How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain (14 page)

Certainly Helen could have tried harder. With half the school year gone by, she knew what the tests were like. But that wasn’t really the point. She had done what I had asked, which was to redouble her efforts at studying.

The great compromise that emerged from this hand-wringing was an explicit and concrete statement of what was expected, a goal that was entirely within her control.

“I still want you to see the dog scanning,” I said. “I know the tests are picky. So how about you put in an extra hour of studying each day until the scanning?”

“If I do that, I can come?”

“Yes, but to make sure that you’re studying the right things, it has to be with either me or Mommy.”

Helen already had one to two hours of homework each day, so this was not greeted with enthusiasm. But grudging acceptance was all that was required.

She refused to study with me that night. But over the next two days, the resentment diminished, and Helen allowed me into her room to go over concepts from science and math. I hoped that my explanations of how things worked would somehow help her remember the laundry list of facts that she would be tested on. But all I really wanted was an excuse for her to share in the excitement of the Dog Project and see what real science looked like.

12

Dogs at Work

T
HE DRESS REHEARSAL
with Callie at the scanner made it clear that the dogs should be conditioned to more than the MRI. They needed to get used to the entire experience. We wanted them peaceful and poised on the day of scanning. The more we could do to get them used to the environment, the calmer they would eventually be. Because of her agility competitions, McKenzie was a certified road warrior, and traveling didn’t faze her. But Callie was a homebody, and she didn’t take well to car travel. After all, most of her car trips ended at the vet for a series of shots or a similar indignity.

So I started bringing Callie to work.

Getting her into the car was the hardest part. I would say, “Wanna go to work?” and Callie would run over to the garage door and leap up and down as though her legs were made of springs. But once I opened the car door, she would balk, tail between her legs. She would stiffen up as I placed her in the front seat. Even when we got moving, she never relaxed and would try to sit in my lap as I drove. Eventually we settled into a mutually acceptable position with her in a standing position, hind legs on the passenger seat and front legs on the
center console, facing me. She shivered for the entire thirty-minute trip from house to campus. Her nervousness also caused her to shed, leaving short black hairs all over the seats.

Once we got to Emory, Callie became her normal, cheerful self. The short walk from the parking deck to the lab triggered smiles in all whom we passed. Callie liked to hop up on a stone wall, about waist high, in front of the lab building, where she would trot along, doing her best imitation of a circus dog on a tightrope.

Inside the lab, she would zoom around to each of the waste cans, looking for food scraps. Once she was satisfied there was no free food, she would interrogate the people. Lisa would lower her face to dog level and coo, “Callie!” Callie would stand on her hind legs to lick Lisa’s face. The guys were friendly, if not as demonstrative, and tried to engage Callie by throwing a tennis ball around. But Callie was not a retriever. Her interest in things that moved tended toward small, furry animals.

With each trip to the lab, I brought a toy to keep her amused. It wasn’t long before bones and Kongs lay scattered on the floor. A water bowl was in one corner, a doggie bed in another. The lab was starting to feel like home.

Presciently, we had included language in the official IACUC protocol specifying that the dogs would first be familiarized with the scanner environment. This would minimize the chance of the dogs freaking out and running amok. Although the intent was to placate the risk-averse lawyers, there was now the obvious side benefit that the dogs would not only have to be familiarized with the scanner, but they would need to be familiarized with the staging area—the lab. Therefore, when I brought Callie to work, I was just following protocol.

Also according to our protocol, we would need to find the right subjects. Mark had suggested a laundry list of ideal characteristics: calm, good in novel environments, good with strangers, good with other dogs, inquisitive, unafraid of loud noises, unafraid of heights, and able to wear earmuffs. These traits were specified in the official IACUC protocol that gave us permission to do the research.

Never mind that Callie and McKenzie had already been selected as our first two subjects. We would still need more dogs. We needed backups in case Callie or McKenzie couldn’t make it into the MRI. Of course, we could conduct dog tryouts at CPT, and eventually we would, but we could just as easily hold “auditions” at the lab. Because the dogs hadn’t yet qualified to be research subjects, and therefore fall under the IACUC rules, they existed in a gray zone between pet and research, and, as I was painfully aware, pets were not allowed.

One day, Andrew brought in his toy poodle, Daisy. Andrew had warned us that she was a temperamental dog and barked when anxious, which was often. We were already testing the boundaries of research rules, but if we got noise complaints, dogs would not be welcome anymore. Daisy was on good behavior, though. She didn’t stray far from Andrew, and he limited the duration of her visit. He didn’t dare bring his other dog, an American Eskimo named Mochi. She tended to leave puddles wherever she got excited. Other lab members soon followed suit. One day I was greeted by two beautiful huskies, London and Reyna. Another day, Lisa’s goldendoodle, Sheriff, paid a visit. Sheriff was a golden, frizzy cross between a golden retriever and a standard poodle. He didn’t qualify for the Dog Project based on size alone.

The dogs had a noticeable effect on morale. The lab felt more relaxed. The students were less distressed by whatever problems were cropping up in their research. The simple brush of a dog walking by, or the press of a cold, wet nose on your hand, was enough to drop anyone’s stress level. People laughed more.

The beneficial effects of dogs in the workplace have been well documented. Sandra Barker, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and director of the Center for Human-Animal Interaction, has been studying the effects of pets at work for more than a decade. In 2012, her team measured stress levels of workers who were allowed to bring their dogs to work. Normally, stress is lowest in the morning and rises steadily throughout the day. But the presence of dogs kept self-reported stress at their morning levels all day long. The researchers also found that the presence of dogs increased communication between workers.

Whether these effects on stress are simply a matter of perception has been difficult to determine. The most concrete proof would be reductions in the body’s stress hormone, cortisol. Cortisol is produced by the adrenal glands, which sit on top of the kidneys. When a person is stressed for any reason, the brain sends a signal to the pituitary gland, which releases a hormone that flows through the blood to the adrenal gland, causing the release of cortisol. The effects are nearly instant. Cortisol causes blood pressure to rise and the heart to beat faster. These are beneficial effects if you need to jump into action, but if the adrenal gland continues to release cortisol because of chronic stress, its effects will begin to damage the body. Chronically high levels of cortisol cause stomach ulcers, hypertension, and diabetes.

Some studies have found that dogs decrease cortisol levels, while others have not. There is relatively little research in this area, so much of the variability in results probably comes from the variety of conditions in which dog-human interactions have been studied. Not everyone likes dogs, and as Lyra proved at the lab party, dogs can send cortisol levels skyrocketing in people who are afraid of them.

Even though there is not a lot of biological evidence yet to prove that dogs have health benefits for humans, some companies have recognized that their employees are happier and more productive when they are with their dogs. Google, for example, states, “[Our] affection for our canine friends is an integral facet of our corporate culture. We like cats, but we’re a dog company, so as a general rule we feel cats visiting our offices would be fairly stressed out.” Amazon has a similar policy, simply requiring that employees register the dog and be responsible for good canine citizenship (barking and peeing are no-no’s). Other large companies with dog-friendly policies include Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, Clif Bar, the Humane Society headquarters, Build-A-Bear Workshop headquarters, and the software maker Autodesk. And, of course, many small businesses around the country.

If having dogs at work makes the humans less stressed, do the dogs feel happier too? The question is embedded in the much deeper riddle of animal emotions and gets to the heart of why we were doing the Dog Project.

For the most part, scientists have ignored the question of whether animals have emotions. This is peculiar because most pet owners are pretty sure that they do. Science, though, deals with things that you can measure, and, by definition, emotions are internal. Science has been able to measure only behaviors that are a
result
of an emotion. With humans, this is not a problem. You can always ask a person how he is feeling and deduce which emotion is associated with a behavior. The linking of subjective states and objective behaviors is an important step because different emotions may result in similar behaviors and expressions. For example, if you see someone crying, you might assume he or she is sad. But those could be tears of joy. The only way to know is to ask.

This inability to exactly determine emotions from behavior is why scientists have generally avoided the question of animal emotions. For example, a dog can’t tell you why he chews your slipper. But scientists have not always been so reluctant to venture into this. Charles Darwin devoted an entire book to the topic. In
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
, Darwin described how emotions like joy and fear have common manifestations in both animals and
humans. Although
Expression of the Emotions
was his third book, after his famous books on evolution, it is the one that resonates most strongly today. The timelessness comes from his heavy reliance on dogs to illustrate his points. Richly illustrated with photographs and engravings, the modern reader can immediately identify with Darwin’s dogs.

Because humans and animals evolved from a common ancestor, Darwin deduced that we might also share basic emotional functions. If that were the case, animal emotions would help reveal the origins of human emotions. Unlike other scientists of his era, content to simply describe natural phenomena, Darwin wanted to understand why emotions manifested the way they did. Why, for example, does happiness trigger an upturned mouth as opposed to a downturned one?

Darwin formulated three principles of emotions that applied to man and animals. First, he said that emotions come from the brain. This was a pretty remarkable and correct intuition, considering that almost nothing was known about the brain in 1872. Second, emotional expressions build on natural movements. For instance, smiles are upturned because laughter triggers the closing of the eyes, and the contraction of the muscles around the eyes also raises the corners of the mouth. Third, Darwin believed that emotions manifest as the opposite actions of opposing habits. Darwin chose a dog to illustrate this principle, which he called
antithesis.

When a dog approaches a stranger that appears hostile, the dog “walks upright and very stiffly; his head is slightly raised…; the tail is held erect and quite rigid; the hairs bristle… the pricked ears are directed forwards, and the eyes have a fixed stare.” These actions are defensive and may represent a prelude to an attack. The principle of antithesis states that the opposite emotion—joy—manifests with opposite motions. “Instead of walking upright, the body sinks downwards or even crouches…; his tail, instead of being held stiff and upright, is lowered and wagged from side to side.” The descriptions are as apt today as they were 150 years ago.

Darwin’s work on emotions was forgotten for more than a century. Although serious research in this area is beginning to attract scientists again, the vast majority still stays away from the knotty question of animal emotions. A major factor in scientists’ reluctance is that the study of animal emotions opens up an uncomfortable ethical question. If animals have emotions like humans, is it right to kill and eat them?

There have been a few exceptions. Within neuroscience, two people stand out. Kent Berridge, a psychobiologist at the University of Michigan, has extensively studied the link between reward systems in the brain and the expression of emotion in rats. And Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Washington State University and Bowling Green State University in Ohio, has been the strongest advocate for mapping animal emotions onto corresponding brain systems that are common to all mammals.

Reiterating what Darwin said, Panksepp has argued that only when we understand the emotional systems of our fellow creatures will we begin to understand the origins of human feelings. This is a compelling argument. When we look at the brains of animals, it is immediately apparent that there are many structures in common. The commonalities have traditionally been called
primitive
, reflecting scientists’ belief that they must have an old evolutionary origin. In the 1960s, the neuroscientist Paul MacLean used the evolutionary analogy to divide the brain into three parts: the reptilian brain (the basal ganglia), the paleomammalian brain (the limbic system), and the neomammalian brain (the neocortex). Although these divisions are overly simplistic, it is clear that only the neocortex is substantially different in humans and other mammals. The other two divisions—the basal ganglia and the limbic system—are largely the same from rats to humans. It is in these systems that Berridge and Panksepp believe that emotions originate.