![]() “Obviously, dog brains are much smaller, and they don’t have as much cortex as we do, but some of the core areas around the brainstem-the basal ganglia, which the caudate nucleus is part of-look very much like those in humans,” he says. But, he points out, the research suggests that the human brain and canine brain aren’t as radically different as we might have imagined. He admits that the idea is controversial. ![]() “At some fundamental level, we believe the dogs are experiencing emotions something like we do,” Berns says. They’re close enough, he suggests, that we can safely describe them with words we don’t often apply to animals: the mental activity represents emotions, and perhaps even constitute love. Image via PLOS ONEīerns interprets these results as indications that, in some ways, the mental processes of dogs may not be so different from those of humans. This, too, triggered activation in the caudate.īerns’ dog Callie in the fMRI, being shown one of the hand signals. To further probe how the dogs’ brain activity correlates with the actions of humans they know well, they put the dogs in the fMRI and had their owners leave the room, then walk back in. “In this case, the reward system only seems to activate in response to the smell of a familiar human, which is pretty amazing,” he says. Again, they saw increased activity in the caudate, but only as a result of one of the scents. “We wanted to understand how dogs recognize other people and dogs in their households,” Berns says. As part of a second experiment, they had dogs sit in the scanner and exposed them to smells of humans (from either their owners or strangers) and other dogs (from either dogs they lived with or unfamiliar dogs). Subsequent work revealed more unexpected findings. In humans-and in dogs, the research indicated-caudate activity is related to the desire to have something that causes pleasure, and the satisfaction involved in obtaining it. As they hypothesized, the first signal triggered elevated activity in an area called the caudate nucleus, which is rich in receptors for dopamine (a neurotransmitter involved in the sensation of pleasure). The research is still in its preliminary stages, but as Berns’ team begins to scratch the surface of the canine brain, they’re finding something surprising-in several ways, its activity mirrors that of the human brain to a much greater extent than expected.Īs part of their first paper published on the work in 2012, they trained dogs to recognize two different hand signals: one that meant the animal would be given a piece of hot dog imminently, and one that meant no hot dog. ![]() In total, they’ve successfully trained about a dozen dogs to voluntarily participate in their studies. To deal with the device’s noise (which can surpass 95 decibels, equivalent to the sound of a jackhammer 50 feet away), they taped earmuffs to the dogs’ heads and piped in ambient noise over loudspeakers, so instead of the machine’s sound beginning abruptly, it gradually arrived over background noises.Ī dog undergoes training, learning how to rest its head on a pad without moving, so that scientists can scan his brain. To solve the problem, Berns recruited dogs from the local community-starting with a dog he adopted after Newtown died-and gradually trained them to climb up a series of steps into a table, rest their head on a pad inside the fMRI’s inner tunnel and sit still for 30 seconds at a time as the machine does its work. Using anesthesia or restraining the dogs would ruin the experiments, producing an image of an unconscious or anxious dog instead of a comfortable, alert one. Just looking inside inside the canine brain, however, posed a formidable challenge: Getting an accurate fMRI reading means that the subject has to stay almost perfectly still, moving less than a millimeter from one moment to the next. “It got me wondering about how dogs view their relationship with us-if he had loved me the same way I had loved him.” “I’ve always been a dog person, and when my dog died, a pug named Newton, it planted a seed in my mind,” says Berns, who published a new book on his recent work, How Dogs Love Us, last week. Instead of merely studying canine behavior, as has been done for years, he and his colleagues began scrutinizing the internal architecture and patterns of dogs’ brains, using the same tools they rely on to better understand the brains of humans. Then, in 2011, he took on a new object of neuroscientific study: Canis lupus familiaris, otherwise known as the domesticated dog. Using fMRI technology, which tracks the flow of blood to different areas of the brain, he sought to find correlations between people’s internal mental patterns and their real-world behaviors, decisions and preferences. For the first few decades of his career, Emory neuroscientist Gregory Berns studied the human mind.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |