Neuroscientist explores 'What It's Like to Be a Dog'

Neuroscientist explores 'What It's Like to Be a Dog'


Berns went on to conduct a series of experiments on dogs, gathering both behavioral and fMRI data on questions such as: How capable are dogs of self-restraint? Do dogs prefer praise from their owners or food? How do dogs process faces in their brains? What's going on in a dog's when it smells the scent of its owner?

In 2013, Berns wrote a New York Times bestseller called "How Dogs Love Us." He described how the death of his beloved pug Newton planted the seeds for his eventual switch from the studying the to focus on non-invasive studies of the cognition of dogs and other .

In the following Q&A, Berns talks about his new book, What It's Like to Be a Dog: And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience, just published by Basic Books. The book focuses on his hopes that understanding how animals think will revolution how we treat them.

Question: Can you talk about all the dogs you've had as pets during your life?

Gregory Berns: When I was a child growing up in Southern California we had two golden retrievers, Pretzel and Popcorn. It's embarrassing, but my parents always named their dogs after food. I'm not sure why. Most of the children in the area had dogs and horses and we would go traipsing around the hills. Kids and dogs go together.




Q: "What It's Like to Be a Dog" describes all the experimental work you have done so far with canine cognition. What's the biggest surprise to come out of your research?

Neuroscientist explores 'What It's Like to Be a Dog'
Berns and Callie. Credit: Emory University

GB: If you take language out of the picture, what we're finding is that we see a lot of similarities between dogs and humans. In one study, for instance, we used fMRI to measure the relative value of food versus praise to the dogs and found that almost all the dogs' brains responded to praise as much, and sometimes more, than to food. We ourselves know how it feels when someone praises us, there's a positive feeling associated with it. That's perhaps similar to what dogs are feeling.


Now that we are gaining a basic understanding of canine cognition, we are starting to focus more on the individuality of —what it's like to be this dog, as opposed to that dog.


GB: It started in 2015 when we gained access to the brains of two dolphins that had died, and we showed that we could use DTI to map their sensory and motor systems. Dolphins are incredibly intelligent, social animals but they've remained relatively mysterious. We provided the first picture of the entire dolphin brain and all the white matter connections inside of it.


Through a project I call the Brain Ark we're collecting a digital archive of high-resolution, three-dimensional brain structures of megafauna. It's publicly available to other researchers to contribute to and draw data from.


GB: The Brain Ark is an attempt to catalog and study brains of large mammal species before they are gone. Or, as in the case of the Tasmanian tiger, after they're gone. Many megafauna are in danger of extinction because their habitats are being chopped up in ways that don't allow them to sustain themselves or to migrate.


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Provided by Emory University
Citation: Neuroscientist explores 'What It's Like to Be a Dog' (2017, September 8) retrieved 16 September 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2017-09-neuroscientist-explores-dog.html

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