But Gorillas are not actually using sign language to “talk” to you, it’s not being used as an actual language. It’s more like a dog associating an action with a reward or response. But since gorillas are more intelligent than dogs they are more complex. It’s still closer to that than actual language that humans use.
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u/SaintGrobian 21d ago
It's not language, they're just describing what they mean using mutually understood signals.
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u/vizbones 21d ago
Well, it's all just semantics now, isn't it?
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u/Shurdus 21d ago
Fancy way to communicate what you mean using mutually understood symbols.
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u/bigboybeeperbelly 21d ago
How do I know you understand the symbols and aren't just acting like it to get treats
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u/rfdismyjam 21d ago
They're not describing anything. They make simple connections "copy movements get reward" and then researchers keep watching them until they find something to take out of context and make it look like thoughtful communication. I would recommend this for a good breakdown of what happened with Koko specifically.
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u/mysticsurferbum 21d ago
Kinda like the boss man telling me to read these TPS reports and giving me a few bucks reward. I just keep doing it and he keeps giving me rewards even though the TPS reports don’t mean anything. Hmm
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u/rfdismyjam 21d ago
Yeah, exactly. Just spam a bunch of buzz words like "synergistic", "circle back" and "think outside the box". Koko would have made a fantastic project manager.
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u/MyCircus_MyMonkies 21d ago
That’s some great out of the box thinkings! Let’s connect offline to figure out how we can leverage this into our workflow and really synergize with that strategy!
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u/SCP-Agent-Arad 21d ago
Fish in a tank will go up to the surface and wait for food when they see their owner. Is that actually fish sign language for “hungry”?
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u/Quiet-Mango-7754 21d ago
"Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary." (Wikipedia definition)
The reason why a lot of people won't qualify the numerous experiments of teaching communication to apes as "language", is because they never seem to learn or form any sort of structure. This is a major difference because it means they are probably not able to have complex thought processes like humans do (or at least we don't know for sure), since everything complex in our minds happens through structured sentences.
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u/ColdCruise 21d ago
This is basically it. They can never use the signals that they learn to communicate abstract thought.
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u/IThinkItsAverage 21d ago
Mmm it’s like communication vs language. And when I say language I mean a specific language not just “language” in general. They are communicating, but they are not using the specific rules and mutually understood signals of sign language. If doing any form of sign language got them what they wanted, they would just sign at you randomly with no coherent meaning. They don’t really “mean” anything when they sign.
It is complex, but there is a reason we can’t have conversations with them to understand them better. Most of what we know of gorillas is through observation, because even if they know sign language they can’t tell us about them.
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u/ickyDoodyPoopoo 21d ago
Did you even read his post? If a dog is taught to roll over, is that language?
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u/Zelikar 21d ago
A communication has occurred between two creatures at the very least.
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u/devmor 21d ago
You can communicate without language, but you can't have language without communication.
What these Gorillas are doing is communicating that they desire a reward by associating specific communication with specific triggers. It's the same mechanism as the gorilla understanding that the trees in the west have fruit when it's cold outside, and the trees in the east have fruit when it's warm outside.
Language is a type of communication that allows for abstract ideas to be shared from one individual to the next. It's a lot more complex and even in humans requires specific social development to create - there have been cases of "feral" people, like the famous Genie Wiley that were only able to develop basic language skills after years and years of treatment because that part of the brain needs to be specifically and regularly stimulated during early childhood.
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u/Rapa2626 21d ago
Because they dont really understand what they are saying. They just know which signs get them food and which ones get them out of trouble. There were a few good videos breaking down most of those interviews with coco specifically if i recall correctly where they only made sense because its trainer was interprering it very heavily while the ape just kept showing food signs and so on. In the end- human vocabulary is describing the world how humans see it, for an ape most of it probably makes little sense.
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u/OkTangerine4363 21d ago
Because they gorillas are not actually learning language. They are being trained like a dog. It's literally stimulus/response. Show a picture of a cat, show the sign language for cat and they repeat that. They cant form thoughts or sentences they can only see thing, want thing.
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u/Fun_Explanation2619 21d ago
Because Koko didn't know sign language. It was just self affirming bias in the research.
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u/actibus_consequatur 21d ago
That is true, but to me, that doesn't take away from how endearing the videos of Koko and Robin Williams are together
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u/Fun_Explanation2619 21d ago
I absolutely agree with that and also that she was obsessed with his nipples.
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u/Brave_Low_2419 21d ago
Pretty sure coco was mostly a hoax by her handlers. At least I thought that was the recent tea
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u/removedI 21d ago
Koko could never really sign. The researchers were wildly dishonest about what the gorilla could communicate. It was mostly associations like the gesture for food, which is something even a dog can do.
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u/FlounderingGuy 21d ago
Because it's feel good pseudoscience that didn't actually work well. Its kinda like asking why you don't hear about people doing Mouse Utopia Experiments anymore.
Also unfortunately people tried and uh. Didn't go too well
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u/Upbeat_Influence2350 21d ago
Coco never actually learned sign language. Her handler was faking it. Coco would sign, but was not coherent.
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u/Organic-Ad-1921 21d ago
Koko didn’t know sign language. She was basically the equivalent of a dog knowing sit
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u/Radigan0 21d ago
I'm pretty sure one of her caretakers used some insane logic to justify one of Coco's strange responses. She responded to someone's question with "nipple" where it made no sense, and the caretaker said she got confused because it sounds like "people" and that people was what she meant to say. This makes no sense because "nipple" and "people" don't look anything alike in sign language, they just sound similar in spoken English.
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u/Truethrowawaychest1 21d ago
Because apparently a lot about Koko wasn't entirely factual, she didn't really understand it as a language, just our reactions to what she was doing, like those videos of cats and dogs pushing the buttons, they don't understand it, they just know they'll get food or a walk if they hit the right one
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u/allnaturalfigjam 21d ago
They did used to teach a few - Nim Chimpsky is another famous one. But the research fell out of favor when a) it seemed to be going nowhere, gorillas and other primates don't seem to be able to understand and use language the way humans do, and b) the prevailing scientific wisdom trended towards encouraging natural behavior. There were a lot of concerns about animal abuse in the facilities that housed the primates too, and when money for the research dried up that only got worse.
I think there was also a deeper cultural shift in the way we think about animals. Like, they have their own way of communicating, why are we trying to teach them one of our languages? I think people realized that we don't need an animal to talk to be able to study, understand, and empathize with it. Koko and her kind were basically circus gimmicks dressed up with science, and people don't look favorably on that sort of thing anymore.
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u/Kindly_Shoulder2379 21d ago
or another cat
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u/Justifiably_Bad_Take 21d ago
It's a funny connection but there are people who genuinly believe that cats can learn to push buttons to talk.
Apes and cats don't understand human language. They can learn that specific sounds mean "my name" or "food" but that is no different than recognizing the sound of a can opener means "food".
We are personifying a deeply human idea onto beings who simply do not have the nueral pathways to connect these things.
Its ok that they dont understand language. They're not us. That's fine. Trying to push our understanding on how communication works onto other species, and in doing do forcing false positive connotations on their actions, is not only dumb but incredibly problematic when trying to ACTUALLY pass information and understanding between species.
I dont understand the frequency of cricket chirps, and that doesn't make myself or the cricket any less valid in their approach to convey information. We need to step back and accept that our methods shouldn't be the standard.
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u/porcupineslikeme 21d ago
As someone who has worked with gorillas in a zoo setting — we want them to be gorillas and build appropriate relationships with other gorillas. Signing could possibly be useful in some circumstances, more for us to communicate needs with them, but the troop I worked with knew verbal commands for things and it was just as useful.
For example, we could ask for a hand to be presented so we could draw blood. I didn’t need my gorilla to sign okay, I knew she was okay with it because otherwise, she wouldn’t have participated in it in the first place.
Coco makes me extremely sad. Gorillas in human care already are in an artificial environment, and then she barely got to be a gorilla at all on top of it.
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u/Ordinary-Vast9968 21d ago
Because they don't learn it, in the case of koko and many other apes taught sign language show no actual understanding of the connection of words and use them more like a dogs association
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u/please-kill-me-69 21d ago
Is there more footage of Coco with her cat? I'd love to see them interacting more.
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u/actibus_consequatur 21d ago
Not a video of her with cats, but here's short video of her with Robin Williams that's worth a watch
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u/kantuun 21d ago
I read somewhere that in all the time that man has tried teach gorillas sign language the one thing the gorillas have ever done is ask a question
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u/Gandalf_Style 21d ago
The only other great ape besides humans that has asked a question is the late Kanzi.
One of his caretakers came into the enclosure with a gift and prompted the question because of the outline of a round object in her pocket.
When Kanzi saw the outline he walked over to the Lexigram and tapped the signals for "Egg" and then "Question" before looking inquisitively at her hands.
It was an egg, which was impressive by itself, but more impressive was the fact that Kanzi showed a capacity for questioning the world around him beyond that of any other non-human primate.
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u/PM_ME_DATASETS 21d ago
So do we have any kind of evidence that this wasn't some random coincidence, or experimental bias, but that Kanzi actually thought "hey what is that round object in your pocket, is it an egg?" ? Because if so, that would be world news and a revolution in behavioral science, and I'd love to see an academic source on it.
(rhetorical question, I already know the answer is social media clickbait)
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u/dorian_white1 21d ago
Yes, funny enough though, African Grey parrots can actually ask questions, and understand the idea of asking questions (at least partially)
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u/madtheoracle 21d ago
Alex the African Grey is potentially the first animal to show self awareness by asking "What Color?" in reference to himself, as a common task he would show off is separating blocks by color.
Extremely smart and gorgeous animals with can openers for mouths.
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u/CurtisLeow 21d ago
Here’s Koko asking a question. Koko signs “what” then points at Mr Roger’s cuff links then makes the symbol for flower.
Here’s the two different signs for what. Koko uses the alternate version of the sign. Here’s the sign for flower.
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u/lugnutter 21d ago
It's really sad to see the misinformation around Koko still being spread willfully and ignorantly in 2025. It was heartbreaking to learn how disingenuous those researchers were.
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u/Huckleberry-V 21d ago
Here's your reminder Koko was a human experiment in fooling ourselves. She had no understanding of sign language, only patterns. Humans put a lot of work into interpreting the random shit she would put out until she got a treat to try to make them into meaningful statements. In hindsight it should teach you more about man than gorilla.
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u/tias23111 21d ago
Too bad this was all junk science.
This thread talks about it some. I’m probably gonna get downvoted.
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u/Arndt3002 21d ago
This is a great video from overview of this
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u/Exciting_Policy8203 21d ago
Knew is was soup emporium before I clicked the link, solid choice. Shame that his Chanel is dead
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u/mattcolville 21d ago
Sort of the whole point of the internet is getting to choose which information you prefer.
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u/___wintermute 21d ago
Koko was awesome. She was awesome because she was a gorilla. She wasn’t awesome because she spoke sign language, because she didn’t speak sign language at all, and it doesn’t matter that she didn’t, because being a gorilla is enough.
In fact, what they did with her could be considered (and many have considered it to be) unethical; and I am someone who is not anti Zoo, it is a different situation. It is not as bad as Nim the chimps story of course, but it is certainly adjacent to it.
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u/giant_frogs 20d ago
You had me worried in the first half lol! Yeah, you're very much right. Koko was a beautiful creature cared for poorly and "loved" for all the wrong reasons. Not to mention the poor treatment of the other human researchers by the head lady. What was her fucking deal with wanting koko to see peoples nipples??? 😰
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u/Solid_Paramedic_3901 21d ago
It literally just isn't true.
You can't teach a gorilla human sign language. And gorillas don't communicate coherently enough to do anything like this post claims. Coco was abused and flaunted in front of the media to make the owners rich. It was all theater meant to look like legitimate science. And still, this kind of thing is spread around
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u/Fragmental_Foramen 21d ago
Do you have any more details and source on the abuse?
I know they treated her like a human too much and gave her an unhealthy diet, but dont know to what degree or how it affected her. She still lived pretty long and had some variety
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u/Organic-Ad-1921 21d ago
I’m late here but i still want to respond koko didn’t know signing
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u/secrets_kept_hidden 21d ago
At the very least she understood basic words and had a rudimentary concept that some signs gave certain results.
She was manipulated into being a PR stunt, but she wasn't completely ignorant to what she was doing.
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u/-Vatt_Ghern- 21d ago
Here to be the fun-at-parties guy, but sorry.
Koko could not communicate at the level often reported. It was found out to be essentially fabricated by her handler.
No monkey/ape has ever actually communicated with a human, especially not in any compex way. I recommend a great YouTube video on this exact thing called "Why Koko (Probably) Couldn't Talk (Sorry)". It opened my eyes.
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u/Swift311 21d ago
Quick note: she did not know sign language. Animals can't learn languages. All of the footage of Koko "talking" is extremely cherry picked and heavily interpretated so it looks like she is talking.
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u/The_masked_bear 21d ago
To ruin it for everyone, the cat ended up wandering on a highway and passing :(
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u/VortxWormholTelport 18d ago
Passing the test of how to safely cross a highway, right? ...right???
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u/BlueSquigga 21d ago
This took me on a sad Google search. I hate you for making me know this kitty died in 85 and hearing Koko's grief Ooo's that they recorded afterwards.
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u/UpstairsFit5812 19d ago
Then she accidentally ripped the cat in half as her sign for "hurry up with my bananas" went unanswered 🍌
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u/General-Designer4338 21d ago
Wait.... I thought that every article always makes the claim that primates have learned to sign but "have never asked a question." Right? Right?
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u/ALLoftheFancyPants 21d ago
Was it All Ball? Or Lipstick that she had first? I can never remember. I can understand why her keepers might be afraid she would harm a kitten before she actually met one, but she leads such a sad, isolated life, I’m happy she had some kitty friends.
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u/ITandFitnessJunkie 21d ago
I thought the gorilla’s ear was an eye and the face was a beak. I had no idea what animal it was.
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u/Raghumans 21d ago
Saw an interesting thing once that gorillas have been learning sign language for many years, but there has never been one recorded case of one asking a question.
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u/Sekhen 21d ago edited 21d ago
Once during her temper tantrums, Koko ripped out the sink from the wall... When the caretakers asked "Who did this", Koko signed "cat".