I'm A Dog Mom. Hear Me Bark.
It is an amazing time to be a dog, and a dog mom (or dad)! Things are just snappin’ in the dog world right now. Tons of books, magazines, and websites are talking about dogs--the genetics of dogs, the physiology of dogs, the evolution of dogs, the training of dogs, you name it. Now that I’m in the “Dog Biz,” I get tons of dog-themed gifts from friends and family—socks, coffee mugs, t-shirts, and most of all, books. I am a huge reader—both fiction and non-. I adored Marley and Me, Racing in the Rain, and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle; this last one is not a “dog book” per se, but offers a spot-on rendering of the profound, understanding-beyond-words-core of the human/dog relationship. In the past year or so, I’ve begun to focus on non-fiction books about dogs—in particular, the genetics and neuroscience of Canis Lupus Familiaris. For Christmas, my wonderful husband gave me How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain, by Greogry Berns, M.D., Ph.D. We both read it in only a few days. It is AWESOME.
Dr. Berns has studied the “reward center” of the human brain
for years—what humans like, how we like it, why we sometimes like it too much, and how that information gets
processed in our noggins. His work using fMRI, or functional Magnetic Resonance
Imaging, has shown that the place in the brain that anticipates goodness is
called the caudate nucleus, located
in oldest part of the brain (some call it the “reptilian brain”)—the basal ganglia. The caudate is active in
learning, memory, goal-setting, and social behavior. It allows us to understand
that certain actions result in certain outcomes.
Now, Dr. Berns is a true-blue dog lover. And when his dog,
Newton, passed away, he began to wonder, Had
Newton loved him like he had loved Newton? He thought he had. Newton, a pug,
had slept buried in his armpit every night of his life. But how could he know
for sure? Could he prove it? So, he launched the Dog Project to try to answer
the question. What he found answered much more.
The story of the Dog Project is an amazing one. It’s about a
journey, tracing the growing trust, friendship, and love that grew between Dr.
Berns and Callie, a Feist that his wife and daughters had adopted from a shelter.
At first, Berns didn’t know if he even liked Callie; she wasn’t like any other
dog he’d had before. She was skittish and not very affectionate. She was a hunter,
chasing down and catching, with glee, various small animals and rodents in the back
yard of their home in Atlanta, Georgia. This really upset his young daughters,
but what else could Callie do? Her genetics mandated that she hunt, since she
had the blood of the Treeing Feist coursing through her veins. (Before this
book, I’d never heard about Feists; what a cool, all-American dog!) And, as he
found out, she was super smart; it’s not every dog who can learn to lie
perfectly still for 10 minutes in a really loud MRI machine while humans take
pictures of her brain! This was a BIG
DEAL. No one had ever captured an image of a wide-awake dog brain. The Dog Project
team took more than 400! And what they showed proved that a dog’s brain works a
lot like a human’s.
When Callie was in the MRI, she and Dr. Berns “talked” to
each other. He’d taught Callie two hand signals: “hot dogs” and “no hot dogs.”
When he signaled “hot dogs,” he waited several seconds, then gave Callie a
small piece of a hot dog. When he signaled “no hot dogs,” he waited, then gave
her nothing. He signaled randomly, multiple times. Meanwhile, the MRI was
taking photos of Callie’s brain. When Callie saw the “hot dogs” signal, her caudate
lit up like wild fire. When she saw the “no hot dogs” signal, her caudate was
dark. This meant that Callie understood that the “hot dogs” hand signal meant “hot
dogs are coming” and that was a good thing! It meant that she could look into
the future and know what her dad was going to do. Dr. Berns describes it this
way: “. . .Callie looked at my hand signals and constructed a dog theory of
what I was thinking or at least intending. [A] dog theory of mind . . . Callie’s caudate activation was just the
first piece of evidence that my intentions had been received, and understood,
in her brain” (Berns, 183-4). So what is a theory of mind? Wikipedia defines it
this way: “Theory of mind (often
abbreviated "ToM") is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs,
intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to
understand that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions that are different
from one's own.” This just floored me. I’d always marveled at the level to
which my dogs understand me; they know when I’m happy, sad, mad, or even
pretending to be mad—making my scary “monster” face, “claws” up and growling.
They just wag their tails and do the play bow. “Aw, mom! You’re just silly!”
they seem to be saying. Thanks to the Dog Project, I now know how their brains allow them to read me
like a book.
Callie’s MRI scans also showed activation of mirror neurons, which lets mammals place
themselves in each other’s shoes. Berns says, “At a basic scientific level,
these neurons seem to play a key role in linking action production with action observation
and to allow animals to understand the actions of other members of their
species from their own perspective. Many researchers have suggested mirror
neurons are the basis of empathy. If this turns out to be true, then mirror
neurons not only allow us to simulate the actions of each other from the
inside, but they may allow us to feel what someone else feels too” (Berns, 191).
When Callie watched her dad reaching for the hot dogs, her motor cortex lit up,
although she did not move. Dr. Berns postulated
that Callie was mirroring, or mapping the movement of her human’s hand onto her
own equivalent—her front leg and paw.
This kind of mirror-mapping has been shown in humans. “In 2010, an fMRI
study reported that when people watched silent movies of a dog barking, the
parts of the humans’ brains that responded to sounds were activated, even
though there was no actual sound. It was like the humans filled in the sound of
a dog barking just by observation. But seeing this kind of mirror neuron
activity in Callie . . . meant that the
whole dog-human relationship was not just a scam. If dogs had the ability to
transform human actions into their own doggie equivalent, then maybe they
really did feel what we feel. At least a dog version of it” (Berns, 192-3).
This book is so filled with new information about what and
how dogs think, I could go on and on and on. I think I’ll read it again. It is
very accessible, putting cutting-edge science into layman’s terms. But more
than that, the story of Berns, his family (both humans and dogs), his research
team, and the wonderful contributions of the dogs in the Dog Project—McKenzie,
Kady, Rocky, Caylin, Huxley, and Tigger—will make you smile, while leaving you
wide-eyed with wonder. “The whole purpose of the Dog Project was to understand
the dog-human relationship from the dog’s perspective, and the most important
thing that we learned was that dogs’ brains show evidence of a theory of mind
for humans. This means that they not only pay attention to what we do but to
what we think, and they change their behavior based on what they think we’re
thinking” (Berns, 211). I can’t wait to find out what else Dr. Berns, Callie,
and the gang discover!
Links:
Dr. Gregory Berns:
The Feist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_%28dog%29
The Caudate Nucleus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caudate_nucleus
The Basal Ganglia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_ganglia
The Triune Brain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_brain#Lay_interest
Theory of Mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
Thanks for visiting! Michelle Vardeman Martin
To learn more about Camp Bow Wow - Dallas High Five, visit:
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Thanks for visiting! Michelle Vardeman Martin
To learn more about Camp Bow Wow - Dallas High Five, visit:
http://www.facebook.com/CampBowWowDallasHighFive
http://www.campbowwow.com/dallashighfive
