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Even though I wasn’t sure how we would pay for all this, there was never any real question that I was going all in. I had always followed my passion and hunches in science rather than trying to fit my research program into whatever the funding agencies’ hot topic of the year was. I didn’t hesitate to commit all of my available resources to expand the Dog Project. I had faith that eventually people would soon realize that this wasn’t a frivolous endeavor, and that deciphering what goes on in dogs’ minds would tell us something about where humans came from and how we can live more harmoniously with these wonderful creatures.
The first order of business was to recruit the A-Team. Mark sent out an e-mail to everyone who had come through CPT in the past ten years. He put in calls to local veterinarians. We set a high bar. Callie and McKenzie had shown us what kind of dog could do this. Dogs had to be calm, good in novel environments, good with strangers, good with other dogs, inquisitive, unafraid of loud noises, able to wear earmuffs, and, above all, have a drive to learn new things.
We held tryouts. We tested the dog-human teams for their ability to learn new tasks, like going in the head coil and wearing earmuffs. We played recordings of the sca
Kady wearing earmuffs (above). Tigger in the head coil (below).
(Helen Berns)
Mark honed our training plan, and we began holding weekly classes at CPT where we gradually acclimated the dogs to the MRI environment. In just a few months we had gone from two dogs to eight, and we were well on our way to boldly going where no dogs had gone before!
Callie testing a neck coil.
(Helen Berns)
Callie continued as top dog. Whenever we added something new—a new experiment or a piece of equipment—Callie was the first to try it out. With her help, we discovered that we could obtain stronger signals from a dog’s brain by using a coil designed for the human neck. With this type of coil, the pickup element was closer to the brain than in the birdcage.
In talking about the Dog Project, I have learned that people react in one of two possible ways. Dog people do not need any further explanation. They understand the desire to know what their dogs are thinking, especially how they love them. If anything, these folks wonder why nobody has done this before. The other type of person, possibly a dog owner but not actually a dog person, views this as a colossal waste of money. Shouldn’t we be using these expensive MRI machines to improve human health?
It is a valid question, and the best way I can answer it is to say that through the Dog Project, we are improving the human condition. Although I had worked in neuroscience for almost twenty years, and the majority of my research had been funded by the National Institutes of Health to understand how the human reward system goes awry in addiction, more people have been positively impacted by our one experiment on two dogs’ brains than the thousands of MRIs we had previously done in humans. Not everyone loves dogs, but for those who do—and that is about half the people in the United States—their dog’s welfare is intimately tied to their own. If we can understand just a little bit of what goes on behind those puppy eyes, dog-human bonds can only become stronger.
There are already well-documented beneficial effects of living with animals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that living with pets can decrease blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglyceride levels, as well as alleviate feelings of loneliness. Dogs, especially, provide opportunities for exercise and socialization.
As we move forward with the Dog Project, it is one of my dreams to really figure out what makes for a strong dog-human bond, what Konrad Lorenz called a “resonant dog”—a dog and a human who are fully in sync with each other. Using the reactivity of specific parts of a dog’s brain to a human, we could gauge the strength of this bond and figure out activities to strengthen it, or better match people with dogs. Therapy animals could benefit as well, both in finding and training dogs to be the most effective at this important activity.
And while it is easy to see how we could use this information to improve human health, I think it is just as important to use this technology to improve the welfare of dogs. Although they are considered by many to be man’s best friend, they are also still misunderstood, which I think is a result of many people’s impression that dogs are barely domesticated wolves. I was disappointed when I encountered this attitude from an NIH official to whom I was proposing the expansion of the Dog Project to better understand how dogs decrease stress in humans. Instead of seeing how the dog’s reward system is tied into the human’s well-being, his response was “I imagine [the reward system] is maximally active when the dog is tearing into a human.” I can only speculate that he had a bad childhood experience with dogs or that he had been reading too many werewolf stories.
The point is that we can use brain-imaging technology for our own benefit, but we can also train it on dogs for their benefit. We are only scratching the surface of figuring out what dogs know and what they feel. But we already know that the major cause of behavioral problems in modern dogs is separation anxiety. Dogs get attached to their humans, and, understandably, they get lonely when the people are gone. When they act out and destroy things, everyone suffers, but it is the dog that may end up at the shelter.
It may seem far-fetched that sca
Beyond all the promise of new discovery, the aspect of the Dog Project of which I am most proud is how we treated the dogs. Of course, Callie and McKenzie were family members, but we treated them like humans in the hope that others who followed in their paw-steps would be afforded the same respect and rights of self-determination. Until proven otherwise, I believe the right course of action is to assume that dogs (and probably many other kinds of animals) have a level of self-awareness and emotion that bears more in common with humans than we had ever anticipated.
Dogs are surely our first friends for always.