Posted on 10/29/2018 7:41:21 AM PDT by ETL
If sometimes you wonder if your dog is angry with you for staying out late, you might be right. New evidence suggests that animals have a clear sense of time, using previously undiscovered neurons that seem to switch on to count off minutes as they wait.
The discovery was made by a team from Northwestern University while studying the medial entorhinal cortex of mice. Located in the mid-temporal lobe, it’s the part of the brain associated with memory and navigation. And since it encodes spatial information in episodic memories, lead study author Daniel Dombeck theorized that it could function as a sort of “inner clock” as well.
“There are many similarities between the brains of mice, cats, dogs and humans,” Dombeck told Fox News. “We all have a medial entorhinal cortex (the region we found that may act as an inner clock), so it's logical to think that this brain region serves a similar function in all of these different species.”
To test his theory, Dombeck and his team put a mouse on a physical treadmill in a virtual reality environment. The mouse would run (on the treadmill) down a hallway to a door. After six seconds, the “door” would open and the mouse would get a (non–virtual reality) treat. They would repeat this a few times before making the door invisible. Dombeck was surprised to find that the mouse would still run and stop at the invisible door, waiting for six seconds for it to “open” so it could eat. Since the mouse didn’t know whether the door was open or closed and waited exactly six seconds, the team concluded that it had to have used its inner clock.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I’m hungry = “Lunch Time!!!!!!!!”
as anyone with a pet can say ‘thank you captain obvious’
They may have a sense of routine, but our dogs can’t tell the difference between two minutes and two hours, unless there is some biological indicator involved.
My dogs know when it is time to eat. And they struggle when we “fall back.”
No surprise to me.
My cats know when I am usually at work and when I’m not.
So if I go in on a day I’m not usually at work, they get really upset.
Anyone that owns a dog is well aware of that fact.
I used to have dark-colored dogs and light colored carpeting. I now have light-colored dogs and dark colored carpeting.
I’m certainly not as smart as the mouse, LOL!
8am and 4:30 pm. Breakfast and Suppertime. They are NEVER more than a few minutes on either side of the clock when demanding to be fed!
They needed to do a study to discover this obvious fact?
My cats could have told them this, if they’d only asked therm.
Exactly. It is a sense of routine. Our Jack Russells go nuts as soon as the dishwasher is loaded after dinner. They know it’s walk time.
If my husband and I go out to dinner, they just keep their places on the couch. They know there is no walk that evening.
.
One of our cats comes and declares “its bed time” within a minute one way or the other of 9:00 PM every day.
(he sleeps on our bed, and knows that its futile to try to pick his spot before we go to bed)
.
My dog gets up every morning at 5:30 am wanting to go out and get his breakfast. Funny though, he sleeps in on Sundays
Their stomach is their clock.
I don’t think so. I ask my cat to flip this egg in 13 minutes and he does nothing.
No. Dogs have no sense of the passage of time.
Time to eat? All day.
Ever leave the house for 20 minutes to run an errand? When you get back, the dog goes bananas and treats you like you've been gone forever.
And they know neurons turn on because....
Just like brain chemical imbalances.
Pseudoscience.
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