The latest research on canine neuroscience may be telling pet owners what they've already known, but Emory University professor Gregory Berns' latest study on the brains of dogs reveals that our furry friends use the same areas of their brains to process emotions as we do, the New York Times reports, findings that may help change the view we treat and perceive them as a species.
Berns and his team used M.R.I. (magnetic resonance imaging) scanners on a group of dogs to study their brain activity when presented with different humans to smell. All of of the pets voluntarily sat and let themselves be scanned for short periods of time, none of them put under anesthesia as veterinarians traditionally do during an M.R.I. Berns explained that anesthesia prevents scientists from studying the nuances of dogs' brain functions while awake, blocking the study of anything "interesting like perception or emotion."
"From the beginning, we treated the dogs as persons," Berns told the New York Times. "We had a consent form, which was modeled after a child's consent form but signed by the dog's owner. We emphasized that participation was voluntary, and that the dog had the right to quit the study. We used only positive training methods. No sedation. No restraints. If the dogs didn't want to be in the M.R.I. scanner, they could leave. Same as any human volunteer."
While the help of his trainer friend, Berns had his own dog, Callie, learn to sit calmly in the MRI machine and hold stone-still for up to 30 seconds. After a month of training, Berns was rewarded with the first maps of Callie's brain activity.
Based on the results, Berns was able to recognize that both dogs and humans use the same key brain region of the brain, the caudate nucleus, which sits between the brainstem and the cortex and plays a key role in anticipation of rewards and joy in people. It also plays an important role in the learning and memory system.
While Callie smelled familiar humans, her caudate nucelus lit up, and in earlier tests, it became activated in dogs when their owner who had previously stepped out of the room made a sudden return. Smell plays a major role in how dogs process the world around them, arguably their most keen scent besides sound.
"Do these findings prove that dogs love us? Not quite. But many of the same things that activate the human caudate, which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate," Berns explained.
"Because of the overwhelming complexity of how different parts of the brain are connected to one another, it is not usually possible to pin a single cognitive function or emotion to a single brain region But the caudate may be an exception. Specific parts of the caudate stand out for their consistent activation to many things that humans enjoy. Caudate activation is so consistent that under the right circumstances, it can predict our preferences for food, music and even beauty...Neuroscientists call this a functional homology, and it may be an indication of canine emotions."
Berns compares the sentience level of dogs to that of a small human child, a comparison previously and rather often made by other researchers on canine behavior and neuroscience.
