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Why The Brains Of Dogs & Humans Are More Similar Than You Think
Dogs have long been considered as mans best friend, and new research shows that a relationship like that is totally possible for more reasons than we might initially think. As many dog owners have indicated, canines often appear to understand the emotional side of what is being said to them or projected towards them when a person is talking or even gazing at them in a certain way. While our feelings around this seem pretty clear, what does science say about all of this?
Unprecedented brain scanning research done recently indicates that our feelings around this are likely true and that this ability pre-dates domestication.
Previous MRI research done on canines revealed that dogs are about as conscious as human children. This is not the first time dogs have been studied in an MRI scanner. Gregory Burns, a neuroeconomics professor, studied and analyzed the canine caudate nucleus to determine his findings. This region of the brain is found in both humans and dogs and is associated with the anticipation of things we enjoy, like food, love and material things. Given our feelings and this prior study, it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that dogs in fact do have the capability to understand the emotional content behind what we are saying to them.
The Study: 11 Dogs, 22 Humans, and 200 Sounds
An experiment conducted by lead researcher Attila Andics from the Hungarian Academy of Science’s Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest explored the possibility of whether or not dogs were capable of fully understanding what we say to them.
The new study published in the journal Current Biology is the first to explore the neurological relationship between humans and non-primate species. The dogs were initially taken through 12 training sessions where they were provided positive reinforcement while being trained to stay in one spot for about 8 – 10 minutes, as that is how long it takes to complete the MRI and the subject must be motionless. The dogs were then given headphones to muffle the loud sounds that MRI’s produce. The headphones also acted as the means by which researchers would deliver the 200 audio samples required for the experiment.
The sounds were used to touch the parts of the canine’s auditory cortex which is the area responsible for processing acoustic information. The sound samples included environmental noises, like car sounds and whistles, human sounds (but not words), and dog vocalizations (like barking and growling).
To compare the neurological data, 22 humans were subject to the same MRI with the same sounds.
Source: http://truthisscary.com/2014/04/why-the-brains-of-dogs-humans-are-more-similar-than-you-think/
