What Exactly IS Your Dog Thinking?

Have you ever watched your dog and wondered what they're thinking about?  Do they think about their other doggie friends?  What about their "best friends"?  Someday I'll tell you about my dog Ollie and his "girlfriend" Jenny.  Does your dog empathize or know when you're in physical pain?

I've even noticed that sometimes the tail goes back-and-forth, other times the tail goes in circles.

Well, I'm geeked about this new study at Emory University in Atlanta that's being done using MRI on dogs!

From an article in the LA Times...

The scientists don't know the answer yet, but they may know soon. In a new paper to be published in PLoS One on Friday, the Emory research team showed that it is possible to train a dog to climb into an MRI tunnel and stay still long enough for the machine to do a full scan of its brain.

In the first experiments with dogs in an MRI machine, the researchers compared the response in the dog's brain when it was shown a hand signal that meant it would get a hot dog (left hand up), and the response to a signal that meant it would not get a hot dog (both hands pointing toward each other horizontally).

If that doesn't sound that exciting, don't worry. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Berns said the first experiment was really just a proof of concept, to see how to go about doing a brain scan on a dog.  "It was purposely very simple because we didn't know it would work," he said. "We had to kind of pick a task that we could know what should happen."

But it did work. Next, the researchers can use canine MRI scans to answer more interesting questions.

For example, Berns said, they might explore whether dogs have empathy for owners by showing the dogs pictures of their owners being poked with a pin and seeing whether that triggers a pain response in the dog's brain. They can also determine whether dogs process human language as arbitrary sound or if they have neural structures that respond to the deeper manner of language. They can see if dogs recognize their owners by sight or by smell.