Ever wondered how deeply dogs reciprocate our affection? Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist and professor of neuroeconomics at Emory University, thought about this while mourning his beloved pug, Newton. In his work with addiction and reward centers in the brain, Berns used fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to open "the black box of the human mind." Turning to his lab team, Berns brought up the possibility of creating a "functional homology" (a mapping between the brains of two different species) that could decode the canine brain to discover empirically what--and how--dogs think.
As Berns describes in How Dogs Love Us, the project faced significant early obstacles. Even though the experiments would not receive funding, the research needed to be approved by the university--and it was a "fishing expedition" with no clear goal in mind. Furthermore, if the researchers were able to get around Emory's restrictions on testing dogs and other animals, in order to gain any significant data from the fMRI, the dogs would need to be fully conscious, willing participants and stay completely still for several minutes while their brains were scanned.
Eventually, the team received permission from the university by applying the same guidelines as for a human child--establishing a visual willingness to participate and a guardian's consent. Working with his own mixed breed dog and a volunteer's border collie, Bern was surprised by how quickly they adapted to wearing sound-deadening earmuffs, placing their heads in the chinrest and remaining in the scanner. He then was able to map the canine brain's reaction to a variety of situations, including the presence of food, the scent of a strange dog or human and the scent of a familiar "pack member."
How Dogs Love Us makes a thought-provoking and often humorous case for something canine lovers have suspected for years: dogs are not simply "Pavlovian learning machines" but, rather, sentient beings with a high level of empathy and an affinity for social learning. Dogs, Bern discovered, share many of the same complex mental processes humans do. In answering his original question, he sparks many more about how we value and care for our canine companions. --Kristen Galles
Shelf Talker: In order to understand the canine brain, a neuroscientist must first figure out how to get dogs to sit still in an MRI scanner. What he discovers next could transform our relationship to our pets.