How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain (4 page)

The second flaw is the reliance on wolf behavior to interpret dog behavior, termed
lupomorphism.
While it is true that dogs and wolves share a common ancestor, that does not mean that dogs are descended from wolves. This is an important distinction. The evolutionary trajectories of wolves and dogs diverged when some of the “wolf-dogs” started hanging out with proto-humans. Those that stuck around became dogs, and those that stayed away became modern wolves. Modern wolves behave differently from dogs, and they have very different social structures. Their brains are different too. Interpreting dog behavior through the lens of wolf behavior is even worse than anthropomorphizing: it’s a human anthropomorphizing wolf behavior and using that flawed impression as an analogy for dog behavior.

Wolf analogies have led to many flawed training strategies based on the idea that the human must be the “pack leader,” an approach most commonly associated with Cesar Millan. Unfortunately, there is no scientific basis for using the wolf’s social structure as a model for the dog-human relationship.

Dogs can’t talk, and we can’t transport ourselves into a dog’s mind to know what its subjective experience is. Where I see a happy golden retriever playfully jumping up and down, someone else might see a hungry dog planning to eat her for dinner. So what can we do to better know a dog’s mind?

Although I hadn’t yet made the connection at the party, I would soon realize that the solution had been right in front of me all along: brain imaging.

Because all mammalian brains have substantially similar parts, a map of canine brain activation could be referenced to its human equivalent. For instance, if we saw activation in the reward center of the dog brain, that could be interpreted through human experiments that result in similar activity. With human experiments, we have a reasonably good idea of what happened to create a particular pattern of brain activation. We know, for example, that activity in the visual part of the brain can be caused either by photons hitting the retina or by the person mentally imagining a scene with his eyes closed. Similarly, if we observed activity in the visual part of a dog’s brain,
and the dog wasn’t looking at anything, we could reasonably assume that it was forming a mental image of something. Dogs might have imaginations too!

Mapping between the brains of different species is called a
functional homology.
It means that a subjective experience like imagination can map onto both a human brain and a dog brain. The patterns of activity in the two brains would illustrate how to transform one type of brain into the other.

Philosophers dismiss the question of what it is like to be a dog as unanswerable, but functional homologies between dog and human brains could provide the missing link. Although brain imaging wouldn’t tell us what it is like for a dog to be a dog, it could provide a road map—a brain map—of what it would be like for a human to be a dog, without the bias of the human interpreter. If it worked, brain imaging could end up being a canine neural translator. We could go way beyond the question of why Lyra was being obnoxious at the party. If we could map our thoughts and feelings onto the dog brain, we could get right to the heart of the dog-human relationship: Do dogs love us?

It all comes down to reciprocity. If the dog-human relationship is predominantly one-sided, with humans projecting their thoughts onto the dog vacuously staring up at his master in the hopes of receiving a doggie treat, then the dog is not much better than a big teddy bear—a warm, soft, comforting object.

But what if the dog reciprocates in the relationship? Do dogs have some concept of humans as something more than food dispensers? Simply knowing that human feelings toward dogs are reciprocated in some way, even if only partially, changes everything. It would mean that dog-human relationships belong on the same plane as human-human relationships.

None of these questions can be answered simply by observing
dogs’ behavior. They go to the heart of dogs’ subjective experience of the world and, in particular, their subjective experience of us.

My colleague and his wife didn’t stay long. Even with the dogs locked away we could hear Lyra barking in the bedroom above the din of the party. Nobody was surprised when they were the first to say good-bye.

Once they left, I let the dogs out. Lyra ran to the remaining guests and, in her state of excitement, puked up something foamy and green. The partiers watched in disgust as Callie darted over to slurp it up.

From the chorus of “Oooh, gross!” it was clear even the animal lovers were aghast at our dogs’ behavior. An exodus ensued.

And that is why we no longer hold lab parties at our house.

3

A Fishing Expedition

W
HILE THE EMBARRASSING INCIDENT
of the lab party was the second catalyst of the Dog Project (Newton’s death being the first), the final event that set the project in motion came out of the blue: the death of Osama bin Laden.

Every Wednesday morning, the members of my research group gather for the one sacred event of every academic laboratory: lab meeting. Regardless of the field of research, every lab in every university holds a meeting once a week, the only time when everyone, from the lowliest undergraduate to the lab director himself, has the opportunity to learn what everyone else has been doing. At lab meeting, everything is laid on the table. You hear about new discoveries, unexplainable data, and false leads.

All the research my lab does is based on MRI data. We are a “dry” lab because we don’t work with chemicals or do biological experiments that require expensive containment equipment. Those types of labs are “wet” because they have specialized plumbing and air vents to prevent the release of toxic fumes or, worse, infectious microbes. Our lab doesn’t even have a sink. It is simply a large room
with computer terminals located around the perimeter. A central table serves as a hub for socializing and lab meetings. A calendar hangs on the wall to let everyone know when people are out of town and when we’ll be scanning people at the hospital. This gives a snapshot of how busy we are. No data, no science. I like to see a good flow of research subjects, with at least four a week. Other than that, the walls are covered floor to ceiling with whiteboards. We use the walls to graffiti ideas. Every inch is covered in diagrams, equations, or graphs. Visitors are mesmerized by the visual onslaught of the specialized code of science: Greek symbols, statistical arcana, flow charts. The lab people are literally surrounded by their ideas.

It takes about two years to go from initial brainstorming to published paper. The actual data collection—scanning subjects in the MRI machine—takes the smallest portion of that time. We might spend six months brainstorming and debugging an idea and only one month collecting the data. Sometimes the results turn out to be a lot more complicated than anticipated. Okay,
most of the time
they turn out to be more complicated than we had expected; sometimes we spend a year analyzing the data to make sense of the results. The process of writing up the findings and submitting to a journal to publish them can also take a year.

A few years before embarking on the Dog Project, my team began exploring different types of decision making. Having spent a decade studying the effects of rewards like money and food on the brain, we had recently branched out to study decisions based on sacred values. This was not planned. Instead, it came about when I met Scott Atran, an anthropologist who studies the roots of terrorism. We met at an academic conference and, over a bottle of wine, hatched the idea of using fMRI to try to understand how religion and other sacred beliefs guide decision making. It would be a fun collaboration, with the practical added benefit of being fundable by the Department of Defense. But in order to probe people’s sacred values, we would have
to push on hot-button issues. Race, religion, sex, guns, abortion, gay rights—all the stuff you don’t talk about with the in-laws.

We spent a year brainstorming the sacred values experiment, at least half that time wasted because nobody in the lab truly felt comfortable talking about these issues. Scientists or not, if you really push on what is sacred to people, you can be sure they’ll be offended.

At some point, I think the lab realized that we weren’t going to make progress until we got better at suggesting ideas that might offend someone else. So it was with a determined effort that we became truly politically incorrect. That’s also how we really got to know one another. The team includes people of different sexes, sexual orientations, religions, races, political affiliations, even diets. Drawing on our own sacred values, we each compiled a list of the most offensive statements we could imagine and whittled them down. When we examined the brain responses to these statements, we found that the brain processes sacred values as rules—like the Ten Commandments. This was important because it explained why sacred beliefs are so resistant to change. They cannot be argued with, and they cannot be traded for money or other material things.

Maybe it was some kind of cosmic premonition, but one of the issues we probed in the sacred values experiment was whether people identified themselves as a dog person or a cat person. I am not sure this is a good thing, but I have always categorized people this way. And if the answer was “neither,” then that was the worst of all.

Against this backdrop of the sacred values experiment, the mission to kill Osama bin Laden was all over the news. As details trickled out, it was revealed that a dog had accompanied SEAL Team 6.

This shouldn’t have been particularly surprising; dogs have been part of military units throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They are fixtures at border crossings and airports, and every urban police department has a K9 unit. But the fact that a dog had
helped kill the most wanted man in the world was something special. It showed that dogs were not just companions. Even though it could have no understanding of democracy, a dog had helped defend a way of life.

Like the human members of SEAL Team 6, the identity of the dog on the mission wasn’t revealed. But this anonymity just stoked the media firestorm. To satisfy the public’s appetite for details, the public relations arm of the navy released stock photos of military working dogs: A German shepherd wearing a bulletproof vest bounding through a stream. A Belgian malinois, in tandem with its handler, leaping off the ramp of a helicopter.

The most touching photo was of a dog strapped to the chest of a soldier parachuting out of an airplane at thirty thousand feet, both wearing oxygen masks. The soldier cradled the dog with one arm while pulling the parachute release cord with the other. The closeness of the bond and the physical embrace really hit home for me: dogs and humans belong together. We couldn’t exist without each other.

Prior to seeing those photos, I had been completely unaware that dogs had been trained to do such amazing feats. The noise from a helicopter is deafening. Most humans take some time to get used to it, and even then they wear heavy-duty ear protection. Obviously these dogs had been acclimated to some fairly hostile environments. Judging from the photos, they not only tolerated them, they enjoyed working in them with their humans.

“Did you guys hear there was a dog on the SEAL team?” I asked at our Wednesday lab meeting. The team came over to one of the computers to see the images of the military dogs that had gotten me so excited.

“That’s badass!” Andrew Brooks, the sole graduate student in the lab, said. Andrew had been in the lab for two years and was working
toward his PhD in neuroscience. I liked him a lot. His parents were missionaries then living in Japan. But their religious fervor didn’t stick to Andrew. He swung the other way and found his calling in science. Even so, his route to Emory University was unusual.

Emory is considered a fairly prestigious institution, and most of the students who apply to graduate school come from a predictable group of universities. The Ivy Leaguers tend to stay in the Northeast, so Emory gets a steady feed of students from the “Southern Ivies” like Duke and Vanderbilt Universities. But Andrew had gone to a local community college and then transferred to a tiny liberal arts school in Macon, Georgia. After he graduated, he had applied to grad school at Emory. Macon is about as deep in the South as you can get. I knew Macon only as the home of the Allman Brothers Band and the place where Duane Allman was killed when his motorcycle collided with a flatbed truck in 1971, leading to the posthumous classic album
Eat a Peach.

Early in my career, I would have turned up my nose at a student like Andrew. There was a time when I mistook pedigree, or even raw intellect, as the key determinant of success in science. But I had grown wary of the paper superstars. Too many incredibly smart students had come through the lab who didn’t have the passion for research. Maybe they were accustomed to things being easy for them. Unfortunately, science never goes the way you expect. Many of them didn’t deal with the unexpected very well.

Andrew didn’t take anything for granted. He was smart, he worked hard, and he had a fire in the belly for doing experiments that might fail spectacularly. And Andrew was a dog person. He lived with a toy poodle named Daisy and an American Eskimo called Mochi.

The other big dog person in the lab was Lisa LaViers. Lisa had just joined the lab after graduating from Emory. She had done well in my neuroeconomics class the previous semester, and when a job opened up in the lab, I had encouraged her to apply.

Lisa was, in a word, perky. As one of the younger people in the lab, I loved her sense of adventure and the enthusiasm that she brought to the team. Although she had no previous experience with fMRI, I went on a gut instinct that she could quickly learn the skills to carry a project from the starting line all the way to the finish. She had majored in economics, so she had some math skills. Everything we did in the lab, from programming experiments to analyzing the fMRI data, involved a fair amount of mathematical sophistication. Even so, nothing an econ major couldn’t handle. Although Lisa was initially apprehensive about taking a job for which she was a newbie, she quickly gained confidence as she took over the sacred values project.