What is your dog thinking? Brain scans unleash canine secrets
May 7, 2012
Callie wears ear protection as she prepares to enter the scanner (credit: Bryan Meltz)
Emory Center for Neuropolicy researchers at Emory University have developed a new method to scan the brains of alert dogs and explore their minds. The technique uses functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), the same tool that is unlocking secrets of the human brain.
“It was amazing to see the first brain images of a fully awake, unrestrained dog,” says Gregory Berns, director of the Emory Center for Neuropolicy and lead researcher of the dog project.
The researchers aim to decode the mental processes of dogs by recording which areas of their brains are activated by various stimuli.
Ultimately, they hope to get at questions like: Do dogs have empathy? Do they know when their owners are happy or sad? How much language do they really understand?
In the first experiment, the dogs were trained to respond to hand signals. One signal meant the dog would receive a hot dog treat, and another signal meant it would not receive one.
The caudate region of the brain, associated with rewards in humans, showed activation in both dogs when they saw the signal for the treat, but not for the no-treat signal.
“These results indicate that dogs pay very close attention to human signals,” Berns says. “And these signals may have a direct line to the dog’s reward system.”
Ref.: Gregory S. Berns, Andrew M. Brooks, Mark Spivak, Functional MRI in Awake Unrestrained Dogs, Social Science Research Network, 2012 [download] (open access)
Comments (7)
by shabnam
dear researchers before wasting time energy money patience etc etc do consider communicating with humans who relate to other species on equal footg. when one lives with another you learn more than simply notg observatory points. please!
by Peter Simmons
This smacks of reinventing the wheel. But scientists have constantly to think up new ways of getting funding, their lifeblood. Of course they will never get the complexity and nuances of a dog’s brain, which most dog people know from experience; at best this is a crude method of assessing thinking. Dogs, as the ‘dependent’ member of the relationship, have naturally become incredibly good at understanding our language, and the more you talk to them the more they understand – pretty basic, that’s how children learn language. Just because dogs don’t have our palate doesn’t mean they don’t understand what we say, and subtly answer – if you watch carefully you may get it! And of course they experience empathy, they’re mammals. Why do so many people assume we are so different from other mammals, perhaps they want to feel superior.
by Chris
Wow do we really need a team of “educated researchers” and an MRI radiation brain scanner to figure out what we already know about DOGS? They should scan their own brains for something more worthwhile to do with their time than figure out if a dog’s brain lights up when you freakin feed him.
by tedhowardnz
MRI does not currently have the resolution to resolve activity at the level of individual neurons. All it can give is aggregate average over many neurons.
For some simple localised functions, like first level sense data, this has some utility; as these things do seem to be localised to specific regions of the brain.
It seems that most higher level functionality is not localised to specific areas of the brain, but is actually widely distributed across most of the brain.
MRI is a great tool for morphology.
It seems to be completely useless for resolving the big issues of brain-mind interface, which seem to reside at the level of interaction of individual neurons, and smaller, at the level of processes within neurons, and at the interfaces between neurons.
In so far as understanding how brains actually produce us – MRI seems to be a very expensive, very pretty, dead end!
by Lare
Once in the scanner they got the dogs to remain still How?
by Nahuel
Will the dogs with increased intelligence beings to evolve the next hand of human intervention?
by roundabout
I reckon any dog owner could have told them that without all the fancy equipment. Dogs understand a lot of language, especially when it pertains to food, taking walks, riding in the car, going to see someone they know and like — oh yeah, that too, dogs like some people more than others and they are more positively inclined towards people who do things with them than to those who simply give them food.