How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain

by Berns, Gregory

  Even though I wasn’t sure how we would pay for all this, there was never any real question that I was going all in. I had always followed my passion and hunches in science rather than trying to fit my research program into whatever the funding agencies’ hot topic of the year was. I didn’t hesitate to commit all of my available resources to expand the Dog Project. I had faith that eventually people would soon realize that this wasn’t a frivolous endeavor, and that deciphering what goes on in dogs’ minds would tell us something about where humans came from and how we can live more harmoniously with these wonderful creatures.

  The first order of business was to recruit the A-Team. Mark sent out an e-mail to everyone who had come through CPT in the past ten years. He put in calls to local veterinarians. We set a high bar. Callie and McKenzie had shown us what kind of dog could do this. Dogs had to be calm, good in novel environments, good with strangers, good with other dogs, inquisitive, unafraid of loud noises, able to wear earmuffs, and, above all, have a drive to learn new things.

  We held tryouts. We tested the dog-human teams for their ability to learn new tasks, like going in the head coil and wearing earmuffs. We played recordings of the scanner noise, watching for any signs of anxiety. After hours of testing, we were still left with five new dogs and owners who were ready to commit to the project. Just as exciting, the dogs represented a cross section of breeds. We had Kady, a Lab-golden mix who had washed out of therapy training for being too sensitive. There was Rocky, the miniature poodle; Caylin, another border collie; and Huxley, a Brittany mix. And finally, rounding out the motley crew was Tigger, a funny Boston terrier who reminded me a lot of Newton.

  Kady wearing earmuffs (above). Tigger in the head coil (below).

  (Helen Berns)

  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 34, 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.

  156 Reverse inference…: Russell A. Poldrack. “The role of fMRI in cognitive neuroscience: where do we stand?” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 18, no. 2 (April 2008): 223–227.

  Reverse inference in the caudate…: Dan Ariely and Gregory S. Berns. “Neuromarketing: the hope and hype of neuroimaging in business.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11, no. 4 (April 2010): 284–292.

  157 Love and the caudate…: Arthur Aron et al. “Reward, motivation, and emotion systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love.” Journal of Neurophysiology 94, no. 1 (July 2005): 327–337.

  17. PEAS AND HOT DOGS

  164 Side preference in dogs…: Camille Ward and Barbara B. Smuts. “Quantity-based judgments in the domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris).” Animal Cognition 10, no. 1 (January 2007): 71–80.

  18. THROUGH A DOG’S EYES

  169 Signal-to-noise ratio…: The SNR increases roughly by a factor of √N, where N is the number of repetitions. For example, 100 repetitions would increase the SNR by a factor of 10.

  173 Dogs used attentional cues from humans…: Márta Gácsi et al. “Are readers of our face readers of our minds? Dogs (Canis familiaris) show situation-dependent recognition of human’s attention.” Animal Cognition 7, no. 3 (July 2004): 144–153. Dogs are sensitive to the social context…: Juliane Kaminski et al. “Domestic dogs are sensitive to a human’s perspective.” Behaviour 146, no. 7 (2009): 979–998. Alexandra Horowitz. “Theory of mind in dogs? Examining method and concept.” Learning and Behavior 39, no. 4 (December 2011): 314–317.

  174 Knowing how to read people and how to behave in different social settings is the difference between success and failure…: Gregory Berns. Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2008).

  19. EUREKA!

  182 Nothing in the brain implies an understanding of meaning…: When I first presented the findings to a group of psychologists, this is exactly what they said.

  Dogs’ ability to intuit the meaning of human social signals…: Brian Hare and Michael Tomasello. “Human-like social skills in dogs?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9, no. 9 (September 2005): 439–444. Brian Hare, Josep Call, and Mi
chael Tomasello. “Communication of food location between human and dog (Canis familiaris).” Evolution of Communication 2, no. 1 (1998): 137–159. See also A. Miklósi et al. “Use of experimenter-given cues in dogs.” Animal Cognition 1, no. 2 (1998): 113–121.

  Social cognition of wolves and chimpanzees…: Brian Hare et al. “The domestication of social cognition in dogs.” Science 298, no. 5598 (November 2002): 1634–1636. See also Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods. The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter than You Think (New York: Dutton, 2013).

  183 Kool-Aid experiment…: Giuseppe Pagnoni et al. “Activity in human ventral striatum locked to errors of reward prediction.” Nature Neuroscience 5, no. 2 (2002): 97–98.

  Dysfunctional caudate in addiction…: Nora D. Volkow et al. “Addiction: beyond dopamine reward circuitry.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108, no. 37 (September 2011): 15037–15042.

  Bonus effect in the caudate to social cues…: James K. Rilling et al. “A neural basis for social cooperation.” Neuron 35, no. 2 (July 18, 2002): 395–405. I. Aharon et al. “Beautiful faces have variable reward value: fMRI and behavioral evidence.” Neuron 32, no. 3 (November 8, 2001): 537–551.

  20. DOES MY DOG LOVE ME?

  186 We had finished the first scientific paper…: Gregory S. Berns, Andrew M. Brooks, and Mark Spivak. “Functional MRI in Awake Unrestrained Dogs.” Public Library of Science ONE 7, no. 5 (2012): e38027.

  190 Mirror neurons…: Giacomo Rizzolatti and Luigi Craighero. “The mirror-neuron system.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004): 169–192.