Dogs have human emotions
A professor of neuroeconomics at a university in Georgia has discovered that dogs have emotion, just like humans, the Daily News reports.
Gregory Berns, a professor of neuroeconomics at Emory University, Atlanta, who has been testing the results of MRI scans on his dog’s brain, has discovered that our canine friends use the same part of the brain as humans to “feel.”
His initial goal was to determine how dogs’ brains work and what they think of humans, according to the New York Times.
By looking directly at their brains and bypassing the constraints of behaviorism, MRIs can tell humans about dogs’ internal states.
People usually do not enjoy MRI scans and you have to hold completely still during the procedure.
In conventional veterinary practice, animals are put under anesthetic so they don’t move during a scan.
“But that means they can’t study their brain functions, at least, not anything interesting like perception or emotion,” says Berns.
He started training his own dog, Callie, a skinny black terrier mix from the southern Appalachians, to go into the MRI simulator he had built in his living room.
With the help of his friend, Mark Spivak, a dog trainer, the dog learned to place her head in a custom-fitted chin rest and hold rock-still for up to 30 seconds.
After months of training and some trial-and-error at the real MRI scanner, they were rewarded with the first maps of brain activity and managed to determine which parts of her brain distinguished the scents of familiar and unfamiliar dogs and humans.
He found there was a striking similarity between dogs and humans in both the structure and function of a key brain region: the caudate nucleus.
