Our Guide, Koko

These are confusing times, to put it mildly. Problems beyond our control and comprehension present themselves. Whether we gather our information from social media or reliable sources, the demands of trying to grasp global climate change, disappearing bee populations, and North Korea’s nuclear capabilities are overwhelming. How much time and energy do we expound to fathom these issues, and with what success?

Looking for answers has become a consuming pastime. Whether it’s a teenager trying to understand why her best friend's abandoned her, or a brain chemist searching for the cause of Alzheimer’s, we’re engulfed in monumental enigmas. Why else would Google be popular enough to metamorphose from a noun into a verb?

Questions accumulate like canyon sediment over millennia. We’re living in an increasingly complex world added to the old questions we never answered. We don’t know how the brain works. What causes mental illness? What forces us to sleep every night, and why do we dream?

Massive networked telescopes search the skies for radio signals from light-years away. Scientists now know other stars like our sun have planets orbiting them; thus there’s a statistical basis for believing in ETs. Nanotechnology is offering new vistas inside the human body. Climate change scenarios are spurring investments in electric cars and altering our presumptions about an oil-based economy. Technology is altering everything – from the way we grow food to the way we listen to music. VR headsets modify how we experience reality; the video game industry is making more money than movie theaters.

If each generation is better educated than the last, shouldn’t our problem solving improve? Perhaps we are learning more, but the exponential growth of our new discoveries is increasing the pace of additional questions? Perhaps the more we unearth, the more we know what we don’t know?

Some say the information overload and concomitant confusion may lead us to another Dark Ages. We seek and benefit from knowledge, but is there a tipping point, like when we eat too much at a party? Is it possible to be so overwhelmed by the light of enlightenment that it blinds us? Are we blinded by the light, as Bruce Springsteen wrote?

Amid the chaos, it's acceptable to seek guidance. The greatest human minds have been leaders: Einstein, Gandhi, Moses, Freud and Jung. They were teachers offering us tools for navigation. Do you want to know how the physical universe works? E = mc2. Desperate to escape the chains of colonialism? Take the path of civil disobedience. Break free of slavery? Follow the guy with the robes across the sea.

Who are today's teachers? While there are many candidates – from Greta Thunberg to Bob Dylan to Malala Yousafzai, the youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize – I’m going with Koko, the gorilla.

Koko’s real name was Hanabi-ko, which is Japanese for Fireworks Child. She was born at the San Francisco Zoo on July 4, 1971. Koko was a western lowland gorilla, a critically endangered species. When Koko was a year old, a doctoral student in animal psychology at Stanford University, Penny Patterson, began studying her. While it's evident animals can't speak because they lack vocal chords, Dr. Patterson considered other forms of speech. For 45 years, Penny Patterson worked with Koko, teaching the gorilla a modified form of American Sign Language.

By the age of 4, Koko had developed a vocabulary of more than 170 words and showed an ability to use language creatively. In 1975, Dr. Patterson told The New York Times: “She occasionally makes up new words [signs] which are amazingly appropriate, and she is able to string known words together in novel and meaningful constructions. Koko also has a sense of humor and plays word games.”

When the world discovered there was a “talking” gorilla in California, Koko became a celebrity. Her photo appeared on the cover of National Geographic twice, in 1978 and again in 1985. She entertained celebrity visitors like Robin Williams and Fred Rogers, who featured their meeting on his TV show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Koko was the subject of numerous documentaries on animal psychology and language acquisition. To ensure their continued efforts, Patterson created the Gorilla Foundation in the Santa Cruz mountains. By the end of her life, Koko's vocabulary had reached more than 2,000 words. Dr. Patterson’s work and its significance in the study of animal research may never be equaled.

What Koko and Penny Patterson taught us about communication is remarkable not only for its groundbreaking nature but for the decades of work Penny and Koko devoted to research. They are teachers and leaders – for their love of knowledge, amazing persistence, and humility.

Koko held the unique status of the first non-human to communicate with humans. Pet owners believe they communicate with their pets, and Koko proved them right. She crossed a bridge that had never been traversed and greeted us with open arms like ET. Unlike our fear of the unknown, Koko ventured into uncharted territory without dread or animosity. She was grateful to reach a hand across the chasm of interspecies communication, and she asked for no special recognition as the first celestial traveler to set foot in a human domain.

We honor Koko for being an exceptional guide to the questions we face today. She was the first to express what it means not to be human. By participating in our world, she probed the nature of civilization on a path never previously traversed.

Koko died in her sleep on June 19, 2018 at the Gorilla Foundation, where she had lived her entire life.