Comments on: What is your dog thinking? Brain scans unleash canine secrets

By: shabnam

shabnam — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 03:58:27 +0000

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

Peter Simmons — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:30:57 +0000

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

Chris — Tue, 08 May 2012 08:48:41 +0000

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

tedhowardnz — Mon, 07 May 2012 22:58:30 +0000

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

Lare — Mon, 07 May 2012 19:13:24 +0000

Once in the scanner they got the dogs to remain still How?

By: Nahuel

Nahuel — Mon, 07 May 2012 18:53:41 +0000

Will the dogs with increased intelligence beings to evolve the next hand of human intervention?

By: roundabout

roundabout — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:55:35 +0000

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.