How dogs love us | Gregory Berns | TEDxAtlanta

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Ever wondered what your dog is thinking? Does he really miss you when you’re gone? Finally, we have the answer, thanks to MRI technology.

Dr. Gregory Berns is revealing how our mind works, helping us to explore unknown connections along the way. Using advanced brain imaging technologies in his extensive research, Dr. Gregory Berns has helped us better understand human motivation and decision-making. His most recent work explores and details how dogs love us, uncovering the empathy and the bonds we both feel. Dr Berns' research is frequently the subject of popular media coverage including articles in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Money, Oprah, Forbes, The Financial Times, Wired, The New Scientists and the International Herald Tribune. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller How Dogs Love Us and also speaks frequently on CNN and NPR.

How many of you are dog people?

A show of hands.

Excellent!

How about cat people?

OK, you guys can go to the break early.

(Laughter)

So, of the dog people

and the cat people
who want to be dog people,

(Laughter)

how many of you have thought,

"Wouldn't it be great to know
what my dog is thinking?"

I think everyone else already knows
what their dog is thinking, right?

I got into this project,

and I'm going to tell you
a little bit about how -

This is basically
a stupid dog trick story.

It really started
with this dog named Newton,

who was really my favorite dog.

I've had many dogs through my life,
but Newton was my favorite,

and he lived to be about 15 years old.

After he passed away, I thought,

I have these tools, this MRI machine,
that I have been using for decades

to study human decision making
and what motivates people,

why haven't we used this on other animals?

Certainly, other animals

have many of the same feelings
and motivations that people do.

But this is kind of an area of science
that people don't like to talk about.

So I embarked on this project
about four years ago

to try to figure out what dogs think,
and specifically what dogs think of us.

If we're talking about humans,

we have kind of two ways

we can think about what
other people are thinking:

we can either ask them,
and sometimes they will tell us

if they know, and they want us
to know what they are thinking;

or we can observe actions,
we can observe behaviors,

we can try to infer things about what
people are thinking from their actions.

With animals, and dogs, of course,
we can't really ask them.

We can ask them,
and we may think that they tell us,

but we really don't know
what they're thinking.

So we're kind of left
with their behaviors:

we can observe their actions,

and we can try to infer
what they are thinking.

This is the foundation of behaviorism,
and it's been around since Pavlov.

But there are, of course,
very tricky issues here,

and humans being humans,
we tend to anthropomorphize everything.

It's kind of in this area

that I became very interested
in intrigued with the possibility

of trying to figure out what dogs
are thinking by using MRI.

The technique is straightforward.
It's been around for decades.

The idea is: if we were studying a human,

we would put a human in an MRI,
have them do some type of task,

and we'd measure blood flow
or brain activity

and then try to figure out
what parts of the brain do what.

Very straightforward,
if you've had an MRI,

it's not terribly pleasant,
but people will do it.

How do we do this with other animals?
How do we do it with a dog?

I'm going to show you what we found.

Here's a short video.

It's a what we call our training video,
and it demonstrates how we did this.

Before I start it,

you're going to see
two dogs in this video.

The first dog, Callie, is my dog.

She was actually
the replacement for Newton.

She was adopted here in Atlanta
from the Humane Society.

We loved Newton so much;
we could never get another pug,

so Callie is the anti-pug.

The other dog is McKenzie,
a border collie.

We just kind of get right into it.

I'll narrate as we go along.

[Callie - Introduction to head coil]

This's Mark Spivak.

He's my partner in this endeavor,
he's a dog trainer.

The first thing that we had to do

is figure out how do we get dogs
to go into a tube,

to put a head coil around their head
to pick up the brain waves,

and hold absolutely still.

What you are seeing here, is that
Callie is not a particularly obedient dog;

she has no particularly special skills.

But she does have one very good trait,
and that is: she likes hot dogs.

Mark is doing what we call
clicker training.

Every time she approximates
what we want her to do,

he clicks, and then she gets a hot dog.

This's the very first time

she's been introduced
to the thing we call the head coil,

and we didn't know at this point

whether this was even
going to be possible.

[McKenzie - Introduction to head coil]

This dog, McKenzie,
a border collie, is highly trained.

She's very skilled in agility,

and her owner, as you'll see,
gets her to sit in this coil very quickly.

(Video) Dog owner: Good girl!

Yes!

Is she too far out now?

(Video) Gregory Berns: Yeah, basically,

we are looking for the brain case
to be in the center, right there.

That's good.

(On stage) GB: If you've had an MRI,

you know that you're told
not to move, right?

This is the big challenge of doing this.

[Mckenzie - Holding without any chin rest]

Up until this point,

I didn't know if this was going
to be possible until I saw this.

This was literally
after about five minutes of training.

When I saw that, I knew we could do this.

[Callie - Training with chin rest]

What you saw McKenzie doing was close
but not quite good enough.

What we are going after

if we're to achieve data
that compares to humans -

(Video) GB: You are perfect!
Excellent! Perfect job!

(On stage) GB: Mark told me
I had to be more demonstrative

than I am normally.

(Laughter)

(Video) GB: Perfect! Yes!

(Laughter)

(On stage) GB: What you notice we did
was we introduced a little chin rest

because we have to give the dogs
a target to put their head on.

McKenzie adapts this very quickly.

She's actually in a simulator
for an MRI that we built.

She's doing quite well,

but this is actually
still too much movement.

The really difficult part of this
is the noise that the scanner makes,

playing in the background.

These are recordings that we made
to acclimate the dogs to the training.

It's very loud.

This's being played at low volume
just to get her used to it.

But it's really about 95 decibels,

and it's like jackhammer loud.

(Video) GB: That's it,
that what we are doing!

(On stage) GB: This is after
about a month or two of training.

[Callie - Scammer training]

We're at the real MRI now.

This's probably the most expensive
training session ever performed.

(Laughter)

We get charged about 500 dollars
an hour to use the MRI.

(Laughter)

But we had to use the real thing
at a certain point.

At this point, we didn't even know how
they would react to the magnetic field.

The key thing I want you to notice

is these dogs are doing it willingly,
and they enjoy it.

That is the whole point of this project.

We treat these animals
as family members.

We don't sedate them,
and we don't restrain them.

[Callie - Final training]

This's actually after
about two months of training.

We made some modifications
to the chin rest,

and even a shelter dog
like Callie can do this.

[Full chin rest, ear muffs,
tube, hand signals]

If you look carefully, you also notice
that she's wearing ear muffs.

It's very important

because the scanner is so loud,
and the dogs hearing is quite sensitive.

[This means "hot dog"]

The other thing that we did -

(Laughter)

This's a scientific experiment, really.

(Laughter)

[This means "no hot dog"]

That's the training video.

The "hot dog, no hot dog" hand signals,

we started with this

because we didn't know
if this was going to work,

so we decided we needed
to do something really simple.

This's just straight up
Pavlovian conditioning

where we taught the dogs
two hand signals:

this means "hot dog,"
and this means "no hot dog."

If this technique works,

what we should see is activity
in the reward system of their brain

to this hand signal but not this signal.

I also put up a slide here.

Once we started doing this,

the word got out amongst
the community here in Atlanta

that we're doing this crazy
dog scanning project.

We're looking for volunteers,

especially people who like to train dogs
and have dogs that are very well behaved.

That's still true.

If you have a dog that can do this
or you think can do this, talk to me.

Because the project is still going on,
and it's gotten quite large.

You've seen the kind of preliminary video.

This's one of my favorite photos
because it's kind of captures -

this is the first day
we were actually doing the scanning.

It captures the human confusion here.

We were just standing around trying
to figure out how we are going to do this.

But Callie knows, she's been trained,
she's been doing this for two months;

so she's ready to go.

The head wrap is just
to keep the ear muffs in place.

This is what it look likes
from the other end,

from the business end of the scanner.

This's actually a dog named Zen.
He's a yellow lab golden retriever.

What we're studying initially
is just the reward system response.

Very simply, we got
these two hand signals,

and the idea is we compare
the brain response to these two things.

As I said, we have many dogs
doing this now,

it's not just shelter dogs.

We have dogs from
service dog organizations,

we have shelter dogs -
really all sorts of breeds.

Before I show you some of the results,

I do want to say something
about brain anatomy.

A dog brain - this slide is not to scale.

A dog brain is probably about the size
of a plum or a lemon maybe,

depending on the size of the dog.

It's not big, even if you have a big dog,

most of the head is muscle,
so just going to be aware of that.

But I like putting up this slide

because it shows
the similarities of animal brains.

You can immediately
make out common structures.

You can see towards the right
that kind of pretty structure

is the cerebellum that controls
various types of motor movement,

and then below that,
there is the brainstem.

The really the parts of the brain
that are different

are what we call the cortex.

That's the upper part, the folded part.

The big differences between dog and human
have to do with the size of the cortex

and how folded it is.

What folding accomplishes

is packing a lot more brain surface area
into a specific volume.

Generally speaking,

the more folded a brain,
the more surface area,

the more brain power, if you will.

There are lot of similarities,
and there are some differences.

What I am particularly interested in
are the similarities.

Because if we were to have a commonality
of experience with dogs,

and other animals for that matter,

we have to share the same
or similar brain structures.

Darwin said this 150 years ago.

What do the results look like?

This's a very compact way
of summarizing an experiment

which I showed you where the dogs
receive two different hand signals,

and we've averaged the results over,
in this case, 12 dogs,

I think though, we've done this
probably in over 20 dogs.

The orange areas show

what parts of the brain are more active
to this reward signal,

this hot dog signal.

What I want to emphasize

is the brain response
is not directly to hot dogs,

it's to the hand signal
that means hot dogs.

You may think that's not a big deal;
it's still hot dogs.

It's no surprise that dogs like hot dogs.

But it is a big deal
because we train this signal;

it's a symbolic representation
of a hot dog that the dog has learned

and has learned
to recognize this meaning.

The particular parts of the brain

that are being active
are the reward system.

There's kind of two hot spots.

There's a headlight type picture.

That's in an area of the brain
called the cortex nucleus.

It's the area of the brain
that all mammals have,

and it's the area that has the most
dopamine receptors in the brain.

It's kind of the key center that links
reward and motivation with action.

Normally, when that's active
in a human or any other animal,

it means that something
important has happened,

and the animal needs to do something.

In this case it's quite simple
because they will just eat the hot dogs.

Well, so what?

So we proved that dog brains
like hot dogs.

That was just the beginning.

This started about four years ago,

and we've since gone on
and done many other experiments.

Most of the dogs in these pictures,
are still working with us in the project.

We've done things looking at

how their olfaction,
or their sensory system for smell works,

how they identify different people,

and other dogs
in their household by smell.

One of the things that we found
is that this reward system,

the same part of the brain activates
when the dogs smell a familiar human,

even if the human is not there.

It shows that dogs
have representations of us

of our identities that persist
when we are not there.

When people ask me,
"Do dogs miss us when we are gone?"

I have to say yes because we find evidence
that they are remembering their humans,

that they care about them,

and that it's associated
with these reward responses.

Is it still just hot dogs?

To answer this question,
one of the other things that we did

was we actually repeated
the experiment I showed you,

where we show
the different hand signals.

With one little twist:
we manipulate who gives the signals.

Does it matter if the dog's
owner gives a signal?

Or whether a stranger comes in
and gives the signal?

Or even whether a computer
gives the signal?

Because if you believe Pavlov,
and all the behaviorist who followed him,

it really shouldn't matter,

because any signal that indicates
an upcoming food treat is all the same,

if animals and dogs
are just kind of robots.

But in fact, we did find a difference.

What's very interesting about it
is that not all dogs are the same.

For example, my dog Callie
had a much greater response

in that part of the brain

when a stranger gave the signals
or even a computer

as opposed to me!

(Laughter)

Other dogs in the project,

some of the golden retrievers in the labs
can have had the opposite pattern,

where their owners had really elicited
the strongest brain response.

This is very interesting

because what it does is it provides us

with a neural biomarker
of the dog's personality profile.

In fact, what we've done
is we've spun off a new project

which we're very excited about.

We've partnered

with Canine Companions for Independence,

which is the largest service dog training
organization in the United States.

If you know anything about service dogs,
they're incredibly difficult to train.

It's very expensive,
and there's a very low success rate.

Roughly about 35% of dogs
that enter these programs

to train to be assistance dogs
will succeed;

the other 2/3 end up being released
and adopted to their puppy raisers.

So we've partnered with CCI,

and they're actually training their dogs
to do the MRI procedure.

What we're going to do
is try to predict

which of those dogs
will actually be good service dogs.

I really love this project

because it shows
that even though we started this

just as my silly example
of trying to understand

what my dogs think,
and whether they love me,

it's actually gotten much bigger.

Dogs are special.

They're the first domesticated animals.

They have been with humans
since humans have been humans.

When we look at their brains,

it's almost like we
are looking back in time,

and it's giving us a picture
of how the dog-human bond formed.

Thank you.

(Applause)