By Gregory Berns 2013
For the past two years, my colleagues and I have been training dogs to go in a M.R.I. scanner – completely awake and unrestrained. Our goal has been to determine how dogs’ brains work and, even more important, what they think of us humans.
Now, after training and scanning a dozen dogs, my one inescapable conclusion is this: dogs are people, too.
Because dogs can’t speak, scientists have relied on behavioral observantions to infer what dogs are thinking. It is a tricky business. You can’t ask a dog why he does something. And you certainly can’t ask him how he feels. The prospects of ferreting our animal emotions scares many scientists. After all, animal research is big business. It has been easy to sidestep the difficult questions about animal sentience and emotions because they have been unanswerable.
Until now.
By looking directly at their brains and bypassing the constraints of behaviourist M.R.I’s can tell us about dogs’ internat states. M.R.I’s are conducted in loud, confined spaces. People don’t like them, and you have to hold absolutely still during the procedure.
Conventional veterinary practice says you have to anesthetize animals so they don’t move during a scan. But you can’t study brain function in an anestheized animal at least not anything interesting like perception or emotion.
From the beginning, we treated the dogs as persons. We had a consent form, which was modelled 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 on 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.
My dog Callie was the first. Rescued from a shelter, Callie was a skinny black terrier mix, what is called a feist in the southern Appalachians, from where she came. True to her roots she preferred hunting squirrels and rabbits in the backyard to curling up in my lap. She had a natural inquisitiveness, which probably landed her in the shelter in the first place, but also made training a breeze.
With the help of my friend Mark Spivak, a dog trainer, we started teaching Callie to go in an M.R.I simulator that I build in my living room. She learned to walk up steps into a tunnel, place her head in a custom-fitted chin rest, and hold rock-still for periods of up to 30 seconds. Oh, and she had to learn to wear earmuffs to protect her sensitive hearing from the 95 decibels of noise the scanner makes.
After months of training and some trial-and-error at the real M.R.I., we were ready ..........read more
For the past two years, my colleagues and I have been training dogs to go in a M.R.I. scanner – completely awake and unrestrained. Our goal has been to determine how dogs’ brains work and, even more important, what they think of us humans.
Now, after training and scanning a dozen dogs, my one inescapable conclusion is this: dogs are people, too.
Because dogs can’t speak, scientists have relied on behavioral observantions to infer what dogs are thinking. It is a tricky business. You can’t ask a dog why he does something. And you certainly can’t ask him how he feels. The prospects of ferreting our animal emotions scares many scientists. After all, animal research is big business. It has been easy to sidestep the difficult questions about animal sentience and emotions because they have been unanswerable.
Until now.
By looking directly at their brains and bypassing the constraints of behaviourist M.R.I’s can tell us about dogs’ internat states. M.R.I’s are conducted in loud, confined spaces. People don’t like them, and you have to hold absolutely still during the procedure.
Conventional veterinary practice says you have to anesthetize animals so they don’t move during a scan. But you can’t study brain function in an anestheized animal at least not anything interesting like perception or emotion.
From the beginning, we treated the dogs as persons. We had a consent form, which was modelled 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 on 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.
My dog Callie was the first. Rescued from a shelter, Callie was a skinny black terrier mix, what is called a feist in the southern Appalachians, from where she came. True to her roots she preferred hunting squirrels and rabbits in the backyard to curling up in my lap. She had a natural inquisitiveness, which probably landed her in the shelter in the first place, but also made training a breeze.
With the help of my friend Mark Spivak, a dog trainer, we started teaching Callie to go in an M.R.I simulator that I build in my living room. She learned to walk up steps into a tunnel, place her head in a custom-fitted chin rest, and hold rock-still for periods of up to 30 seconds. Oh, and she had to learn to wear earmuffs to protect her sensitive hearing from the 95 decibels of noise the scanner makes.
After months of training and some trial-and-error at the real M.R.I., we were ready ..........read more
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