Does your dog really care?
The question of what a dog is thinking is actually an old metaphysical debate, which has its origins in Descartes’s famous saying cogito ergo sum – ‘I think, therefore I am’. Our entire human experience exists solely inside our heads. Photons may strike our retinas, but it is only through the activity of our brains that we have the subjective experience of seeing a rainbow or the sublime beauty of a sunset over the ocean. Does a dog see those things? Of course. Do they experience them the same way?
I don’t take many holidays. It is not because I am a workaholic, it is for the simple reason that I don’t like leaving my two dogs behind. While reasonably well-behaved at home, the dogs become unhinged in novel environments and make for unpleasant travel companions. Plus, one of them gets carsick with such regularity that you could set a watch by his telltale signs.
So when I do take a holiday, it is always twinged with guilt for leaving them behind. But what about the dogs, did they feel the same way? I am a neuroscientist and The Dog Project, which forms the basis of my new book, How Dogs Love Us, began as an experiment with the aim of answering the question: Do dogs miss us when we’re gone?
Now two years into a project that has involved training dogs to go into an MRI machine – fully awake – so that we can better understand how their brains work, I believe the answer is: Yes. We started with two dogs – Callie, my adopted feist, and McKenzie, a border collie.
We trained them to recognise the meaning of two hand signals, one of which was associated with a food reward. The MRI data clearly showed responses in the caudate nucleus to the ‘reward’ hand signal. But that was just the beginning.
Confident we could collect MRI data in awake dogs, we sought the help of Atlanta’s dog owners. With an outpouring of support, the MRI -dogs has swelled to 15 and continues to grow. Now more than a cute dog trick, with a sizeable cohort of subjects we can begin to answer real questions about canine cognition and emotion.
All of the dogs have successfully completed the hand signal experiment. The team has also gone through a second experiment to examine how the dogs’ brains respond to the scent of different members in their household. While in the MRI , we have presented to the dogs their own scent, the scent of familiar and strange humans, and the scent of familiar and strange dogs. We have not published these results yet, but I believe it is a smoking gun for canine emotions and proof that dogs really do love their humans, even more than their fellow canines.
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 can’t tell us what it is like for a dog to be a dog, it can 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. It could end up being a canine neural translator.
If we could map our thoughts and feelings on to 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 on to 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’ behaviour. They go to the heart of dogs’ subjective experience of the world and, in particular, their subjective experience of us.
Even though I couldn’t have known about the depth of dogs’ social cognition when we started, respect for dogs had been built into the Dog Project. Early on, we had made the presumptive decision to give the dogs the right of self-determination. If they didn’t want to be in the MRI , they could walk out. Same as a human. We created a consent form. Although the dogs did not have the capacity to understand its contents, their human guardians did.
The guardians were able to weigh the risks, however minimal, against the benefits and decide whether it was in the dogs’ best interest to participate. The legal model we used for this process was lifted from the manual on human experimentation. We treated the dogs as if they were human children. But nobody had ever done this before. In the eyes of the law, dogs are still considered property.
The brain-imaging results showed that dogs had mental processes substantially similar to our own. And if that is true, shouldn’t they be afforded rights similar to humans? I suspect that society is many years away from considering that proposition.
In the meantime, they continue to be our best friends.
Extracted from How Dogs Love Us, by Gregory Berns, published by Scribe Publications, priced £12.99.
I don’t take many holidays. It is not because I am a workaholic, it is for the simple reason that I don’t like leaving my two dogs behind. While reasonably well-behaved at home, the dogs become unhinged in novel environments and make for unpleasant travel companions. Plus, one of them gets carsick with such regularity that you could set a watch by his telltale signs.
So when I do take a holiday, it is always twinged with guilt for leaving them behind. But what about the dogs, did they feel the same way? I am a neuroscientist and The Dog Project, which forms the basis of my new book, How Dogs Love Us, began as an experiment with the aim of answering the question: Do dogs miss us when we’re gone?
Now two years into a project that has involved training dogs to go into an MRI machine – fully awake – so that we can better understand how their brains work, I believe the answer is: Yes. We started with two dogs – Callie, my adopted feist, and McKenzie, a border collie.
We trained them to recognise the meaning of two hand signals, one of which was associated with a food reward. The MRI data clearly showed responses in the caudate nucleus to the ‘reward’ hand signal. But that was just the beginning.
Confident we could collect MRI data in awake dogs, we sought the help of Atlanta’s dog owners. With an outpouring of support, the MRI -dogs has swelled to 15 and continues to grow. Now more than a cute dog trick, with a sizeable cohort of subjects we can begin to answer real questions about canine cognition and emotion.
All of the dogs have successfully completed the hand signal experiment. The team has also gone through a second experiment to examine how the dogs’ brains respond to the scent of different members in their household. While in the MRI , we have presented to the dogs their own scent, the scent of familiar and strange humans, and the scent of familiar and strange dogs. We have not published these results yet, but I believe it is a smoking gun for canine emotions and proof that dogs really do love their humans, even more than their fellow canines.
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 can’t tell us what it is like for a dog to be a dog, it can 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. It could end up being a canine neural translator.
If we could map our thoughts and feelings on to 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 on to 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’ behaviour. They go to the heart of dogs’ subjective experience of the world and, in particular, their subjective experience of us.
Even though I couldn’t have known about the depth of dogs’ social cognition when we started, respect for dogs had been built into the Dog Project. Early on, we had made the presumptive decision to give the dogs the right of self-determination. If they didn’t want to be in the MRI , they could walk out. Same as a human. We created a consent form. Although the dogs did not have the capacity to understand its contents, their human guardians did.
The guardians were able to weigh the risks, however minimal, against the benefits and decide whether it was in the dogs’ best interest to participate. The legal model we used for this process was lifted from the manual on human experimentation. We treated the dogs as if they were human children. But nobody had ever done this before. In the eyes of the law, dogs are still considered property.
The brain-imaging results showed that dogs had mental processes substantially similar to our own. And if that is true, shouldn’t they be afforded rights similar to humans? I suspect that society is many years away from considering that proposition.
In the meantime, they continue to be our best friends.
Extracted from How Dogs Love Us, by Gregory Berns, published by Scribe Publications, priced £12.99.