How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain by Berns Gregory

Author:Berns, Gregory [Berns, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw
Publisher: New Harvest
Published: 2013-10-21T21:00:00+00:00

The full monty: Callie in the final version of the chin rest.

(Gregory Berns)

Both dogs made rapid progress with the new chin rest. McKenzie, of course, was already a champ at holding still. The new rest also made it easy for the dogs to consistently place their heads in the same location. There was only one last detail to work out before scan day.

What, exactly, was the scientific question we hoped to answer by scanning dog brains?

14

Big Questions

WITH THE NEW CHIN RESTS, Callie and McKenzie were cruising along in their training. I was routinely blasting the scanner noise at 90 decibels, and as long as Callie had the earmuffs on, she didn’t seem to mind. Scan day was two weeks away. Andrew had circled the date on the lab calendar and written “Dog Day” in bold red letters.

None of us expected to pull off a complete scientific experiment on the first try, so we held on to modest expectations. The first and most important goal of the scan session would be the acquisition of a sequence of fMRI images that weren’t contaminated by motion artifacts. I would consider the session a success if we obtained ten images in a row without the dog moving. That would mean holding still for a twenty-second interval in the scanner. Considering how well the dogs were doing in their training, that seemed entirely possible.

On the off chance that the dogs surpassed our expectations and miraculously held still for several minutes, we would then have the opportunity to collect enough data to go beyond simply proving the viability of the Dog Project. We might actually get to answer a scientific question about canine brain function, which, of course, was the whole point. I didn’t expect to be able to do this on the first go, but it’s always best to be prepared.

I called a meeting of the core Dog Project team—Andrew, Mark, and me—but since everyone in the lab was rooting for this, it turned into an impromptu lab meeting.

“We’ve got two weeks until Dog Day,” I began, “and we have to nail down the experimental task that the dogs will do.”

Because the scanner noise was so loud, the dogs would not be able to hear vocal commands. That left hand signals as the primary means of communication while in the scanner. Up until now, we had purposely avoided using hand signals because we didn’t know what kinds of signals we would use and what the dogs should do with them. It was time to figure that out.

“Not much is known about the functional organization of the dog brain,” Andrew said. “We don’t even know what parts of the dog brain are responsible for basic functions like vision and hearing.” What we did know came from some unsavory experiments over a century old. In 1870, a pair of German scientists used the then new technology of electrical energy to directly stimulate the brains of animals. By sticking their electrodes in different parts of the brain, they discovered that the electricity could cause an animal to move its limbs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.