Posted on 09/22/2017 10:02:58 AM PDT by Kaslin
One of my favorite kinds of news stories is the report of a new scientific study that verifies the obvious. You've seen them. New research finds that heterosexual men are attracted to very attractive women. Evidence collected by wildlife researchers has confirmed that bears really do use the woods as toilets.
But some research that corroborates the obvious is exciting because some people refuse to accept the obvious.
Which brings me to the work of Dr. Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University and the author of "What It's Like to Be a Dog." Berns has, from what I can tell, the best gig in neuroscience. He spends all day taking pictures of dog brains. Don't worry: He doesn't remove them. He uses magnetic resonance imaging to study what's going on in Fido's head. It's tougher than it sounds because the dogs have to hold absolutely still for Berns to get a good read. But that's OK. They got the goodest doggos around, as folks on dog-obsessed Twitter might say, to volunteer.
And what did Berns discover? Something that almost every dog owner in the world could have told you: Dogs aren't faking it when they act like they love you. Because it's not an act.
Berns and his team confirmed this through a host of tests that looked at different centers of the doggie brain and how they responded to different stimuli. In one test they alternated between giving the pooches hot dogs (the food, not Dachshunds) and offering them praise. Looking at the pleasure centers of the dogs' brains, the researchers found that nearly all the dogs responded to "Who's a good boy?! You are!" (or whatever they actually said) with at least as much pleasure as when they got a Hebrew National. A fifth of the dogs actually preferred praise to food.
Berns concluded that dogs derive as much pleasure from love as from food.
As a somewhat obsessed dog guy, I'm the first to concede that a central tenet of doggie philosophy is to reject the whole love-vs.-food paradigm as a false choice. Dogs are committed to the idea that there is no such thing as too much of a good thing. But as almost anyone who has come home to their dog after an extended absence will tell you, dogs don't go bonkers for missing loved ones solely because they think there's a meal in it for them.
And yet, there are people who argue almost precisely that. There's what I would call the dumb version and the smart version of that particular school of thought. The dumb version, as the label suggests, is dumb. It can be found in people who say things like, "Dogs just lick you for the salt," or, "It's just an animal; you shouldn't care about its feelings."
The smart version has more merit. Evolutionary psychologists and other scientists label dogs "social parasites" or, in the words of some, "con artists." They claim that dogs evolved from wolves to exploit our weakness for cuteness. They also note that dogs evolved an ability found almost nowhere else in the animal world: to read human body language and expressions. Indeed, Berns found evidence of this in his MRI studies.
Some, rightly, reject the term "parasitism" in favor of "mutualism," because while dogs certainly benefitted from the warmth of cavemen's campfires and the tossed scraps from their mastodon kills, they also made important contributions as guard dogs and hunters. Pat Shipman even speculates in "The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction" that dogs gave us a competitive advantage against our (presumably) hated rivals, the Neanderthals. Dogs -- or proto-wolf/dogs -- weren't so much pets as allies in hunting big game, helping us evolve as a cooperative species.
I think that's all true or at least quite plausible. But what it leaves out is the ingredient missing in almost all discussions of evolved behavior and genetic programming -- not just for dogs but for people, too. Dogs obviously evolved to depend on humans, but humans also evolved to depend on dogs. From our genes' perspective, we love our children to ensure that our DNA lives to see another day. But that's not how we consciously think about it, nor does that explanation diminish the experience of love or make it any less real.
Dog genes may be designed to con us, but the dogs themselves aren't in on the caper. They just love us, because that's what dogs do.
Can’t imagine living without dogs.
Can I have the dog in the photo?
Having been through a number of MRIs, I can’t imagine how any dog could possibly stay still without being sedated.
It sounds like you’re wearing a bucket on your head and someone is pounding it with a hammer. They give you full-coverage headphones, piping in music, and you can barely hear the music due to the noise.
Mark
I’ve had MRIs but have never been given headphones.
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Never trust a culture that labels Man’s Best Friend an evil unclean beast.
Anyway, I STILL believe a dog’s primary motive to ‘love’ is driven by them knowing WHO THEIR FOOD SOURCE IS.
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How would you explain then the behavior of dogs who react so differently to different people. When we are gone for a period of time and we come home the dog will come over wag its tail and so forth as you would expect. However when certain people come over the house, clearly favorites of the dog, she goes totally berserk,crying and whining and leaning into them. She does only with a select few and these people do not feed her.
Yes, there is a bond, but sometimes, a Golden just needs to play and eat!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=5iTTNRE-njM
Mark
Did you ever read A Boy and His Dog? I did 40+ years ago.
He’d have got ‘em all and won if she would have let him. Just a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the game, that’s all.
That dog looks like my daughter's or grandson's dog. His name is Finn. My daughter, husband and son live in Amarillo
What a dear face.
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My dog loves me best at 7:30 AM and 4:00 PM. You guessed it breakfast and dinner. :-)
I have a chocolate Labrador Retriever that simply adores me. And the feeling is mutual.
As I’m reading this story my chocolate lab came over to me, leaned against my leg and waited for me to pet her. It’s as if she knew what I was reading!
There is a reason Dog uses the same letters as God. We have had rescue Beagles for years and the love they show us and we show them cannot be replaced or replicated. Its unconditional and solid. How sad it would be to go home to a silent house every evening, no wagging tails, barking, howls and bays of joy.
I'll agree it's a primary thought but it isn't the most constant and important thought. My dogs have dry food out all the time, a lot of it, so they never stress about where their next meal is coming from and none are overly fat. They eat when they get hungry. They do get a bite of whatever I'm having and they get a couple of treats per day at about the same time plus a rawhide chew twice a week to keep their teeth clean.
For whatever reason; that morning treat, which I give them first thing when I wake up, is the most important thing in the world to them. I think it signals the start of the new day for them. It may have some other deeper meaning as well but it's the only time they get that excited about it. Truly fired up.
Some of them have their job to do and that's to be a good watch dog which they take very seriously and sometimes even take shifts going outside to hear better while the others nap.
I can't imagine life without dogs but sometimes I think I would get a better nights sleep without them. They do wake me sometimes while "on duty". The trade-off is well worth it though.
Heard at a dog show: (A)”My dog doesn’t like my BF.”
(B) “Get rid of him.” (A) The dog? (B) “No. The BF.”
The way I look at is, God wants our unconditional love, as he loves us unconditionally. That’s from the top down. In addition, from the bottom up, he shows us the same relationship of unconditional love.
dog - man - God.
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