How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain (30 page)

Mark honed our training plan, and we began holding weekly classes at CPT where we gradually acclimated the dogs to the MRI environment. In just a few months we had gone from two dogs to eight, and we were well on our way to boldly going where no dogs had gone before!

Callie testing a neck coil.
(Helen Berns)

Callie continued as top dog. Whenever we added something new—a new experiment or a piece of equipment—Callie was the first to try it out. With her help, we discovered that we could obtain stronger signals from a dog’s brain by using a coil designed for the human neck. With this type of coil, the pickup element was closer to the brain than in the birdcage.

In talking about the Dog Project, I have learned that people react in one of two possible ways. Dog people do not need any further explanation. They understand the desire to know what their dogs are thinking, especially how they love them. If anything, these folks
wonder why nobody has done this before. The other type of person, possibly a dog owner but not actually a dog person, views this as a colossal waste of money. Shouldn’t we be using these expensive MRI machines to improve human health?

It is a valid question, and the best way I can answer it is to say that through the Dog Project, we
are
improving the human condition. Although I had worked in neuroscience for almost twenty years, and the majority of my research had been funded by the National Institutes of Health to understand how the human reward system goes awry in addiction, more people have been positively impacted by our one experiment on two dogs’ brains than the thousands of MRIs we had previously done in humans. Not everyone loves dogs, but for those who do—and that is about half the people in the United States—their dog’s welfare is intimately tied to their own. If we can understand just a little bit of what goes on behind those puppy eyes, dog-human bonds can only become stronger.

There are already well-documented beneficial effects of living with animals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that living with pets can decrease blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglyceride levels, as well as alleviate feelings of loneliness. Dogs, especially, provide opportunities for exercise and socialization.

As we move forward with the Dog Project, it is one of my dreams to really figure out what makes for a strong dog-human bond, what Konrad Lorenz called a “resonant dog”—a dog and a human who are fully in sync with each other. Using the reactivity of specific parts of a dog’s brain to a human, we could gauge the strength of this bond and figure out activities to strengthen it, or better match people with dogs. Therapy animals could benefit as well, both in finding and training dogs to be the most effective at this important activity.

And while it is easy to see how we could use this information to improve human health, I think it is just as important to use this technology
to improve the welfare of dogs. Although they are considered by many to be man’s best friend, they are also still misunderstood, which I think is a result of many people’s impression that dogs are barely domesticated wolves. I was disappointed when I encountered this attitude from an NIH official to whom I was proposing the expansion of the Dog Project to better understand how dogs decrease stress in humans. Instead of seeing how the dog’s reward system is tied into the human’s well-being, his response was “I imagine [the reward system] is maximally active when the dog is tearing
into
a human.” I can only speculate that he had a bad childhood experience with dogs or that he had been reading too many werewolf stories.

The point is that we can use brain-imaging technology for our own benefit, but we can also train it on dogs for their benefit. We are only scratching the surface of figuring out what dogs know and what they feel. But we already know that the major cause of behavioral problems in modern dogs is separation anxiety. Dogs get attached to their humans, and, understandably, they get lonely when the people are gone. When they act out and destroy things, everyone suffers, but it is the dog that may end up at the shelter.

It may seem far-fetched that scanning dogs’ brains could solve problems like this. But since a dog cannot tell us what is bothering him, peering into his mind may tell us what aspect of being separated from his human causes the most distress. Is it a matter of time or distance? How effective could webcams be in checking in with our dogs during the day? Currently, nobody knows how to best tap into dogs’ perceptual systems through technology. Brain imaging could lead the way.

Beyond all the promise of new discovery, the aspect of the Dog Project of which I am most proud is how we treated the dogs. Of course, Callie and McKenzie were family members, but we treated them like humans in the hope that others who followed in their paw-steps
would be afforded the same respect and rights of self-determination. Until proven otherwise, I believe the right course of action is to assume that dogs (and probably many other kinds of animals) have a level of self-awareness and emotion that bears more in common with humans than we had ever anticipated.

Dogs are surely our first friends for always.

Notes

2.
WHAT IT
’
S LIKE TO BE A DOG

Page

16
What is it like to be a dog…: Thomas Nagel. “What is it like to be a bat?”
Philosophical Review
83, no. 4 (October 1974): 435–450.
Many authors have written about the dog mind…: For a particularly good review see: John Bradshaw.
Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet
(New York: Basic Books, 2011).

17
Lupomorphism…: Adam Miklosi.
Dog Behaviour, Evolution, and Cognition
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 15.

18
Visual part of the brain and imagination…: Xu Cui et al. “Vividness of mental imagery: individual variability can be measured objectively.”
Vision Research
47, no. 4 (February 2007): 474–478.

4.
PUPPY STEPS

34
Classical conditioning…: Steven R. Lindsay.
Handbook of Applied Dog Behavior and Training.
Vol. 1,
Adaptation and Learning
(Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2000).

6.
RESONANT DOGS

52
Florence Nightingale…: Florence Nightingale.
Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not
(New York: D. Appleton, 1860), p. 103.

53
Demonstrating that dogs and animals in general can improve human health…: Lori S. Palley, P. Pearl O’Rourke, and Steven M. Niemi. “Mainstreaming animal-assisted therapy.”
ILAR Journal
51, no. 3 (2010): 199–207.
Children and pet therapy…: Kathie M. Cole et al. “Animal-assisted therapy in patients hospitalized with heart failure.”
American Journal of Critical Care
16, no. 6 (November 2007): 575–585. Elaine E. Lust et al. “Measuring clinical outcomes of animal-assisted therapy: impact on resident medication usage.”
Consultant Pharmacist
22, no. 7 (July 2007): 580–585. Carie Braun et al. “Animal-assisted therapy as a pain relief intervention for children.”
Complementary
Therapies in Clinical Practice
15, no. 2 (May 2009): 105–109.
Animal-assisted therapy patterns…: This is called a
meta-analysis
and was reported in: Janelle Nimer and Brad Lundahl. “Animal-assisted therapy: a meta-analysis.”
Anthrozoos
20, no. 3 (September 2007): 225–238.

54
Konrad Lorenz…: Konrad Lorenz.
Man Meets Dog.
Translated by Marjorie Kerr Wilson (New York, Tokyo, and London: Kodansha International, 1994).
Animals demonstrate an understanding of fairness…: Frans de Waal.
Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are
(New York: Riverhead, 2005).
Resonance dog…: Lorenz,
Man Meets Dog
, p. 76.

7.
LAWYERS GET INVOLVED

66
Rabies in the United States…: “Human Rabies.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last modified May 3, 2012.
http://www.cdc.gov/rabies/location/usa/surveillance/human_rabies.html
.

8.
THE SIMULATOR

69
First investigation of dogs’ hearing…: E. A. Lipman and J. R. Grassi. “Comparative auditory sensitivity of man and dog.”
American Journal of Psychology
55, no. 1 (January 1941): 84–89.

9.
BASIC TRAINING

80
Puppies and social learning…: Leonore L. Adler and Helmut E. Adler. “Ontogeny of observational learning in the dog (
Canis familiaris
).”
Developmental Psychobiology
10, no. 3 (May 1977): 267–271. Cf. A. Miklosi,
Dog Behaviour.
Puppies that watched their mother…: J. M. Slabbert and O. Anne E. Rasa. “Observational learning of an acquired maternal behaviour pattern by working dog pups: an alternative training method?”
Applied Animal Behaviour Science
53, no. 4 (July 1997): 309–316.

85
Mutt Muffs…: Mutt Muffs, accessed December 20, 2012.
http://www.safeandsoundpets.com/index.html
.

11.
THE CARROT OR THE STICK?

100
Cesar Millan and pack leader…: Cesar Millan and Melissa Jo Peltier.
Be the Pack Leader: Use Cesar’s Way to Transform Your Dog…and Your Life
(New York: Harmony Books, 2007).

12.
DOGS AT WORK

107
Dogs in the workplace…: Randolph T. Barker et al. “Preliminary investigation of employee’s dog presence on stress and organizational perceptions.”
International Journal of Workplace Health Management
5, no. 1 (2012): 15–30.

108
Chronically high levels of cortisol…: Robert M. Sapolsky.
Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers
, 3rd ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1994).
Google’s dog policy…: “Code of Conduct.” Google Investor Relations, last modified April 24, 2012.
http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html#toc-dogs
.

109
Dog-friendly businesses…: The website
dogfriendly.com
has a user-contributed list of companies that allow dogs.
Charles Darwin…: Charles Darwin.
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
Introduction, afterword, and commentaries by Paul Ekman. 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 55–56.

111
Darwin’s work was forgotten for more than a century…: The situation has begun to change, in large part because of the efforts of Paul Ekman, a psychologist who has extensively studied the facial expressions in humans, and Frans de Waal, an ethologist who studies primate behavior.
There have been a few exceptions…: Marc Bekoff, an ethologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has spent much of his career extending Darwin’s work. Bekoff has argued strenuously for the recognition of animal emotions: Marc Bekoff.
The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy—and Why They Matter
(Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007).
Jaak Panksepp…: Jaak Panksepp.
Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

112
Breaking emotion down to fundamental components…: Stanley Schachter and Jerome E. Singer. “Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state.”
Psychological Review
69, no. 5 (September 1962): 379–399.
Circumplex model…: James A. Russell. “A circumplex model of affect.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
39, no. 6 (1980): 1161–1178.

113
The “seeking” system…: Jaak Panksepp. “The basic emotional circuits of mammalian brains: do animals have affective lives?”
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
35, no. 9 (October 2011): 1791–1804.

14.
BIG QUESTIONS

126
Electrical stimulation of dog brains…: Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig. “Ueber die elektrische Erregbarkeit des Grosshirns” [Electric excitability of the cerebrum].
Archiv fuer Anatomie, Physiologie und Wissenschaftliche Medicin
37
(1870): 300–322. T. Gorska. “Functional organization of cortical motor areas in adult dogs and puppies.”
Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis 3
4, no. 1 (1974): 171–203.

127
Caudate nucleus and reward…: Reward processing is most closely associated with the nucleus accumbens, which is a subregion of the caudate. This region is also called the
ventral striatum
. For brevity, I refer to both as the caudate.
Wolfram Schultz and measurement of caudate activity…: Wolfram Schultz et al. “Neuronal activity in the monkey ventral striatum related to the expectation of reward.”
Journal of Neuroscience
12, no. 12 (December 1992): 4595–4610.

16.
A NEW WORLD

155
Dog brain images from University of Minnesota Canine Brain MRI Atlas (
http://vanat.cvm.umn.edu/mriBrainAtlas/
) by T. F. Fletcher and T. C. Saveraid, 2009.