Every book ever written about what dogs are thinking is about what someone thinks dogs are thinking.
Gregory Berns’ book, “How Dogs Love Us, A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain,” is something completely different.
Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, took a premise all dog lovers have always known — that our dogs love us back — and proved it through the science of brain mapping.
His quest began after losing his 14-year-old pug, Newton. After a long period of mourning, he began wondering if Newton felt the same attachment to him.
“Do dogs have some concept of humans as something more than food dispensers? Simply knowing that human feelings toward dogs are reciprocated in some way, even if only partially, changes everything. It would mean that dog-human relationships belong on the same plan as human-human relationships,” Berns writes.
Berns was accustomed to studying human brains, but this would be something very different. He and his team wanted to compare dogs’ brains with those of humans. Employing a technique used on humans for the past 20 years, the team used functional MRI to study active neurons in the animal’s brain.
Over two years, Berns, taught his dog, Callie, a shelter-rescued rat terrier, to enthusiastically walk into a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine and sit, sphinx-like and without moving, until scientists could get thousands of images of her brain in order to map it. McKenzie, a team member’s border collie, was also in the first round of tests to find out how dogs relate to their humans.
(Just thinking about the logistics of accomplishing the training necessary to do the study is mind boggling to anyone who has ever trained an animal. Most people hate MRIs. How do you make a dog be amenable to the test? Hint: hot dogs.)
Berns discounts the theory that we can rely on wolf behavior to interpret dog behavior.
“The evolutionary trajectories of wolves and dogs diverged when some of the “wolf-dogs” started hanging out with proto-humans (hypothetical primitive ancestors of modern humans). Those that stuck around became dogs and those that stayed away became modern wolves,” he writes.
This means wolves behave differently from dogs and have very different social structures. Wolf analogies have led to the flawed training strategies based on the idea that the human must be a “pack leader,” according to Bern.
The team was able to deduce through the study that although a dog can’t talk, his social interaction with his humans is remarkably advanced. It is humans who are not paying attention. In a dog’s eyes, we are his partners, not his leader.
The journey Berns and his team embarked on, and are continuing, is as remarkable as the study’s conclusions to date.
Suffice to say, Berns proves what most pet lovers have always known. Our dogs are much like us. They are sentient beings. Quite simply, they think about what we are thinking.